An open letter to the Seattle Weekly from Michael Seiwerath of the Northwest Film Forum (posted at GreenCine Daily) should remind us, on the one hand, what's lost when local film critics are replaced by syndicated content, and, on the other, why we are so fortunate not to have to rely exclusively on pulp-and-ink-based movie criticism.
The Seattle Weekly ran a review of the acclaimed documentary "Our Daily Bread" that was credited to J. Hoberman, longtime critic at the Village Voice, another "alternative weekly" in the Voice/New Times chain. But anybody who's ever worked at a newspaper knows what happens to "wire copy" -- it's sliced and diced to fit whatever hole you have to fill. Hoberman's original review combined his takes on Richard Linklater's similarly themed "Fast Food Nation" with "Our Daily Bread," but only part of the latter segment ran in Seattle. The result? Seiwerath describes it as a "botched cut-and-paste truncation":
What ran in the February 21 edition of the Weekly is a recombinant jumble, devoid of time or place. Hacked from the end of the original review, the Weekly piece contains unexplained, unintelligible references to "[Fast Food] Nation." The reader is left confused, with a mess of an article that is only made clear by some internet research into what happened four months ago and 3000 miles away. More than simply an editorial production error, this virtual review is the systemic result of a flawed new business model.The planned efficiencies of media consolidation by the New Times are failing. Without a film editor and consistent criticism written by local writers, the reviews often contain factual errors and obvious references to openings in other cities. This is a system that is no longer serving either the reader or the advertising base. Borrowing from J Hoberman's description of a fast food hamburger, the individual review has become "the ground residue of many, many messily butchered animals."
Like many chain publications, the Village Voice-owned Seattle Weekly (where Richard T. Jameson wrote in the '70s and '80s) has been running reviews from critics at its fellow papers, such as Hoberman at the Voice and Scott Foundas and Ella Taylor (another Seattle Weekly veteran) at the LA Weekly, ever since even the Voice itself cut back its roster of critics. (Hoberman's the only one left, after Michael Atkinson and Dennis Lim were let go in October.)
The pattern is not unfamiliar: In the late '80s and early '90s, I was the film critic for The Orange County Register, one of the country's 25 top-circulation newspapers and the third largest paper in California (after the LA Times and the San Francisco Chronicle). But, even given its valuable proximity and access to the heart of the movie industry (I lived and worked in Hollywood), a few years ago it chose to drop my successor, Henry Sheehan, in favor of running reviews from another Freedom Newspapers critic -- at the East Valley Tribune in Mesa, AZ. (See story about "content sharing" here.) Hey, they figured, why pay two critics to review the same movies?
At this rate, the idea of "professional-grade" criticism at so-called "alternative weeklies" (which has always been a hit-or-miss proposition, anyway) is pretty much a joke. What is "alternative" about these weeklies if they're running the same syndicated copy their sister papers print in other towns? The diversity, the ambition, the experimentation -- and a whole lot of the crap -- that used to be published by these small local papers is now available on the web, along with reviews by amateurs and professionals at thousands of papers, magazines, blogs and online publications around the world. And in a surprising number of cases, the unpaid bloggers, the ones who are driven by their passion for film and a hunger for knowledge, are doing more solid, penetrating work than the soon-to-retire former sportswriters who are simply cashing paychecks on the movie beat. Just look around (you can start with the blog and zine recommendations in the right column). Newspapers may not be extinct any time soon, but I fear newspaper film critics may be on the endangered species list already.
The New Times' Denver outlet, Westword, had problems with some of their film criticism from the beginning, in 1977. I was told they didn't need a local film critic but would have reviews done by their pal from Cornell who wrote from NY. I wanted to do an article on the disappearance of downtown movie theaters. There was no interest. Later one of their own people wrote that article and got the names of the theaters wrong. The "alt-weeklies" dreamed of being the Village Voice, but often are corporate hacks with pretensions of being hipper than thou.
It's difficult for me to see film criticism in newspapers to be on their way out, maybe I'm not informed enough. But here... in the list to the right, while there are all sorts of great zines and discussions, many are far too intellectual for most film viewers. And as we've seen most of the viewing public doesn't regard internet hoopla, or I should say blog hoopla, as a way to judge a movie's worth (Snakes on a Plane) though, and while I hated the film, "Blair Witch" will somehow always be mark against that argument.
People like their cough medicine in simple easy to swallow doses just as they like to be told what a movie is about and if it's worth seeing. They care more about how many stars a film gets over what the filmmaker was trying to say. That is the reason why newspaper reviewers won't disappear, just as big budget action films won't. Now if we're talking about how relevant these newspaper critics are, that might be another thing to talk about.
Shouldn't the word "alternative" be banned from these papers? They haven't been alternative, really, for decades, have they? Reminds me of the Eagles line, "We haven't had that spirit here since 1969." Of course, Don "The New Eagles Album Will Be Sold Exclusively Through Wal-Mart Only" Henley is perhaps not the best example to illustrate the point.
People like their cough medicine in simple easy to swallow doses just as they like to be told what a movie is about and if it's worth seeing. They care more about how many stars a film gets over what the filmmaker was trying to say. That is the reason why newspaper reviewers won't disappear, just as big budget action films won't. Now if we're talking about how relevant these newspaper critics are, that might be another thing to talk about.
Phillip, I really don't know about that. Have "people" changed so much since the Voice was born in the 50s? There's always going to be an audience for film critics who make people think about the movies they watch, and if challenging, intelligent film criticism is disappearing from our newspapers perhaps it's not because people don't want it, but rather because those writing the checks think they don't.
Andy,
I imagine it's a combination of the two. It's easy for an intelligent person to believe that everyone to an extent is intelligent, and in most cases, especially about things like movies and music... okay, the arts, they don't want intelligent, they want entertainment. They want thumbs up/thumbs down... they want 2 out of five stars... they don't want to read and probably wouldn't understand how "Breach" compares and contrasts to the anti-political uprising of the 70's. A film lover would. Most younger audiences now, you ask them what their favorite film is, it doesn't date before the 1980's, and even then it's something more pulp culture than cultural. And it's not that they're stupid or unintelligent, it's that they don't care to know all of the extraneous hyperbole that we so readily cling to as a way of life.
There will always be that group of people who wants to understand filmmaking as an artform, and those magazines and newspapers that deliver, and that search out the obscure and abstract... it's sad to me the way they are beginning to handle themselves, but I don't think they will disappear completely. I think that's exaggerating the potential "issue" a bit.