Voice Media slashes another film critic.
Adding further grist to the discussion of "critical sameness" ("The Stepford Critics?)," Village Voice Media has cut another (film-)critical voice from its payroll. This time it's National Society of Film Critics member Rob Nelson, of the Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages. GreenCine Daily quotes critic Dave Kehr:
This is not good. Soon, we will have a choice between the re-animated Paulettes who dominate the print media and the Knowles-nothing fan boys who dominate the internet. Which in my book isn't much of a choice at all.(See Kehr's clarification in comments below.)
As far as I can tell from the CP web site, Nelson's final piece for them was on the critically acclaimed documentary "No End in Sight" ("Surge This," August 22, 2007):
As the movie's more begrudging admirers will likely acknowledge, Ferguson is no Michael Moore. His background is as a scholar and a Brookings wonk, and "No End in Sight" — his first film, amazingly — is less a work of investigation (or activism) than history. There's no psychology in the movie (e.g., Dubya has daddy issues), and neither are there conspiracy theories (e.g., the war is about redrawing the Middle East map and further fueling Halliburton's tank). On some level, it even endeavors to be a film without politics—and might be that if such a thing were possible. [...]
Ferguson has assembled a wealth of on-the-ground footage from a variety of sources, using it mainly to annotate his interview material, although near the end of the film he includes a horrifying home video of private military contractors randomly picking off Iraqi civilian motorists with machine-gun fire, Elvis's jaunty "Mystery Train" booming from the Americans' car radio. Throughout the film are images of burning cars, stacks of torn bodies, bombed-out homes, Iraqis weeping into open coffins—the sort of pictures conspicuously missing from network news coverage. Is the movie's reporting biased? Not if you consider that anyone who'd testify to the "good intentions" or overall success of the campaign—Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Rumsfeld—naturally refused to comment. The evidence speaks for itself...
"This is not good. Soon, we will have a choice between the re-animated Paulettes who dominate the print media and the Knowles-nothing fan boys who dominate the internet. Which in my book isn't much of a choice at all."
I don't think that is being fair to most internet film bloggers.
I have 40 or so film blogs bookmarked that I read on a regular basis. Not one is of the Knowles/Fanboy style. Just look at the blogs linked from Scanners. There is plenty of good film journalism on the web.
Kehr himself used to blog a bit. Now his blog has mainly just been links to his NY Times reviews. But was he a Knowles-nothing?
As for the print media, the sad thing is, do people even go there anymore for reviews? Roger Ebert used to be the syndicated reviewer for my local paper. But, now it is a different AP critic every week. There is no voice there.
And then in print, a review may be cut for length in certain papers. There are no such restrictions on the net.
While it is upsetting to see film critics being cut, it is not suprising, and doesn't mean the end of film criticism.
Soon, we will have a choice between the re-animated Paulettes who dominate the print media and the Knowles-nothing fan boys who dominate the internet.
But we do have a choice outside of that. We're not all "Ain't it Cool" drones on this side of the river. I haven't come across anyone yet in these comment pages that seems that way. And if I had to rely on online bloggers for my film reviews I don't think that's such a bad thing. Many will be bad, many more will be acceptable, and a few will rise to the top. That's how it is in all media, damn near all professions.
I'm not happy about anyone losing their job, please don't misunderstand, but I don't think the future is as grim as all that.
This isn't the first time Kehr has made one of these slaps at the blogsphere. In some ways, I see what he's saying, in some ways he's making a bitchy generalization. Still, he's the best film critic currently working for The New York Times.
This is sad. I lived in Minneapolis for five years and read his articles quite often.
Moviezzz and Jonathon,
The thing is, I don't think most of the general public reads blogs. They glance into newspapers, or US Weekly, or Maxim and they get there helpings in two paragraph spurts and funny little catchphrases. Thankfully some mags still think people like Travers, Glieberman, and Schwarzbaum are worth keeping around.
BUT, I wonder how dreadful of an issue this is in the end. I believe when "Bonnie and Clyde" came out it was reviled, until Kael got her hands on it. There was a wave of sameness going on then. There's always a wave "against", until someone has a good reason "for", and sometimes vise versa, but I feel "against" is the stronger point of origin because people are scared to death by things that are new or different.
Re: Kael's saving "Bonnie and Clyde"
I've heard that too, but in his Great Movies review of Bonnie and Clyde, Roger Ebert claims to be the only major critic in the nation who appreciated it at first. What's going on here?
A sidenote: who exactly are these re-animated Paulettes Kehr is referring to? Terrence Rafferty has become a book critic for the NY Times, James Wolcott's main interest is politics, Charles Taylor lost his job at Salon and now freelances, writing DVD reviews and continuing his argument with Harold Bloom and A.S. Byatt over Harry Potter. The only disciples of Pauline Kael regularly reviewing film are Stephanie Zacharek, Michael Sragow, and David Edelstein, who don't write like each other and don't even agree on movies, as Rotten Tomatoes shows.
I understand Kehr’s frustration, as I do Nelson’s. But this shorthand dismissal of online film criticism as framed by would-be Pauline Kaels and Harry Knowleses is pretty shortsighted. And I for one wouldn’t shed a tear if the term “Paulette” were to be stricken from the lexicon. If anybody still believes that Pauline Kael dictated from on high what movies were to be worshipped by the likes of Taylor, Edelstein, Wolcott, Rafferty, Zacharek, et al., could they believe that she could also dictate to them what they actually thought of those movies? One look at their reviews indicates that these people are, to a writer, pretty strong, independent thinkers who often don’t see eye to eye, even when they like the same films. I wonder where Kehr would situate himself on that imagined continuum--between Kael and Knowles, or somewhere else? I really enjoy Dave Kehr’s writing. I just wish he’d use his blog to showcase it more often instead of issuing these proclamations about the inherent unworthiness of online film criticism. As has been pointed out many times before, this very blog, Sacnners, ought to be evidence enough that not only does good, provocative, intelligent film writing on the Web exist, but that there’s an intelligent audience ready to read and respond to it too. I join in bemoaning the loss of Nelson’s voice within the City Pages, and hopefully he’ll find another outlet for his talents soon. Whether he does or not, maybe he’ll emerge as an online presence soon with his own blog. The Internet has been known to be friendly to those who would create an opportunity for themselves. And I doubt that publishing himself in that way would make Nelson’s work any less worth reading.
Hi, Jim,
I'm sorry that GreenCine, and then you, picked up that highly intemperate remark I made about Paulettes and internet critics. Hearing about Rob's firing ticked me off and I dashed off something in a fit of pique; I repented about two hours later and took it off the site, but apparently too late. As always, I'm amazed to discover that anyone reads my blog, which I've never really ever had time to maintain in a responsible manner (gotta pay that mortgage, and the internet doesn't help much with that). The real action on it is in the comments section, where I've been lucky enough to attract a lot of very smart people, none of whom hesitate to lay into me when the occasion arises.
Dave Kehr