Here's the New Yorker:
Memorable Movies of 2006
by Anthony Lane
"Most moviegoers will end the year unsatisfied. If you had been cast adrift for the whole of 2006, what would you have missed at the movies? Not a great deal. A soldier fighting abroad in 1942, with no access to motion pictures, would have had some enviable catching-up to do on his return, starting with “The Palm Beach Story,” but it’s not like that these days. ...
My saddest moment in a movie theatre came a month ago, when I screened “All About Eve” to a bunch of acquaintances, one of whom came up to me at the end. “What happened?” she asked. “Well,” I replied, “Anne Baxter got the award, and Bette Davis sat there all steamed up, and George—” “No,” she said, tapping her foot, “what happened to movies like that? Movies with four great parts for women and lines you want to quote? Where did they go?”
No idea, but they sure as hell aren’t coming back. "
Yawn. No wonder film criticism seems more irrelvent every day. Is anyone reading a film critic today that actually matters.?
I just finished writing the above and realized that I'm no better than Anthony Lane; I was doing the exact same thing, only about film criticism rather than film. In fact, if I hadn't stopped, I'm certain I would have invoked Pauline Kael as the last critic that mattered, or some such nonsense.
Do any of you read film critics for pleasure, or do you skip down to the letter grade/number of stars? (Crap, I did it again, didn't I?) Any thoughts?
1 comment:
As a kid growing up in D.C., then working as a movie critic for almost 5 years, I became very alienated early on from any critics who might have impacted me. I found them all to be so horribly cynical that I wondered why they kept the jobs they had. Most were good writers, I'm sure they could have found other jobs and done them with success, but they didn't. They kept going to the movies day after day, ripping movies endlessly and embracing those few that even bordered on entertaining with depressingly emphatic gusto.
The only reviews I tend to even glimpse these days are those in the New Yorker, Premier, USA Today (mostly from Mike Clark, in which case I even still view the star count before I bother to read) and Owen Gleiberman from EW.
The only way I view reviews as mattering anymore is in presentations that mirror the nature of today's demands: in collection. By that I don't mean those large, pretentious bindings of 5,000 reviews by some critic. I mean places like Rottentomatoes.com, where every critic in America is posted and the consensus is what matters. Summations of the reviews are posted as single-line quotations which effectively get the message across and even the casual browser can see that movies one might ordinarily ignore or assume to be terrible - movies like the recent "Rocky Balboa," which has received better overall reviews than "The Pursuit of Happyness," "The Good Shephard," and even "The Good German" - are either as terrible as expected or far better than thought possible.
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