Filmbrain raises an essential issue: “I have noticed a trend in the film blogosphere of critics who, while talented writers, are so damn clinical in their criticism that I find myself wondering if they actually enjoy film.”
In the magazine Cinema Scope, David Bordwell demonstrates how a lack of specific examples undermines a potentially intriguing argument.
Vanity Fair’s James Walcott revealed himself to be both puzzlingly moronic and a fine wit in separate posts last month.
If movie critics chose Oscar nominations, then, here are two possibilities of what they might look like.
Blogger Anthony Kaufman makes an astute observation about the divided critical reaction to Paul Haggis’ Oscar-nominated Crash: “According to the top-ten lists available, not a single critic who resides in New York or Los Angeles placed Crash in their top five. … So the vast majority of Crash fans come from everywhere in between.” Kaufman concludes that this is a function of the movie being simple and unsophisticated.
Following the lead of Slate’s Movie Club, a group of five movie bloggers – including Snob favorite Liz Penn of The High Sign – has started The Conversation.
Two of the most endearing qualities in a movie critic are the ability and willingness to re-consider a judgment in a public forum. So it seems pretty big of Roger Ebert (and Vincent Gallo, for that matter) to sit down and talk about the new version of the The Brown Bunny.
The New York Review of Books has an excellent piece in its July 15 issue on the nature of criticism. It deals specifically with Dale Peck’s already notorious Hatchet Jobs – which, of course, I haven’t read – and concerns itself primarily with the role of the critic. The author’s conclusion is that Peck is too busy “punishing” the authors he’s slamming to effectively “judge” them, and that Peck needs to offer an alternative to the books he loathes to be a good critic.
