Which film critics do you trust (if any?)

"Sure, you can surf JSTOR, but what about people who aren't interested in academic writing?"

i want to start a film site w/h4a, alfred, slocki, and morbs. da croup, jjusten, veggiegirl, you're in too. we'll call it 'the smash cut to black, then a loud scream'

Thankfully, I didn't want to write about movies anymore anyway.

oh, u kid

now taking bets on if the dissolve will run anything and dumb as this: http://www.avclub.com/articles/never-leave-the-cave-without-it-13-good-performanc,99756/

Which film ilxors do you trust (if any)?

I am p curious to see what films these guys write about/prioritise. p4k more legitimately has a mandate to write domestically/insularly about American/w/e film, but a film site covering the same territory would be kinda disgustingly unambitious

american / w/e music, rather

the site's name reminds me of this

http://media.komonews.com/images/Chew_Cookbook.jpg

It's live: http://thedissolve.com/

"i loved the av club...but the font was so small and unrefined!"

i wonder if they can track the amount of ppl who open this site and then close the page within 10 seconds

http://alteredzones.com

Rip

oh my god richard you think joe swanberg is better than jafar panahi

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2013/07/who-are-the-twelve-greatest-living-narrative-filmmakers.html smdh

classic brody

film criticism's Variety obit

http://variety.com/2013/film/markets-festivals/the-last-critic-who-mattered-1200599333/

Tributes to the late Stanley Kauffmann by Wolcott, Thomson, Denby:

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115090/tribute-stanley-kauffmann

Never really connected to kauffmann's writing, especially, but I admired the fact that he continued to work into his 90s. Thanks for the link.

Apparently his last review was Our Nixon in August. Here he is on Chereau's Son Frere:

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/new-places-within

on Antonioni's breakthrough:

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115093/stanley-kauffmann-lavventura

and the notorious Godfather pan (OTM on Brando):

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/film/101783/tnr-film-classics-the-godfather-april-1-1972

OUR CRITICAL PRECEPTS

(1) It's primarily about language, using the precise word for Oshima's eroticism, having a push-pull relationship with both film experience and writing experience.

(2) Anonymity and coolness, which includes writing film-centered rather than self-centered criticism, distancing ourselves from the material and the people involved. With few exceptions, we don't like meeting the movie director or going to press screenings.

(3) Burrowing into the movie, which includes extending the piece, collaging a whole article with pace changes, multiple tones, getting different voices into it.

(4) Not being precious about writing. Paying strict heed to syntax and yeat playing around with words and grammar to get layers and continuation.

(5) Willingness to put in a great deal of time and discomfort: long drives to see films again and again, nonstop writing sessions.

(6) Getting the edge. For instance, using the people around you, a brain like Jean-Pierre Gorin's.

(7) Giving the audience some uplift.

Manny Farber & Patricia Patterson, Film Comment May/June 1977.

^ too much work

J Hoberman taking over Dave Kehr's DVD column in the Sunday NY Times.

Cool.

David Bordwell on the Founding Fathers of modern film criticism:

http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2014/01/26/the-rhapsodes-agee-farber-tyler-and-us/

linked in celebration of quitting this nonjob

http://blogs.indiewire.com/criticwire/film-criticism-state-of-the-art

Kent Jones is a good listen: http://www.thecinephiliacs.net/2014/02/episode-33-kent-jones-spawn-of-north.html

KJ (who I sat behind at a Hitchcock silent the other night) on how Bazin and Farber would not be at home in the field today, and also other things about Sarris and Robin Wood:

I think that Farber’s passionate involvement in the actual practice of criticism precluded any genuine investment in partisanship or polemics, and that’s doubly true of Bazin. Paradoxically, this means that the cinema’s two greatest critics are outliers in what we now call film culture, a by-product of the Politique des Auteurs, streamlined for American use into the Auteur Theory, and finally trodden down and flattened over the decades into plain old auteurism. Their names are constantly mentioned and their most famous pieces are frequently cited and invoked, but rarely in terms of their relevance to contemporary affairs, least of all the lucid objections they raised to the auteurist idea at its inception.

http://www.filmcomment.com/article/auteur-theory-auteurism

btw is there a compilation of the '50s Cahiers gang's writings in English, or of JLG's in particular?

http://www.amazon.com/Cahiers-Cin%C3%A9ma-Neo-Realism-Hollywood-Harvard/dp/0674090616

thanks NN

quitting this nonjob

how come?

there's a line in The Great Beauty (which I sort of hated otherwise) to the effect of "I'm too old to do things I don't want to do."

also

"No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."
- Samuel Johnson

Yeah, well Samuel Johnson was a well known junket whore.

Read on Alfred's blog that EW's Owen Gleiberman just got canned after having been with the magazine since its inception. I haven't read that mag in years, but my family had a subscription years ago and I always enjoyed his criticism. His minority-opinion reviews of The Last Boy Scout and Groundhog Day were particularly memorable. Would love if Rolling Stone could somehow lose the never non-hacky Peter Travers and pick up Gleiberman.

c'mon man Peter Travers electrifying as the bruised heart of the rolling stone empire.

MZS on the sacking: http://www.rogerebert.com/mzs/for-the-love-of-it-notes-on-the-decline-of-entertainment-weekly-the-firing-of-owen-gleiberman-and-the-ongoing-end-of-an-era

Bordwell's last entry on those '40s critics:

http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2014/04/20/the-rhapsodes-afterlives/

Seitz's advice to young critics:

http://www.rogerebert.com/mzs/advice-to-young-critics

(I was conscientious, as an old neophyte, on about 8/10, but never had any illusion I'd make a living at it, so I just ran out of time and motivation)

https://media.vocativ.com/photos/2014/04/Movie-Critics-Graphic-Full2.jpeg

http://www.vocativ.com/culture/media/screening-hacks-americas-movie-critics-rated/

odious

that doesn't seem to allow for the possibility that maybe "200 of the highest-grossing movies of the decade" were mostly shit

thou daren't deviate from the norm

consensus = truth

Kael, Kauffmann, and Simon would have been off the chart for the duration of their careers; Sarris the same for his heyday, though he really softened the last decade or so. Farber would have been in another county (though he was only a regular reviewer for a short while).

i'm FPing any score-related posts in future

Reunion in Vienna (1933, Franklin) 7/10
*Inside Llewyn Davis (2013, Coen, Coen) 8/10
Adam & Yves (1974, de Rome) 5/10
*Manhattan Melodrama (1934, Van Dyke) 6/10
Slap the Monster on Page One (1972, Bellocchio) 7/10
Love Is Strange (2014, Sachs) 6/10
Devil in the Flesh (1986, Bellocchio) 5/10
The Eyes, the Mouth (1982, Bellocchio) 6/10
Manakamana (2013, Spray, Velez) 7/10
*An Oversimplification of Her Beauty (2012, Nance) 8/10
The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976, Ross) 7/10
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970, Wilder) 6/10

― images of war violence and historical smoking (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Etc., etc., etc.

I don't think ratings are a problem in and of themselves, least of all on a message board where there's no review attached.

well, we're not critics. Glossing over substantive stuff on critical chops in favor of another mass-market barometer is for shit.

no one's making a scoresheet of our ratings, yr comparison is specious

jaymc might be

and the NSA.

I don't know, I just don't see ratings as a problem when accompanied by good writing. Christgau rated records for 40+ years. If you mean that ratings are usually accompanied by poor writing, that's probably true. But they don't cause the poor writing.