Which film critics do you trust (if any?)

I haven't, but I'd like to see his – got a link?

Google is my friend http://www.imdb.com/user/ur0740315/

He has already proved his worth, by alerting me to the existence of this remake

http://i.imgur.com/UmD3N70.jpg

Keith Uhlich spies a trend, spurred by John Wick 2, he calls The New Competence:

Recent New Competence films are, for me, stuff like La La Land, A Cure for Wellness and this, which seem designed as self-conscious "coherent" antitheses to the haphazard aesthetics that have proliferated in mainstream moviemaking. Yet they all lack that intangible something that would make them great, or even good. You can "see" them clearly, but there's little, between the lines, to really see.

It's a term I came up with, and like any such grouping, it's more than a bit of a shallow catch-all. I'm more a believer that each movie is unique and creates its own specific analytical problems. But creating a grouping helps me organize some of my thoughts and feelings on the art of the moment, and hopefully go deeper, if not in writing, then in conversation or reflection.
I also agree that craft itself can be meaning, and the craft here I think conjures a moral vacuum that rubs me the wrong way. The movie made me soul-sick, all the more so because of its arch pretensions to Buster Keaton-esque comedy, its thoughtless stereotyping of characters and character actors, and its numbingly pie-eyed adoration of firearms. At this moment, I'm just not able to find much fun in treating an AR rifle like a fine wine.

film critics can't afford fine wine gtfo

Good obit for Richard Schickel by MZ Seitz. His Hitchcock episode of The Men Who Made the Movies and the CBS special about the history of Hollywood film comedy in '77 meant more to me than the TIME reviews. And I still have to read my copy of his 1968 book The Disney Version.

http://www.rogerebert.com/mzs/the-art-of-entertainment-richard-schickel-1931-2017

I have no opinions of Schickel other than reading his Allen bio and for many years confusing him for Vincent Canby.

i had thought he died a few years ago and then i realized it was richard corliss who died.

I think I saw his Allen TV special, maybe the Scorsese and Watch the Skies ('50s scifi) too

Only know Schickel from a number of commentary tracks he recorded, all of which are uniformly terrible - incoherent, rambling, poorly researched. I have a Blu-Ray of The Good, The Bad and the Ugly with separate commentary tracks by Schickel and Christopher Frayling (so Eastwood biographer vs Leone biographer) and the difference is illuminating - Frayling is lucid, fluent, insightful and incredibly well-informed, whereas Schickel is none of these things.

Not compared to a Leone biographer, I'd imagine. I'd blame whoever hired him, although I only recall hearing him do a commentary for Rebecca and it wasn't 'terrible,' especially when he was complaining about young Olivier's film chops.

bye bye Rene Rodriguez: http://www.miaminewtimes.com/arts/rene-rodriguez-miami-heralds-last-full-time-film-critic-is-done-9245208

Did you push her down the stairs?

well this sucks; Keyframe closed. where will i get my cinema news?

http://www.indiewire.com/2017/05/fandor-mainstream-keyframe-closed-backlash-exclusive-1201815695/

Very happy to see that David Hudson's indispensable film news Daily has landed at Criterion.

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/4546-the-daily-where-were-we

Useful for you to determine the trustworthiness of film critics: http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2017/12/which-film-critics-are-the-most-contrarian-we-used-data-to-find-out/

(If I'm 36th out of 350+ in overall contrarian tendencies, there's a lot of pushovers out there.)

299) Staff [Not Credited] (9.41016)

you're an independent thinker, honeybunch

is Rex Reed 6th because he hates most things that couldn't have been made before 1966?

ok, i have 70 reviews in Metacritic... but presumably not enough that drew 30 reviews. I would've liked to see my score, but such is the 'barely released' beat (that drove me into retirement).

Molly Haskell

“It’s a kind of mission or responsibility I feel to keep the past alive, because I’m closer to it than most people,” she said. “I think it’s hard for young people now to even be interested in it. They’re just so overwhelmed by the present and keeping up with the present, but to me, it’s always so interesting to know where movies come from and what leads to what, and finding links that you didn’t know were there. If I have a purpose, that’s what it feels like it is to me.”

In 2009, in support of her book “Frankly, My Dear: ‘Gone with the Wind’ Revisited,” she penned a piece for The Guardian about the film’s “so-called rape scene.” “There’s something wonderfully contradictory and interesting about that scene,” Haskell said. “I wouldn’t put it in a movie today, but I would never take it out. I wouldn’t tear it down with the monuments on Monument Ave. in Richmond.”

She added, “We look at the films differently now. That’s fine. We can look at them differently, but try to understand how things were in the context in which they were made.”

“In those days, if you’re writing about film, there was no way to see something unless you had it on 16 millimeter, and we did.... There were obviously no DVDs and no Criterion Collection, and all of that, the abundance is just staggering now. The problem is how to wade through it all and how to find people and keep the conversation going.”

But even such abundance comes with a practical requirement: realizing you just can’t see everything. “I was looking over some things that had come out after NYFF, and films had just disappeared. If you didn’t see them there, you don’t see them,” she said. “Now it’s just there are so many different cinemas that you just have to decide which ones you’re just gonna not ever know anything about.”

http://www.indiewire.com/2018/01/film-critic-molly-haskell-feminism-new-york-film-critics-circle-1201912651/

I've essentially only retired from reviewing crap mainstream movies for the last month and a half or so but ... I don't miss it at all?

(Emphasis on the question mark.)

V. much looking forward to this:

https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/robin-wood-horror-film

welcome to da club, Eric

Not sure what thread this goes into, but AW deploys PK to bash what I’m guessing is going to end up one of the year’s best...

An amazing prophetic review of film If Beale Street Could Talk written in 1976: “...It’s dead and it deadens you. Your heart goes cold. The world is a dishrag" pic.twitter.com/5fw7Tu4RBs

— armond white (@3xchair) September 26, 2018

https://www.facebook.com/dennis.cozzalio/posts/10156236564683369

“I'm disgusted to have seen no expressions of support on here for David Edelstein, who was fired from NPR's Fresh Air for a joke he made on a PRIVATE social media page. It was a dumb, and soon deleted, joke about the butter scene in "Last Tango in Paris," a scene that, as a friend pointed out, we have all made jokes about over the years--until a few years back when the lie spread that the scene depicted Maria Schneider actually being raped on film. This is uncategorically false, and Schneider herself said it was. But it's a lie that has been spread by famous people. In this current situation by Martha Plimpton, who took a screen grab of David's page and made it public and called for his firing. Let that sink in: a private joke was made public and then used to get someone fired. That's the behavior of a Stalinist thug. But it's completely in synch with an era when thought policing is considered a public good. And an era so intoxicated by its own outrage that to say what I just said is to risk being accused of thinking sexual abuse is okay, or that the abusers who are being outed shouldn't be punished."

i'm sure the Snowflakes are celebrating

You got out of the game just in time.

Firing is a bit strong but what a horribly formed 'joke'

Also, fwiw, I'm not sure Edelstein's just-as-risible comment "[Green Book] taps into a kind of nostalgia for when everything — even racism — seemed simpler" is an entirely inaccurate depiction of the movie on the screen.

(That probably would've been a lot easier to swallow if the rest of the review was an unqualified pan, though.)

When a friend posted the GB remark yesterday, I said the rest of the review added much-needed context. The butter line is worse.

He shouldn't have been fired, but he knows now that FB is never private.

never say anything on Facebook

or don't friend Martha Plimpton

That joke would have to be pretty awful for me not to think the firing is ridiculous.

The joke sucks, and the firing is ridiculous.

As for the Green Book comment, I knew exactly what he was getting at (and agree, in theory, not having seen the film) just from having seen the film's trailer, to the point that I'm kinda surprised that it even needs explanation/defence/contextualization.

The best line in the Facebook post above is "And an era so intoxicated by its own outrage that to say what I just said is to risk being accused of thinking sexual abuse is okay." It's an infinite death spiral--I paused before submitting my previous post.

people looking to be offended def have a home at NPR, with their fucking Moth Hour and Terry Gross

Yeah I don’t have anything new to add to this, but this firing is cartoonishly stupid.

Having seen the tweet in question, I think it's possible that (much like his Green Book comment) he meant something that's actually in line with what snowflakes would endorse ... reducing Bertolucci's entire career down to basically nothing other than the idea he facilitated rape.

Or not. I don't know.

it's been rly depressing to see ppl gloat about this on twitter

i assume if she were alive and writing pauline kael would get fired for one of her usual cracks about an actress's appearance or something

That'd be the down side. The upside is that John Simon would never have made it past two columns.

I was thinking the exact same thing in connection to this. Except I think it would unfold like this: some interviewer in 2018 would ask Kael to "clarify" her Last Tango review, she'd respond in a way that amounted to "Oh, please," and the next day she'd be out of a job.

There will probably be a number of pieces like this in the coming days:

http://www.salon.com/2018/11/28/david-edelstein-the-butter-scene-in-last-tango-and-the-darkness-of-the-internet/

"I suspect what befell Edelstein this week is only partly about one stupid Facebook post, and has more to do with the messy process of generational change and the inevitable Schadenfreude surrounding someone who holds two prestigious media jobs, either of which many other people would kill and eat their grandmothers to get."

I don't expect I'll get much agreement here, but--conceding that they bring some of it onto themselves--I think there's an element of that behind some of the carping about Christgau, Marcus, and Bill James on ILX.

no need to carp about Christgau because all of his writing is awful. that quote is OTM though

I'm sure these media companies are happy to take any excuse to axe folks with any seniority, especially who write about fiyulms, cause who fucking cares about those anymore

Maria Schneider never said she was *actually* raped in the butter scene; she said she stayed friends with Brando, and that all the sex was simulated.

Edelstein knows that. Martha Plimpton doesn't (too busy writing about what her "favorite abortion" was, it seems).

I think it's possible that (much like his Green Book comment) he meant something that's actually in line with what snowflakes would endorse...Or not. I don't know

I've seen the joke now, and agree with this. As humour, it's not much more than a lame reference to what I take it (I don't remember) is an old advertising slogan for butter. Not particularly offensive, definitely not funny. If you try to extract meaning from it, all I get is either a) a complete non-sequitur, prompted only by the fact that this slogan popped into Edelstein's head, or b) a dig at Bertolucci, the idea that he's getting a pass in death for this infamous scene. I don't know.

I'd have to check it (I might be misremembering), but I suspect that Kael's review of Straw Dogs is another one that'd get her fired today.

Maybe this one moment in film and social history isn't really about Pauline Kael.

Actually, I think it very much is in a way.