Which film critics do you trust (if any?)

(bumping this becz i'd like to hear anyone else's take on armond's rant. i need to learn not to revive threads at 3 in the morning.)

there's lots of stuff on the Armond thread revived last week. Here.

ah thankx.

...and ok, so, everybody else says it's incoherent too. good to know. now i can go back to not thinking about armond white.

does anyone have links to his eighties rockcrit?

now:

http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/

Also, Nathan Lee back to NY Times (Wong's As Tears Go By today).

http://projectionbooth.blogspot.com/2008/05/bad-journalism-pet-peeves-of-film.html

yeesh.

i mean, calling an article "bad journalism" and leading with a sentence as unreadable as "The results of it can be seen in the recent slaughtering of Speed Racer by the likes of a majority vote at Rotten Tomatoes (and many others aside), while the start of it, I think, can be seen in the kind of slandering going on right now at The House Next Door as regards the recently announced remake of Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant, directed by Werner Herzog (!) and starring Nicholas Cage (!$%@)"...

Maybe, but sentences like that are my downfall as a writer. My editors are constantly telling me they get a headache whenever my sentences get to their fourth or fifth clause.

But I use long sentences to give the short ones that extra element of surprise.

I use dull, medium-length sentences to a similar purpose.

sentences like "This is a simple pitfall but its devastation is one muted in its effects, as we tend to mistake it for legitimate thought, uncritical of our own mental processes" and "And so we continue leaning on our crutches as we sit down in the middle of the auditorium about twice as far back from the screen as the screen is tall (that's how I do it, anyway)" and "The Star Wars prequels and Matrix sequels saw mostly venom, the unforgiving kind like in the Alien films (speaking of bad sequels...), eating away at the ship, damaging the infrastructure" totally give me a headache.

The biggest problem with that blog entry is that Rob simply drops the names of films as though mere mention of his allegiance toward this movie or against that movie (i.e. Hulk and Iron Man, respectively) stands in as an example of independent thought.

But the intent is sort of OTM, about the gangpiling aspect of Internet discourse..

Not that this hasn't been noted and unpacked many a time before, on basically every ILX film thread from 2004 thru 2006.

i guess. i think bad writing is a worse problem than gangbanging opinions to be honest.

It's a blog.

ok...

i guess i just dont think it's a problem full stop. who cares if 80% of newspaper critics dont like speed racer

I mean, not to be completely defeatist about it, but yes, the writing aspect would raise my ire a lot more if it appeared in Film Comment or something. But in blog form, I'm almost always paying more attention to whatever it is the writer's trying to convey.

I'm not arguing that stripping the entry of all reference to specific films would've done a lot more to bolster his argument.

that's what i was trying to do too! hard to take bad writing about bad writing seriously tho. i'm not even sure what exactly he's saying.

(Then again, in reading it again, that would've removed about 80% of the content.)

reference to specific articles would have helped. his ideas are almost completely unsupported.

it's a blog.

what year did "unpack" become a synonym for deconstruct? sounds like work.

isn't the whole post just about being hypersensitive to the sensation that talking about films in most internet quarters is a matter of liking the movies/filmmakers with cred and tearing down the usual suspects? It's all a completely subjective stance anyway.

On another note, the idea that the relentlessly self-assured Mike D'Angelo and his vocational nine lives can't even get work as a freelance critic these days has me pretty down in the dumps about the scene.

i guess it's just not an issue i'm too passionate about haha! xp

ya i'm holding onto my staff job with my fingernails.

(as well as thinking about other options just in case...)

although to be honest my job involves editing & planning, i'm a section editor and not just a staff critic.

which would be a sweet job.

Honestly, I can see why it's an anomaly such things exist.

And I have to hope that's not just schadenfreude talking.

(FT film critic jobs, I mean)

ya. it's really NOT full-time work unless you take 8-16 hours to write a review.

That's exactly what MDA admitted on his blog. He said it was rare he ever put more than 15 hours in a week on the gig.

It could probably be more if you're the sole critic for a city paper. Chris Hewitt at the St. Paul Pioneer Press handles the duties entirely by himself, to the tune of 8-10 movies a week sometimes.

xp: How about 4 hours?

If I've ever taken longer than an hour or two on a review, it's because my computer is connected to the Internet and it's entirely too easy to get distracted. That said, I'm sure I've had a draft open for 8 hours every now and again, especially when I feel like I have to make the review 1500 words or more for those features, et al.

I'm just perpetually out of practice, tho. When we were doing the Brian De Palma thing and I had to do about half of the reviews myself, I ended up banging out 1000 words pretty quickly.

i write ridiculously fast (and i'm sure it shows!)

A lot of the reviews I write fast are the ones that my editors like the best, but are also the ones I feel the worst about.

When it comes down to it, even editors at alts are probably fine, thanks, without the writerly BS.

how do you mean?

I mean, if I give myself enough time, that's when I start making conscious "decisions" (to put it nicely) as a "writer" and adopting weird structural strategies, rather than just getting the damned review out on paper. And then it comes back with one paragraph annotated with a note from the editor saying something like "couldn't you just write 'The dog jumped over the fence.' here?" ... Exaggeration, but you know.

Most of my most liked reviews and essays are the ones I bang out the fastest – the equivalent of a band's B-side or single recorded for commercial reasons.

Eric OTM about how quickly one can write blurbs for weeklong or daylong features.

Seriously, if you're in practice and in routine (and work for a paper where your editorial staff remind you that sticking to appraisals of the story/script/performances is best), I can't imagine how easy it would be to be a FT blurbslinger.

But also how easy it would be to burn out on it.

Just ask Dickens.

Like my man Chuck D said
What a blogger know?

I don't even try to write well until I rewrite.