Which film critics do you trust (if any?)

Oh my God, maybe I'll actually start watching this again:

At the Movies’ welcomes Scott, Phillips
Ben Lyons and Ben Mankiewicz are being replaced by two new film critics

NEW YORK - After a year of getting slammed for their performance as film critics, “At the Movies” co-hosts Ben Lyons and Ben Mankiewicz are getting their tickets punched.

Replacing them next month on the long-running syndicated series will be film critics A.O. (Tony) Scott of The New York Times and Michael Phillips of The Chicago Tribune, ABC Media Productions announced Wednesday.

The abrupt change reflects a move back to the show’s quarter-century-old roots after a year its detractors dismissed as lightweight and too fast-paced.

Lyons, a Hollywood reporter and film critic for the E! network and ABC’s “Good Morning America,” took particular heat for hobnobbing with Hollywood insiders and allegedly seeking blurb glory in movie ads.

“We tried something new last season,” said Brian Frons, who heads up the Disney unit that oversees ABC Media Productions. The departing co-hosts “did everything we asked of them, and they have been complete professionals.

“However, we’ve decided to return the show to its original essence — two traditional film critics discussing current motion picture and DVD releases.”

Scott and Phillips seem to follow in a tradition of critic co-hosts that reaches all the way back to the show’s first incarnation in 1975, a local effort called “Sneak Previews,” which paired rival Chicago newspaper film critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel.

The incoming Scott has spent nearly a decade as a film critic at The New York Times. He was the Sunday book critic at Newsday and a freelance contributor to publications including The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Review of Books.

Phillips is the film critic of The Chicago Tribune. He has written about entertainment and the arts as a staff writer and critic for the Los Angeles Times and The San Diego Union-Tribune, among other publications.

The pair, who in the past have both appeared on the Chicago-based “At the Movies” as guest critics, will take over when the new season begins the weekend of Sept. 5 (check local listings for day and time).

In an interview Wednesday, the departing Lyons said he looks back on his year with the show with satisfaction and no regrets.

“I’m extremely proud of the work Mank (Mankiewicz) and I did on the show,” Lyons said. He has been able to put complaints about him into perspective, though he did take exception to “malicious” attacks leveled by those who “hide behind a computer screen.”

In a separate interview, Mankiewicz said his soon-to-be-former co-host “took most of the heat” directed at the show, “and I think it was unfair and mean-spirited.

“But we’re film critics — and we can’t really go ballistic when people criticize us,” he reasoned. “I loved working on the show, all of it. It will sound hokey, but it really was an honor to continue that broadcast legacy that Roger and Gene created.

“I have worked on TV a long time,” he added, “and I know nothing is permanent in television.”

karina longworth

http://www.theauteurs.com/notebook/posts/1117

http://s3.amazonaws.com/mmc-beta-production/assets/17570/Movie_Graphic_C.jpg

huh

http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture_society/counting-the-stars-1553

christopher null really sucks. (filmcritic.com)

quick, you can be one of the first 3,000 people to apply for this:

The L.A. Weekly is looking for a film critic/editor. Candidate must have deep knowledge and appreciation of contemporary film and film history, both international and Hollywood. Must write and edit extremely well in formats ranging from short and full reviews to interviews to longer reported features. Essential duties include planning and managing the Weekly's film section, including special issues; assigning freelancers; occasional blogging.

What happened to Ella Taylor?

Time for you to make like Jed Clampett and light out for the territory, Jesse.

I couldn't live in LA, or assign freelancers.

I came across that christopher null person as the only RT "critic" who dislikes Children of Paradise.

Maurice Scherer

cankles

hysterical british call of duty modern warfare 2 kid

quick, you can be one of the first 3,000 people to apply for this:

The L.A. Weekly is looking for a film critic/editor. Candidate must have deep knowledge and appreciation of contemporary film and film history, both international and Hollywood. Must write and edit extremely well in formats ranging from short and full reviews to interviews to longer reported features. Essential duties include planning and managing the Weekly's film section, including special issues; assigning freelancers; occasional blogging.

― hellzapoppa (tipsy mothra), Monday, November 23, 2009 4:43 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

haha i'm like ... 5% tempted to apply for that since that is exactly my job and prob pays better. but... living in LA. not so much.

I'd rather not have a job that I'm sure to lose within 6 months.

ya that too

ran into D4v1d Ed31ste1n in a bar tonight! nice guy.

what happened to nathan lee?

he was very good. LAT shd hire him, but the full spec includes lots of non-critic stuff like doing fawning q&as and promoting the new times brand blah blah blah.

reading serge daney, who wasn't good at all, but it is interesting to read him since he has clearly been very influential.

reading serge daney, who wasn't good at all

Shine on you contrarian diamond.

P.S. Read some of YOUR stuff btw. Very good! Really wish you were less cranky, though.

RIP Robin Wood -- an indispensable Hitchcock critic (tho I believe his forthcoming book is about, ugh, Haneke):

http://www.thehousenextdooronline.com/2009/12/robin-wood-february-23rd-1931-december.html

oh shit. RIP.

Great, familiar quote from Glenn Kenny's blog:

I had better say that the Guilty Pleasures feature [in Film Comment] seems to me an entirely deplorable institution. If one feels guilt at pleasure, isn't one bound to renounce either one or the other? Preferably, in most cases, the guilt, which is merely the product of that bourgeois elitism that continues to vitiate so much criticism. The attitude fostered is evasive (including self-evasive) and anti-critical: 'Isn't this muck—to which of course I'm really so superior—delicious?'

http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2009/12/robin-wood-19312009.html

A bunch more links:

http://www.theauteurs.com/notebook/posts/1345

and a piece that includes a long 2000 interview at the World Socialist Website:

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/dec2009/wood-d21.shtml

I enjoyed the Hamlet with Ethan Hawke very much. I thought he was terrific. He was the best screen Hamlet. Much better than Olivier and certainly than Kenneth Branagh. He was without the Olivier affectation and all of Branagh’s self-consciousness. Branagh always seems to be saying, “Now to help you get this line, I’m going to put on an expression. This is important. Watch this.”

....I think what’s been crucial to any work on Hitchcock has been the work of radical feminists in the late 1960s, early 1970s. First, they launched an attack on Hitchcock because of all the persecution of women in his films, and then to amend that...although women are constantly tormented, terrorized and murdered in his films, the women emerge as the most sympathetic characters and the ones with whom Hitchcock seems to most deeply identify. The whole thing is turned on its head, and the films become about male oppression, rather than about the terrorization of women. I think the best of Hitchcock films continue to fascinate me because he’s obviously right inside them, he understands so well the male drive to dominate, harass, control and at the same time he identifies strongly with the woman’s position. The struggle against that, his films are a kind of battleground between these two positions....

Hawks, no, I feel more or less the same about Hawks. Although Rio Bravo is possibly becoming my personal favorite film of all time. Ever since I came to the conclusion that the whole world situation was hopeless, and that nothing would arrest the horrors, and the only thing left was to maintain one’s self-respect, if one can. I don’t see what’s going to arrest the onslaught of global capitalism. I hope that I’m wrong.

http://www.theauteurs.com/notebook/posts/1345

morbs is tht 'ugh, haneke' as in 'uhhh lemme think, haneke' or 'ugh, haneke' as in 'ew gross, haneke'

read 'hitchcock's films revisited' about a decade ago. read the third edn (or the new bits anyway) about half a decade ago. i'd recommend reading the most recent possible (which includes all the original material). there are many critics who reverse or retreat from their original position, but few who manage to do it as well as wood, andto talk about it -- and to relate the change to something bigger -- as incisively as wood did.

obviously one of the seminal british critics, and i'm very surprised this hasn't been reported in britain -- anywhere, so far as i can tell.

very sorry to hear about wood. his bfi book on "rio bravo" was one of the best in that series. rip.

morbs is tht 'ugh, haneke' as in 'uhhh lemme think, haneke' or 'ugh, haneke' as in 'ew gross, haneke'

― thurman merman (cozwn), Tuesday, 22 December 2009 22:27 (Yesterday) Bookmark

what? you didn't yet notice that Morbius asserts his hatred of haneke vehemently and at every opportunity (without ever actually saying anything else, of course)?

<3 vadim rizov <3

(without ever actually saying anything else, of course)

i fee bad about writing that, sorry morbs.

feel

yes cozwn, 'ew gross, haneke'.

In fairness, I rather like Code Unknown and Time of the Wolf.

nrq, I am encouraged by your respect for Wood. Can we try to be respectful nemeses in the new year? please?

another iterview:

http://www.yourfleshmag.com/artman/publish/article_773.shtml

I trust Dr. Morbius <3

thanks, but don't get carried away.

ugh morbs

; )

Define trust. Morbs is dependably cantankerous. Armond is reliably insane. So on.

Eric, I think you should read Robin Wood on Cronenberg vs Larry Cohen.

Some great discussion on two threads of Dave Kehr's blog, discussing RW in regard to Make Way For Tomorrow, Hawks and Ford (and homoeroticism in both), Before Sunrise, etc.

http://www.davekehr.com/?p=456#comment-35575

http://www.davekehr.com/?p=461#comments

dave kehr's blog is so ugly

The last link leads to excellent exchange between Joseph McBride and Brian Dauth on the crisscrossing relationships in the weirdness of Cary Grant's relationships with the women in Only Angels Have Wings.

ever the aesthete. xp

that's a great comment thread.

i should really read more robin wood.

I'm ashamed that I knew nothing, not even his Hitchcock book (which I put on reserve at the library a couple of days ago).

when I wrote a North by Northwest review recently, I looked at what Wood said about it just to make sure he hadn't come up with some counterintuitive insight that would make me want to rewrite the whole thing.

not even his Hitchcock book (which I put on reserve at the library a couple of days ago)
I've been meaning to read this for 25 years. Using my recently acquired expertise in using the new NYPL catalog, I managed to pick up a copy on my way home yesterday.

One film critic I just learned the existence of and do not trust is David Gilmour, author of The Film Club: A True Story of a Father and a Son.

Although one unintentionally amusing thing about his book was that the son's name is Jesse, so all the while reading it I kept expecting the punchline to be "and one day that boy grew up to be tipsy mothra."

RW's Final Top Ten

http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?p=17784

FUCK YES, GO KARINA! http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2009/12/la_weekly_adds_film_edito.php

shit, I don't much care for Foundas @ Lincoln Center.

Why? Cause he wrote a positive review of Up in the Air?