Which film critics do you trust (if any?)

Adam: this is one of my favorite books o' film, and one of the smartest.

either of Simon Callow's Welles volumes kill time...

I prefer Thomson's, actually.

Thanks, guys!

I also like the short format because it allows me to refine my prose.

lso lk srt frmt b/c cn rfn prz

the chion book isn't very good, the better one is the bellos (sp?)

from new york post
August 14, 2008 --

FORMER New York Times movie critic Elvis Mitchell better come up with a good explanation for what he was doing with $12,000 in cash in a cigar box - or he won't get the money back.

On Friday, the US government filed an application to keep the cash that border guards found on Mitchell last April 27, when his taxi crossed into his hometown of Detroit as he returned from a documentary film festival in Toronto. "A search of Mitchell's belongings uncovered the box full of money along with [15] Cuban cigars," Canada's Windsor Star reports.

"He gave us a declaration for $80 and they found $12,000 US and the cigars," said border patrol chief Ron Smith.

Mitchell - who's now busy promoting "The Black List," the HBO documentary about race he co-produced with Timothy Greenfield-Sanders - told authorities the money was an accumulation of ATM withdrawals over the past year.

But he told Page Six yesterday he "grabbed the wrong box" from his apartment. "I have a fear of banks, so I keep cash in my house and I grabbed the wrong box," Mitchell said. "I took it into the country and out. The cigars, well I should have smoked them before I left," he laughed.

US law requires any traveler carrying more than $10,000 in cash to report it to authorities. Mitchell said his lawyer is trying to get the dough back. "He's filed papers and within the next few weeks I'll probably get it back," he said, adding he was "embarrassed" by the situation.

"Apparently a black man with dreads can't carry that much cash, but I think there are a few worse things to be embarrassed about. I haven't cheated on my wife like some in the news," Mitchell said.

RIP Manny Farber

http://daily.greencine.com/archives/006525.html

Hoberman on Farber:

http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-08-19/film/manny-farber-1917-2008/

and Paul Scrader:

http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/manny-farber-1917-2008-20080819

The first thing they would do in a Manny Farber School of Film Criticism is shut down!

One thing he said to me early on which seemed to have really informed a lot of his thinking—because he was first and foremost a painter and he was a great admirer of Jackson Pollock—he said the insight of seeing Jackson Pollock's work is the insight of seeing something designed on the vertical presented on the horizontal. Before Pollock, painting was seen horizontally and made horizontally and I think he liked that idea, that you would do something vertically and view it horizontally.

My point being that that kind of perception difference, to try to see things in a different way, at a different angle, that was underneath everything he wrote about films. He was not in the great American critical mainstream. His job was to take that odd approach, find that unexpected insight. He couldn't imagine himself writing the way a professional film critic does, like David Denby works—Manny simply couldn't do that.

Yes, you're talking about just immediately proceeding Sarris, before Andy weighed in with his bible.
!

The American Cinema, right?

wtf Elvis get off A-Rod's back and watch yr goddamn money!

from his NYT obit:

Mr. Farber, a quirky prose stylist with a barbed lance, responded to film viscerally. He despised what he called the “art-infected” films of cinematic greats like Welles and Alfred Hitchcock — “the water-buffaloes of film art,” he once called them — preferring the work of genre directors like Anthony Mann, Raoul Walsh and William A. Wellman, who transformed pulp material and genre conventions into “private runways to the truth.”

Well, I can see why he said that "whether you liked it" is the last thing he wanted to know from a critic. It was his weak point.

I've been really liking Joshua Rothkopf of Time Out New York.

bradshaw has made a tit of himself with the 'benjamin button' review tbh. awards season pushes people into Making A Stand: if i could be fucked i'd seek out obviously worse films he's given more than one star. obviously i disagree with the result, but there are matters of competence:

"He also has a Zelig-type habit of showing up at important events: while he's sailing in Florida, you can see Apollo 11 taking off in the distance."

it's not apollo 11; but this is pretty much the only instance of this kind. all of the gump comparisons are true, but the big difference is ccbb is pretty much silent on american history. (that and, you know, the reverse ageing.) there is no zelig-type habit at all.

can't be bothered to fisk this bollocks any further.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Butthurt.

Benjemima Buttuninteresting

it's a solid zing

xp

Although Peter Bradshaw's right about 'The Reader'

nrq i fully expected you to have revived this with the one-word answer "me"

i don't want to see that film tbh so can't judge. i felt david hare's comment that "oh, well, obviously if these hatin' film critics had been around in 1933, the nazis would never have won" had the ring of sarcastic truth.

xpost

lol, not even.

Even if only one or two of the gump comparisons are true its enough to say it would be a waste of a ticket, tbh.

i like little white lies magazine - the writing isnt always great but i like the enthusiasm/passion.

i wish they had a contents page. is that too square for words?

also u should only do "the XXX issue" if XXX has some kind of zeitgeisty cultural heft. "the 'man on wire' issue" not so much.

yeah they do too many theme issues. since i started buying it its all been centered around just one film. maybe theyre strapped for content or trying to please PR/distributors. the east asian cinema special was good though. gave me lots of tips of what to watch.

The Last 117 Employed Film Critics in America

http://moviecitynews.com/voices/2009/090302_critics.html

There are many other full-time movie critics, but they're working freelance. Maybe they should change the word to "salaried."

as someone who thinks freelance just means jobhunting every damn day, i say nyaaahhhhh.

To think Ben Lyons will still be on that list when 100+ of the other get the ax ...

filmbiz friend finds Edelstein secretly gay

Not so secretly, judging by his review of I Love You, Man on today's CBS Sunday Morning.

frontin' ^

"Most people think that film criticism is largely a matter of stating evaluations of a film, based either in criteria or personal taste, and putting those evaluations into user-friendly prose. If that’s all a critic does, why not find bloggers who can do the same, and maybe better and surely cheaper than print-based critics? We all judge the movies we see, and the world teems with arresting writers, so with the Internet why do we need professional critics? We all love movies, and many of us want to show our love by writing about them.

In other words, the problem may be that film criticism, in both print and the net, is currently short on information and ideas. Not many writers bother to put films into historical context, to analyze particular sequences, to supply production information that would be relevant to appreciating the movies. Above all, not many have genuine ideas—not statements of judgments, but notions about how movies work, how they achieve artistic value, how they speak to larger concerns. The One Big Idea that most critics have is that movies reflect their times. This, I’ve suggested at painful length, is no idea at all...."

http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/?p=4102

"the world teems with arresting writers"

not really, dave! read yr own books fer evidence.

what happened to screengrab?

Folded up shop a month or so ago. Not sure it was really generating the traffic it should've.

kinda digging this Philip Kennicott but i haven't read that much

documentary reviews, esp (THE GARDEN, IOUSA)

Mark Peranson is giving Armond a run these days as the English language's crustiest critic.

http://www.cinema-scope.com/cs39/spot_peranson_stupid_cannes.html

i don't think i trust any publications re: documentaries

For all her hollywood insider cattiness, I kinda trust Manohla Dargis

ha eric i was just reading that

guardian/observer reviewers seem a bit hit and miss (but then who isnt). i think i read peter frenchs review of t4 salvation in the observer and either he wrote too much and it got chopped or he just seemed to have nothing to say so just padded it out as much as poss. but then id prob rather read empire reviewers.

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.