Terror in the Aisles

I’m not speculating about Cook’s job security here, or even my own, but rather about film criticism itself, which has been in a conspicuous state of decline for years now and which, more recently, has begun seizing about, gasping for air, like a fish out of water. Call me a pessimist, but when the Los Angeles Times’ Patrick Goldstein issued the latest eulogy for the profession, in an August 15 editorial titled “Critics’ Voices Become a Whisper,” I had to agree with his assessment that the influence — nay, the relevance — of critics has hit an all-time low. It’s not that there aren’t fine, perceptive, intelligent critics still out there (although any number of them, from the New York Post’s Dave Kehr to the Orange County Register’s Henry Sheehan, have been handed their walking papers in recent years). It’s that even those critics’ voices have become increasingly marginalized in the age of the everyone’s-an-expert blogosphere and the ongoing consolidation of traditional media. Would that Goldstein had had the guts to mention how even his own employer has increasingly resorted to reprinting out-of-town reviews from Timessister papers Newsdayand the Chicago Tribune, rather than assigning its own local critics to weigh in on all the new films. Whereas the local critic’s voice was once a cherished staple of any major (or minor) city daily, the world of print film criticism has more recently come to resemble one giant wire service. And the real question is: Has anybody (outside of critics themselves) even noticed, or cared?

Of course, critics have always been and will continue to be irrelevant to the fortunes of pictures like Pirates(which garnered middling notices across the board) and Superman Returns(which received mostly raves, but whose worldwide gross has yet to exceed Pirates’ domestic one). What has been far more troubling of late is just how little effect we seem to have on the performance of anymovie, whether it’s an obscure art-house masterpiece like this year’s Romanian import The Death of Mr. Lazarescu or an under-the-radar studio gem like writer-director James Gunn’s impishly scary-funny Slither(a dream double feature with Snakes on a Planeif ever there was one). Even when reviews appear to have buoyed a film nowadays, it’s just as likely a matter of coincidence. (Did favorable notices really bring audiences to Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center, as some have suggested, when the even more enthusiastic support for United 93 did little to broaden that film’s appeal?) So it becomes difficult to argue with Goldstein and others — Varietyeditor in chief Peter Bart has long enjoyed shooting at critics for sport — when they point out the disparity between critical darlings and popular hits.

But why is it assumed that critics shouldlike the ?most popular movies, and that if they don’t, they’re the ones who are out of touch? Is it not possible that critics who, if they’re doing their jobs properly, see several hundred films a year (including many that will never be distributed theatrically) might really know something more about cinema than the casual moviegoer who is limited to the offerings of the local multiplex? By that I don’t mean knowing which movies are good and which ones are bad, but rather knowing how to read a film, in the way that one knows how to read a book. And is it going too far to suggest that intelligent criticism can help to foster that literacy, and that for this very reason criticism is still something vital and necessary? It’s easy to leap to conclusions, of course — that we’re living in pervasively anti-intellectual times, or that people (to quote one colleague’s recent deduction) “are just plain stupid.” I for one continue to hold ?out hope that's not the case, which is easier on some days (like the ones where you receive an e-mail or a phone call from that one person who saw that one movie they would never have seen otherwise on account of something you said or wrote) than on others. If Dick Cook saves Hollywood, who is going to save?the audience?