Movie News
The Death of the Print Critic
Posted by Kevin Carr (kevin@filmschoolrejects.com) on April 7, 2008
It’s official. The print film critic is dead. It has to be true because I read about it in Variety, or rather ironically so, on their web site.
Of course what Variety’s Anne Thompson doesn’t point out is that this has been a long time coming. In fact, some may argue that the print film critic has been dead for years, just no one has acknowledged it yet.
Over the past few months, dozens of critics from major outlets have retired or been let go. This happens largely because they can’t justify their own salaries, not when people can read 300 reviews for the same movie indexed through RottenTomatoes.com for free.
What I find hilarious about this tide of events is that Thompson is bemoaning the fact that the respectable newspaper critics can no longer push movies like Citizen Kane, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Psycho to success. (She seemed to miss the fact that these movies’ successes were from being damn good films.)
Another huge goof on Thompson’s part is to insinuate that great independent films won’t receive attention without the local print critics’ attention. This shows colossal ignorance to how films are made and marketed today. Last time I checked, the internet was the home of independent film.
In fact, internet critics have more power in getting the word out for a quality independent film than anyone else on the planet. Ever hear of this little movie called Juno? FSR’s own Neil Miller was quoted on the Fox Searchlight page for this one.
Like the dinosaur anchors on the nightly news who aren’t respected like Walter Cronkite was, print critics are whining about how no one respects their expertise and opinion. The reality is that it is their egos and pompous nature, their ability to overanalyze the cinematic and cultural significance of film that makes them out of touch with the viewing public, and the print critics are feeling it hard.
As long as there are newspapers and magazines in this world, they will run film reviews. But much of these will come from wire services and syndication. Of course, one of these days, these print outlets might just start contracting with a large review indexing site like RottenTomatoes.com to reprint their reviews. That day is probably not that far off.
After all, I can’t count how many times I hear or read someone reference RottenTomatoes as a source for online reviews. On the flip side, I can’t remember the last time I spoke with someone in town who casually reads, let alone seeks out, the opinion of our local paper’s film critic.
While web sites like Film School Rejects receive a certain amount of random traffic from odd search strings, the vast majority of our readers are not like that of a print outlet. People look at newspapers for everything from politics to gardening. Hell, some read them for the comics alone.
Film web sites exist to be about movies…. reviews, interviews, commentary, news. I doubt people looking for a better way to rid their lawn of crab grass are going to even bother with our site. That is what makes online sources for movie reviews so powerful. For example, I would bet that more people read uber-critic Roger Ebert’s reviews on RogerEbert.com than even pick up a copy of the Chicago sun Times.
The internet is not ideal for everything, but it is ideal for movie reviews. And it’s that way for two main reasons: currency and relevancy.
Hollywood will withhold screenings of movies from print critics, and they won’t be able to run a review until the Monday following the release, if at all. However, an internet critic like myself can see the film at its first showing on Friday morning (in the Eastern time zone, no less) and have the review live on the web and indexed through RottenTomatoes before anyone sees it in Los Angeles. That’s currency’s real power. And it scares the crap out of Hollywood.
Relevancy is also critical. Say you read a review in your local paper for Iron Man. You might be able to remember what the guy said about similar movies like Spider-Man and Batman Begins, but unless you are a constant reader of his work, you don’t know what he thinks about other films that you like.
The internet critic is a different story. When you read my review of Iron Man, you can index all of my reviews, relevant or not. You find out what I thought of Superman Returns, or you can see what I thought of the director’s other works, like Zathura. And even if an internet writer’s reviews aren’t all indexed on one site, a simple Google search can get that information in seconds.
It’s not that people don’t want film expertise. They just don’t want stuffy old farts telling us that we’re stupid for liking popcorn movies. In this day and age, anyone with an internet connection and a blogspot account can be a film critic, and that’s actually a good thing. That’s why we, who haven’t been properly educated in film like the dinosaurs that are drowning in the tar pits of the big dailies, are reaching an audience. We’re just a bunch of average folks who love movies and like to talk about them to anyone who will read us…
…which appears to be quite a lot of people.
Read more articles by Kevin Carr
14 Comments
April 7th, 2008 at 11:21 am
The web gives exposure to those like me with Film and Digital Media degrees. I’m not a dinosaur, more like a tiny salamander running around the whole video store. In college, I butted heads with Film snobs who hated Quentin Tarantino. I also laughed at the other students in my class who snickered when my film professor said film theory can be applied to movies as mainstream as Speed.
April 7th, 2008 at 11:51 am
Movie reviews and Film criticism are very different things. What many regular people do on blogs or sites like this one are movie reviews (even on newspapers), not film criticism (and you don’t state otherwise in your site, that’s honest).
On the other hand…
It’s not overanalyzing film, like you say, it’s just that film is a more complex medium (an art form) that can be analyzed from multiple perspectives (psychology, cognitive science, philosophy, narrative theory, etc.)
And I know that’s not what your readers want, but that doesn’t mean that when you bring all these disciplines to discussion movies are overanalyzed. That’s very naive and just hint that you merely know film as an art form.
I’m not arguing about the power of Internet in the movie industry. Obviously sites like this one have a solid impact on regular moviegoers, but again, that doesn’t mean that you should understimate real film criticism (which you will rarely find in regular blogs or those newspapers you talk about).
Respect the fact that your audience is one, and the audience of film criticism is another. As simple as that.
And I say this because saying “overanalyzing film” it’s a pretty big statement. You should have some pretty solid arguments to debate that, and by the way you write, it seems that you barely have them.
Just because you have adquired a reputation as a site, and it’s a respected one as far as I know, doesn’t mean that you should be arrogant and a smartass. Don’t let the many hits per day that you receive on your site get over your head.
Cinema is a much bigger field than you think. News and opinion sites like this one are merely a part of it.
April 7th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
@Jacobson17
I agree with you on the fact that there is a clear difference between Film Criticism and Movie Reviews. You are absolutely right, people don’t come to Film School Rejects to get analyzations that delve into things like narrative theory or the psychology of film (or at least I hope they don’t, because they have been led astray), the come here to be entertained with some clever color commentary. As well, they come here to see the opinions of people just like them. So in that sense, there is a place for websites like ours. I think that we would both agree on that.
I would also say that the beauty of the internet is that film criticism, will still survive. There are plenty of writers out there on the web who I would consider to be film critics. I have a feeling that the audiences of the old school newspaper critics will eventually migrate online and find the voices that appeal to them.
As for Kevin’s remarks about critics that “overanalyze film”, that is just one man’s perspective. Personally, I believe that you are right, we all represent different parts of cinema. That is, in essence, the beauty of it all, there is so much that can be taken in. You can be reading Kevin Carr’s outlandish, down-to-earth (and sometimes a little arrogant) rants one moment and be taking in the insights of the Emanuel Levys and the Jules Brenners of the world in the next moment. In this vast seas of the internet, I think that there is certainly room for everyone.
In regards to the “Death of the Print Critic”, I would say that it is more the death of a medium (newspapers) that we should be eyeing. Just as email has taken a bite out of snail mail, the internet will eventually (if it has not already) overtake traditional methods of journalism. The interesting this for me, is to see how both the Studios and the journalists themselves adapt to this new medium. One thing I can tell you is that studios in Hollywood still carry around with them the mindset that websites like ours are unworthy, that we lack influence and that a reporter from a newspaper with 250k readers per month is more important than one of us, a reporter from a website with 2 million readers per month. There are some studios that have begun to come around and embrace these changes, but others are way behind the curve. I will be interested to see how this ever-present shift impacts the way internet outlets are treated.
Alright, I’m done.
April 7th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
@Neil Miller
I totally agree with you. Hollywood studios should embrace the fact that sites like yours
have influence on moviegoers.
I’m able to see it, even if I don’t agree with some of your opinions, and I agree also that
that’s one of the beauties of Internet: diversity. There’s room for eveyone.
Maybe Kevin was a little bit too passionate in his article (i.e. using the word ‘dinosaur’).
And to the comment by Kevin Gustafson:
That’s one of the things that’s absolutely fascinating to me: film theory can be applied to
an art-house film, auteur film, etc. as well as a mainstream movie (i.e. Pirates of the
caribbean, Transformers, etc.)
Just because they’re considered “pop-corn movies” doesn’t mean that film academic
studies can not be applied to them. In fact, many film scholars analyze and disect them
to see, for example, how film technique is applied today and how differs from classical
american cinema or, for instance, study frame composition, rate of cutting, etc.
April 7th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
@ Jacobson17
Kevin is a little too passionate with a lot of things… That is what makes him effective to a certain extent. :)
April 7th, 2008 at 2:16 pm
The average moviegoer isn’t going to care about academic topics. You can still talk about how entertaining it was by using words they can understand and will read. For instance I could I could go the film professor route talking about No Country For Old Men.
I could say how the deputy murder scene revealed the inner madness of the Anton Chigurh character. The scratches on the floor recall German Expressionist works like M where the characters perspective was depicted in the mise-en-scene. But, when writing a review, I’d say instead that the scratches make Chigurh’s strangling more violent and I’m convinced Javier Bardem is psycho. Aha, Joe Blow gets it.
I hope to pull off reviews like Roger Ebert. He writes reviews that slip in a bit of film history and theory, but analysis is never the main thrust. In my opinion, he’s entertainment first, importance second. His books and college lectures are different. I don’t think Kevin Carr was really ranting about film analysis. He was more like highlighting the differences.
April 7th, 2008 at 2:16 pm
He does get a rise out of people. Good for discussion.
April 7th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
Over here in Greece, a country with a great deal of printed-press for its small market, print critics are read and quoted a lot still, no matter how many people write about movies in the internet. People spend a lot of time in coffee shops and means of transportation so they read a lot of newpapers. I work for an internet variety-website but i would like to get printed at some point. It’s a different medium and it can’t really die.
April 7th, 2008 at 4:37 pm
Newspapers will die.
Perhaps I’m a bit on the extreme side of things, in a fun Kurzweilian way, but newspapers haven’t always existed, and they won’t always exist. The internet hasn’t even begun to flourish to its potential, and when it does, and when it is proliferated as a true majority in the global fashion, print outlets will die.
They will die because there will be no money to be made.
This isn’t a sad thing - or at least it’s only about as sad as someone’s grandfather wishing people would write more letters. It’s nostalgic and should be memorialized in a history museum, but as we slowly make our decent into evolving into half-human, half-machine creatures, we’ll need to slough off the old trappings of culture like newspapers and mail.
What will really blow your mind is the day when e-mail becomes obsolete. And it will come. Hide your books away now, neo-luddites, because the end is near.
April 7th, 2008 at 5:36 pm
Nice analogy on letter writing!
April 8th, 2008 at 2:04 am
I think there is a possibility (which is already showing up) that as more and more and more people write around the internet, less and less are going to be read and that is the same as not existing. Besides, the internet if full of browsers but very few readers in analogy. Even if print press dies (which is a long way internationally), the big media establishments will take back a large portion of the public which is getting tired from all the noise and the overflowing “original” content.
You google a news story and you get the same associated press piece over and over again, in different peoples websites. Eventually you smell the coffee and go straight to associated press. I heard people who search around the web a lot for their work talk about a google button that excludes blogs from the search because of the useless material.
Of course i might be just deluding myself, since i’m running a pdf magazine that aspires to get printed soon…
April 9th, 2008 at 5:27 pm
Congrats, FSR, for posting the first contrarian blog applauding the demise of the print critic.
I think Neil has a lot of good points about why this is happening - namely, that print media is dying out, and even that in the near future many more print critics may migrate to the Internet.
But I think too many people are getting caught up debating the merits of print vs. online, the distribution of film criticism. (Or movie reviews, however you think of it.) My main concern in all of this is that it’s not just PRINT critics that are losing jobs because they’re less important to consumers, but it’s criticism in general that is becoming less and less important to movie goers. Yes, perhaps the average member of the public doesn’t care to know or realize or think about the things that make movies fascinating (like a handful of topics within No Country alone). Maybe people just want to know if they should spend $10 to see The Ruins. Either way, it seems people care less about discussing a movie as art/culture/thought provoker than they used to. And that’s what troubles me the most.
Not to mention it’s a tricky thing to underestimate the intelligence and knowledge of your own reader. I’d be offended. And personally, I’d rather read the work of someone I know is a good writer and knows his/her shit than “anyone with an internet connection and a blogspot account.”
April 14th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
The emergence of something new always rankles.
When man invented the wheel I suspect many early men grumbled that the ones using the wheel were taking the easy way out in getting to the next Mammoth hunt.
Movies were supposed to kill off live theater.
Television was supposed to kill off movies.
Cable television was supposed to be the death knell to the networks.
There is room for the film sites and room for print film critics.
Film is an art form and there are many of us who are hopelessly addicted to it and
feel the need to share our views.
Think of it as therapy for an addiction we don’t want to be cured of.
It’s not bad for movie goers to have so many opinions that their heads are spinning when they finally choose a film to see.
Maybe they’ll want to see more than one.
April 20th, 2008 at 11:36 am
Awesome Job, other Kevin. This article is showing up on Google a lot. It’s higher when you type my name, of course. Ok, I’m dreaming.