ATC Topic Class: "Movie critics: Shut up already!"

If you want to see the full article, it's here 

Is criticism dying? Maybe, sort of. OK, yes. Nobody cares! Write about movies, instead of your wounded pride

... If film criticism really is dying, it's doing so with all the dignity of a bunch of clucking old hens, squawking in despair while the fox gnaws his way through the wire. I myself have participated in three panel discussions in the last three years about the dire plight of people who get paid to write about movies other people make -- attended primarily if not exclusively by other critics or aspiring critics -- and there must have been dozens more. No self-respecting film festival, it seems, is complete without one.

This meme has been growing in intensity (and tiresomeness) for four or five years, ever since it became clear that new forms of media were eating away the business model of print journalism and that the elite cadre of professional cultural critics was being swamped by the blogulous hordes of InterTwitterMcGoogleyness. Do I really have to keep writing this paragraph of background explanation? I didn't think so. Thanks! (Salt Lake Tribune blogger Sean P. Means maintains an online list of downsized film critics that now includes 65 names.)...

At the very beginning of my writing career, I learned one thing: Film criticism is a kind of performance, an adjunct form of entertainment. If it isn't funny and lively and engaging, it isn't anything at all. My first gig was writing brief reviews for a community newspaper in San Francisco, spending my own money to attend matinees and then writing them up. The rules were simple: If the publisher of the paper -- a gay businessman in his 50s whom I never met in person -- thought my reviews were funny, they'd get published. (And I'd get paid: $25 per movie.)

Let me make clear that I would agree with virtually any theoretical argument that a defender of old-school film criticism could make. Critics should be educated about the wider world, should know a lot of film history and a little film theory, should be more concerned with the "whys" and "hows" of a movie than with the "whats," should seek to spark debates and disputes and challenge the audience's preconceptions. Check, check and check. Sign me up. But reviewing movies is a lot more like performing stand-up comedy than like delivering a philosophy lecture. None of those grand ideas even begin to matter if you're boring and you can't write.