Dawn of the Movie Critic
Roger Ebert’s post on the death of movie criticism links the changes on modern journalism with the obsession on celebrity gossip. Editors wants fast, easy stories on the hot couples in the global spotlight, they don’t need proper criticism, they are afraid of long articles. This is happening, but it is probably not the reason why real movie criticism is being shunned by general media.
The rise of the Internet and the decline is newspapers and magazines sales have sent most of the newspapers’ editors in a state of complete panic. They cut jobs and try any gimmick trying to win a fight they already lost. In a very near future, print will exist in a small niche, for speciality stuff, for deluxe magazines. Devices like the Amazon Kindle will make sure that people will have their news fix on the go. There will be more content than before, not less. Movie criticisms is not going to die, but it’s going to change radically.
The amount of commentary on anything at all is at an all-time high. And if it’s always refreshing to read some prominent movie critic, it’s also true that the majority of professional critics are not more skilled or interesting to read than some of the top reviewers on Amazon.com. This doesn’t mean that there is no difference between professional critics and amateurs, but the gap is closing: amateurs can get an extraordinary amount of feedback from strangers, tweak their style, develop their tastes, and do so as part of a community.
We will have an overabundance of thoughtful movie criticism. The real problem is that most people won’t see it because they will need to look for it in order to find it: websites will arguably be more specialized than newspaper, and it will be probably more difficult for someone who’s not interested in the subject to accidentally discover a review of an obscure movie.
Most of these “new critics” won’t be paid for their writing, or at least won’t be paid enough to make a living out of this job alone. This means we will have less people able to check out more than a couple of festivals or premieres, and this could limit their knowledge of what’s going on in the movie world. But the movie world is changing: digital delivery is more and more of a reality, and we are probably heading to a new era were indie movies will be available to the general public on the opening day through means other than theatrical distribution. Critics could receive advance, copy protected copies of movies to review before their release date.
It’s significant that a name of Ebert’s calibre is writing this kind of elegy, because what we will probably not see anymore is a critic of his importance and impact on popular culture. Ebert will probably be one of the last critics of his kind (last one in Italy: Morando Morandini, likely), the future will likely not see “star critics” as much as a network of critics that, together, will manage to give a broad view of what’s going on. They will have to cooperate, share, confront their ideas more often. It’s going to be diverse, and global. It’s probably not going to be a tragedy.
The whole movie business is changing, and celebrity gossip alone is not killing criticism. Now that critics have lost their privileged speaker podium, is time to get creative in order to affect popular culture again. It won’t be easy, but it could be interesting.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011 at 4:39 am
That’s way more clever than I was exepctgin. Thanks!