Movie critics - Endangered Species

This not a blog I particularly looked forward to posting. Both at McGill and with my-pov.ca, I swore to myself I would focus exclusively on celebrating movies and what makes us love our movies, still the greatest bang-for-our-buck. They buffet our emotions, mold our outlook and leave us enthralled.

However three separate emails to me, each disparaging recent ‘Your movie sucks’ reviews in the Gazette, drags me reluctantly into contextualizing movie reviewing into a North American context. A glut of movie critic firings and layoffs at The Village Voice, Newsday, Newsweek, Denver, Tampa, Fort Lauderdale are making movie reviewers an endangered species as newspapers slide into oblivion, revenues declining, under pressure from Web alternatives.

Roger Ebert despaired. ‘ We are being trained not to think. It is not about the disappearance of film critics. We are the canaries. It is about the death of an intelligent and curious, readership, interested in significant things and able to think critically. It is about the failure of our educational system. It is not about dumbing-down. It is about snuffing out. The news is still big. It’s the newspapers that got small.’

Ah! Gloria Swanson! Where is she now?

At http://blogs.sltrib.com/movies/labels/disappearing%20critics.htm, is a list of 49 movie critics who have disappeared. It feels like a conspiracy. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper is only a virtual reality. The Detroit Free Press is the biggest newspaper to expunge its film critics entirely, borrowing movie copy they don’t have to pay for out of payroll.

The Montreal Gazette may be the next in line. It wants the contractual freedom to do like the Detroit Free Press. Layoffs and buyouts are every Gazette journalist’s daily nightmare-of-life. The parent company, Canwest Publishing Inc. wants to centralize its operations, allowing it to outsource movie reviewing. And no doubt, pick up syndicated fanboy items. As a consequence, Gazette staffers, such as John Griffin, no longer appear to have much of a future. Not only is the job security of Gazette writers at high risk, but also for readers like us, it’s greatly minimizing future of local reviewing and reporting. Indeed, the National Post and Global Television – other deep-in-debt Canwest enterprises – also seem to be facing a haunting, bleak future themselves.

Movie reviewers, even in the best of times, have always been under pressure by editors, by distributors, to provide suck-up dumbassery fawning verbiage, designed to attract distributor advertising, invite junkets to exotic locations. How indeed any critic decides what he likes more than another, when and where to ladle cutline praise has always been a mystery to me. But that's beside the point. Different folk like different movies and most don't need nobheads telling us what is good.

That being said, for our kinds of movies – non-Hollywood, foreign, small - critical accolades mean the difference between their relevance and obscurity, their box office success or failure. Critics who provide well-rounded information with an opinion attached, make the difference. Otherwise small movies would never be found. The Lives of Others found its audience only after being championed by critics. One Week, a small Canadian movie opened strong, thanks to John Griffin’s ***** review. The extinction of reviewers is sure to have profound repercussions. Who’s gonna championing the movies, lacking crowd-pleasing content or marketing muscle their way into public consciousness?

It is for precisely this reason I set up my-pov.ca. Over our lifetimes, movie reviewing has mutated several times. In the 50s, spurred on by Le Cahiers du Cinema, it became grunge beat intellectual. In the 60s, Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael made it celebrity-glossy. In the 80s, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert took it to TV. Now the Internet generation is democratizing it, pretty much anyone with a website, now an arbiter of taste. So the movie scourge is not going away, just disappearing from our newspapers, and reincarnating onto digital platforms.

And yet, if Canwest management has its way, I sense a dire abyss in front of us: without local beat reporters (love ‘em or hate ‘em), the Gazette will inevitably bypass indigenous movies, ignore local festivals, personalities, tastes and concerns. Great movies live and die by erudite film critics getting behind them. People aren’t going to go to movies, because of some joker like me, blogging the Internet. They are capable of calibrating their opinions against the aesthetics of John Griffin, Brendan Kelly, Bill Brownstein. We'll miss them when they're gone.