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• 6/9/2008 6:12 PM Peter Grayson wrote:
  I had this book at the top of my wishlist and it looks like my daughter bought it for me for father's day. Looking forward to reading it. I just got done reading Ghosts in the Machine, which also coincided with Glenn Kenney's comments about what you had said previously. I find the whole thing ridiculous, as if you yourself were now responsible for people losing their jobs. Some people's sense of entitlement never ceases to amaze me.
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  1. 6/9/2008 10:02 PM Michael Atkinson wrote:
     Thanks, man, and you're very right.
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• 6/9/2008 10:40 PM Glenn Kenny wrote:
  "Very right," huh? You might want to check out my now-polluted comments thread to see how right he is. Jesus.
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  1. 6/10/2008 10:50 AM Michael Atkinson wrote:
     I did, Glenn. Polluted is the word.
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• 6/10/2008 12:09 PM John wrote:
  I have no bias toward either you or Mr. Kenny but I would like to know what great works you are undertaking besides doing exactly what it is you claim to think is expendable. Just because you are no longer a staff critic doesn't exempt your work from being considered expendable by the large corporations controlling the media in this country. Do you truly believe that after all the staff positions are wiped out that the freelancers will be spared? Instead of encouraging the demise of your art form maybe you should do as Glenn does and champion it, lest we be reduced to getting our criticism from frat boys and old folks on youtube.
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  1. 6/10/2008 7:07 PM Michael Atkinson wrote:
     I've been trying to stay away from this small-pond-spiteful-fish hullabaloo, but the presumptions behind your comment is idiotic. Who are you to tell me what I should do with my career? I'll go to law school if I want, and I don't have to justify it to you. What's more, I can continue being a critic, and pay my bills the best I can, and I don't have to justify that to you, either.
     I'm not "encouraging" anything -- you think it was a secret to the media corporations that film critics (unless they're also editors, etc.) are merely staff writers who file once a week? And I never said film critics should be expendable, or the freelancers aren't also expendable; you're having a conversation in your own head. I was just stating the obvious; you meatheads are acting like I invented the problem. And the real problem is, not enough readers and business owners care about film reviewing enough to keep it alive in the manner it's used to. Maybe they're getting dumber, maybe they read more online, but either way it's happening. Nut up, son.
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• 6/11/2008 12:21 AM Todd wrote:
  As a full time film critic, I can personally attest to the vast amount of time devoted to doing this job, which seldom if ever fits remotely within the confines of a 40-hour work week, much less 10 to 12. In addition to seeing the films (there's the 10-12 you're referring to), I have to write the reviews, prepare, attend, conduct, transcribe, and edit interviews, write news stories, prepare features, coordinate future content for news articles, interviews, and reviews, and publish my site. If your job as a critic is limited to seeing one or two movies a week and then writing up capsule reviews, then rest assured I am envious of your abundance of free time, but at least recognize that the problem readers (much less critics) have with your comments isn't that you have sadly validated the opinions of the folks doing the firings/layoffs, but that you disrespect your profession, your own work, and the dedicated efforts of an entire group of people doing (or at least trying to do) the same thing.
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  1. 6/11/2008 8:41 AM Michael Atkinson wrote:
     Fine -- but the discussion began considering Ansen and the like, the old breed, and responsibilities therein are not as expansive as yours. The New Times critics, one of whom I was briefly, review two, maybe three movies a week each, period. Daily newspaper critics do the same (unless they're also the editors, like you). The staff critics for regional glossies and alt papers all do the same. It's a busy freelancer's dream job. What you describe is a combo critic/journalist/editor, which is becoming more common and God knows warrants a respectable paycheck.
     Not that I don't think -- I'll say yet again -- that film criticism should in an ideal world be everywhere, or at least as ubiquitous and prized as it was in 1972.  Film critics -- the ones that can write interesting copy and know their medium -- should be hallowed figures, as they once were. (Actually, in some senses, they still are, as this entire debate demonstrates, but the renumeration just isn't there.) But we don't live in an ideal world. Nor do we live in a world where the editors of publications are unaware of how much work film critics actually do (Pauline Kael never freelanced, and never had to), and are therefore giving them compounded duties. I didn't invent the bottom line, nor am I responsible for "validating" it. Disrespecting? I've been evangelizing for the serious art of film criticism for years, exactly in an effort to stem the tide of disinterest in it demonstrated by the wider public and by corporate boards. But if the pubs are handing out retirement packages to clear their rosters of file-one-column-a-week critics, I can't tell them from a practical perspective that they're wrong. From a cultural perspective, it's disastrous (most of the time), but why on Earth would any of you guys think that matters to the accountants? This is the world we live in, where knowledge and ardor for Mizoguchi and Sam Fuller doesn't count for a subway token. All this for-us-or-agin-us partisan cant is soundly vaguely Bushian, or even Wilsonian to me. The best we can do is make ourselves invaluable again -- but you're battling not only the media heads but an over-advertised mass consumership, 98% of whom care nothing about the movies a good critic would champion. Suffice it to say that we're in a painful transitional moment, and the future is dark.
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• 6/11/2008 7:25 AM John wrote:
  Ok. I think that first of all your insults are pretty much childish and out of line. I present questions to you as an admirer of your work and of your profession and you resort to basic name calling. I am not Glenn Kenny and I am not a regular poster on his site. Further more I think there are some very fine critics who have agreed with Glenn who would take exception at being called "meatheads". That's great if you want to go law school or whatever else you want to do but that doesn't change the fact that your initial comments that started this whole conversation were flip and fairly unsympathetic to the profession you've called your own for many years. Of course, just like any film worth its salt, there can and should be differing positions on this topic. But what do I know, I'm just an idiotic meathead who you know nothing about.
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  1. 6/11/2008 8:58 AM Michael Atkinson wrote:
     I hate being accused of tossing comment-thread insults (except when it's a political discussion), so I'll apologize, but your barely disguised sarcasm re: "what great works" etc. ticked my clock. That was personal. So have been many of the comments posted around (not here), and I was reacting to them as well, which might not've been fair -- but then again, I reply to comments for everyone to read, not just the initial commentator.
     I don't think my initial comments were flip, and I didn't intend them to be unsympathetic; in any case, the tenor of your reaction now again has a partisanal close-mindedness to it that suggests that in order for me to be on the "right side," I have to watch the tone and thrust of what I write on my own blog, or else every film writer and wannabe is gonna come and get me? To hell with that. Or am I grouping you in with the band of brothers on Glenn's comment page? In any case, the whole discussion has a desperate air to it I don't like -- all of the harried, hyperbolic, furious objections to my post, beginning with Glenn's, have potentially done the entity of film crit more harm, by making its readers and practitioners look like backbiting drowners trying to hold on to a Titanic lifeboat.
     Yet, of course, it's understandable, given the state of things.
     But what's the future? You may well be right re: "old folks on YouTube": we may be heading toward a mediascape with one universally syndicated, marketing-controlled critic, and a vast Internet terrain of alternative voices, most or all unpaid. As Matt Zeitz said recently, it may become a devotion, rather than a profession. What'll happen will happen irrelevant of what I, or any of us individually, say.  
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• 6/11/2008 9:33 AM Glenn Kenny wrote:
  I myself would be the last person on earth to ever suggest you "watch the tone and thrust" of anything you write, on a blog or anywhere else. But do you actually think I posted what I did in order to "get" you? Or that nobody would take the slightest issue with what you said, merely take note and summarily "nut up"?
  
  I know that the tone of the comments thread on my post would have been entirely different had it not been derailed by the troublesome and likely fictitious Mr. Grayson—but "band of brothers"? Really? There are quite a few among them who express admiration for your work while taking issue with certain of your points.
  
  I always got a kick out of the passage in the introduction of Sarris' "The American Cinema" wherein he recounts receiving a letter from a Polish film writer that opened, "Let us polemicize." It's something that sometimes sticks in the back of my mind when I blog. But creating factions is—again—the last thing I'm interested in doing.
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  1. 6/11/2008 10:41 AM Michael Atkinson wrote:
     Fair enough. (And I didn't think "band of brothers" was a very savage dig.)  I'm not surprised or disturbed by anyone taking issue with what I write, when it's a matter of opinion. I was just mentioning obvious facts, insofar as I did not take into consideration critics/journalists/editors like you, or freelancers, like myself. It's been the reality that most daily paper/weekly mag staff critics get paid for the amount of copy a freelancer would have to rap out five times a week to survive. That's why everyone wants those jobs, and why they're disappearing. It's a hard business for most of us, and bound to get harder. That's all.
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  2. 6/12/2008 6:14 PM Peter Grayson wrote:
     I am actually a real person, Mr. Kenney, regardless of what you and some of your commenters think. I am not a character from an obscure self-published book, and I am not Jon Jost. Like I said, I work in Immigration, I live in Laguna Niguel, California, and I even have a real phone number 858 200 0202 that makes my phone ring, which causes me to pick it up and speak in my own voice. I'm sorry I caused such consternation on your site, and I said I wouldn't be coming back, but I can't help but think how pathetic this all is. Mr. Atkinson said something that I thought was dead on, and being a fan of his work, I thought people, including you, were attacking him for ridiculous, self-serving reasons, most of which I mentioned in some of my comments. In other words, I was defending Mr. Atkinson's opinion, an opinion I believe is still very strong. But to imply that I am some figment of someone else's imagination strikes me as very irrational. Do you say that about everyone who doesn't agree with you? That seems about as childish as my cackling, which I thought was rather apropos considering that it was the first time I had ever really expressed myself on the internet in such a way, and I found it to be both liberating and ridiculous, hence the denotation of how funny I thought it was. Anyway, I am very shocked to find out that even though I am currently sitting behind the same desk I've been sitting behind for the last thirty-odd years, that I am somehow nothing more than a character created by an author I've never heard of, of better yet, the alter-ego of a filmmaker whose work I have never seen. Thank you for pointing this out to me. However, if you do happen to even be near 24000 Avila Rd in Laguna Niguel, please don't hesitate to pop in, say hello, and see for your own eyes that I am indeed an actual, physical manifestation of a man whose name is Peter Grayson.
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• 6/11/2008 10:05 AM John wrote:
  You have some great points there. This whole thing is a bit inside baseball. I think my strong reacations and possibly hostile tone can be attributed to fear. For readers and amateurs like myself that are geographicly isolated in the "flyover", we're motivated by a fear of diminishing access to strong critical writing. If it were not for folks like you and Mr. Kenny (among many others) we wouldn't hear about these great films to pop into our netflix or greencine queue. The internet is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand it leads to situations like this one, which while entertaining for many are not very constructive in the long run. ON the other hand, projects like the new website for the Museum of the Moving Image bring hope to professionals and amateurs both that the great critical dialogue about all aspects of culture will continue unabated. Thanks for your honesty and I wish you good luck in all your future endevors.
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  1. 6/11/2008 10:43 AM Michael Atkinson wrote:
     Thanks, John.
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     1. 6/11/2008 11:12 AM Glenn Kenny wrote:
        I heartily and happily concur thank John as well. And Mr. A, if I'm in the neighborhood tonight, I'll stand you a round.
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• 6/11/2008 12:05 PM james keepnews wrote:
  always happy to come late to a bar fight! candidly, i did think mike's initial screed was harsh if painfully accurate about the state of professional film criticism in the early 21st -- he certainly didn't fall over himself to show sympathy to those who had recently lost employment as film critics. that said, i very much doubt any lecturing about the pain of film critics losing a paying gig need be directed towards a man still unable to place the words "village" and "voice" together in the same sentence.
  
  think how hard it's been just in the last few years for some of the critics like ansen; compare what he's been able to write about across a year in 2007 versus even 1987 and you see how considerably conditions have diminished generally on the cinema beat. and it's hardly as if it's only film critics getting the shaft; the whole journalistic enterprise is up for review by the bean counters. gawker's recent formulation in regards to sam zell's eviscerating an already pretty well picked-clean tribune corp. spells it out pricelessly: "LA Times Sunday Magazine May No Longer Contain Journalism".
  
  in any case, one never blames the canary for the mine collapse, and casting a cold eye on these woe betidings for the professional critical community -- if you think it's tough for film critics, think how bad it is for a book critic, or g-d forbid a dance critic writing for the major dailies/weeklies/monthlies/anylies -- is certainly not the same thing as supporting those betidings.
  
  so, the tough question now becomes vladimir illych's famous one: what is to be done? i agree with mike that we are in a transitional period, and i actually think good critics do deserve to make a decent living i would (and do, in my meager magazine buying way) happily subsidize. do i, plus a handful of cinephiles posting comments to blogs like this, have the wherewithal to build any kind of groundswell for good criticism, anywhere? if we build the online 21st century equivalent of cahiers or partisan review &c., &c. online, will anyone come? as pearl bailey (read: bill gunn) might have put it in the landlord, i'm not sitting on a hot stove waiting for it to happen...after us, the savage g-d, or transformers 2 with a vengeance cross-marketed by the new york times, which may amount to the same thing...
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  1. 6/11/2008 2:23 PM Michael Atkinson wrote:
     Thanks, Jim. Your groundswell point -- when the PTMNBN table was cleared, a bunch of us got together thinking about trying to launch a weekly that did it right, but we could never get it together... The possibility still haunts me.
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• 1/2/2009 7:16 PM Jon Jost wrote:
  Just to confirm Mr Grayson's comment - I am not Mr Grayson, and the writer who chose anonymity, apparent reader of that navel gazing avant film list FRAMEWORKS, is, oh my god, w-r-o-n-g- (doubtless again). Mr Grayson, should life find me in So Cal, I'll give a call and drop in.
  best
  jon jost
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