Film Criticism

[Finch]

Won't Kickstarter claw the money back for you? I never pledged to any campaign.

[jazzo]

Unfortunately, no. From the comments, some have reported the issue and tried, but were unsuccessful.

Every campaign has a disclaimer that you’re pledging at your own risk. I’ve just only been part of ones that were either fulfilled without issue or never materialized at all and they were just a loss, but never one where a product was produced, distributed to two-thirds of the backers, but then scrapped for the last third, only to be sold for profit on another platform.

[DeprongMori]

I hope you get it. The advance passages and interviews he released during the campaign were incredibly well done, especially the more recent, deeply moving Milch interview.

I just wish he was a bit more honourable. If he’s filling new book orders from Kickstarter stock, that’s just shitty. If, for whatever reason, he isn’t in the financial position to fulfill 400 orders already paid for, communication of that would go a long way with backers.

That’s a shame he didn’t come through for a number of backers. I was fine with the delay given the circumstances in his life, and once the book was completed I got my copy with the bonus items pretty promptly. I wasn’t aware others got burned.

[domino harvey]

This passage from Peter Armitage’s 1961 article “the War of the Cults” (tracking nascent film criticism periodicals) in Motion quite struck me

[Matt]

There's a terribly cruel irony in this: Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote a piece for a monthly column in the Chicago Reader called "Moving Places: Does Film Criticism Still Exist?" only to be told that they weren't going to run it or any future columns from him.

The following was written as my second planned monthly column for the Chicago Reader, after the first of these ran in their March issue. The paper decided it wasn’t currently equipped to handle editing articles by freelancers so they paid me for this piece but decided not to run it or to run any future columns of mine, at least for the time being. They also emphasized that they would be open to future “pitches” of mine, assuming that I would want to offer any.

[Walter Kurtz]

1. The Reader kicks a guy in the teeth who wrote for them for over 20-some years?
2. One of the very few watchable English-language films released in 2025 (The Mastermind) can't get a decent USA distributed blu-ray release?

Predictions:

3. Famines, plagues, disasters... and then a dozen fiery angels lighting up the nighttime sky.

[hearthesilence]

The Reader has been undergoing major changes so I guess this may be a byproduct of that. They switched their publication to a monthly basis beginning THIS month, and I imagine things are still settling over there. It's a non-profit now so it's probably an even more scrappier operation than usual. Still sucks for Rosenbaum but it's not exactly a great time to have your income tied to the newspaper business. (I mean, it wasn't really "great" before, but now it's even worse.)

[hearthesilence]

Make some money helping Jonathan Rosenbaum:

For the past eighteen years, ever since I retired from my post as the main film critic for the Chicago Reader, this web site, jonathanrosenbaum.net, has been offering free access to most of my writings from the last half-century, receiving close to a thousand visits from readers around the globe every day. To keep it going and myself going as well, expanding its offerings in the process as a Substack resource, I find I need to monetize it, and for this I need help, expertise, and online savvy.

For anyone willing and able to help me make this transition and profit from it, I can offer a revenue share as 20% of the first years’ profit, or if you’d like to help build this publication together, or think you might be, email me your thoughts about how you’d like to partner in this venture. We can take things from there and I look forward to hearing your thoughts about this. jrosenbaum2002 AT yahoo DOT com

[diamonds]

2017:

Criticism is different, too. […] One of the advantages is that people aren’t paid to be film critics now so much. A lot of people think that this is a disaster, but you could argue that it’s good, because, if people really care about film and writing about film, it’s because they care about it and not because they expect to be paid for it. So, in a way, it purifies professional criticism.

2024:

I mentioned this in another interview, but A.S. Hamrah said in an otherwise favorable review of one of my more recent books that I really don't deal sufficiently with the fact that it’s no longer possible to make a living being a film critic, or that it's much harder nowadays. And I really think that that’s good rather than bad because it means that the people who do it, do it because they love it, not because they're trying to make a career out of it. I mean, I like getting paid sometimes for what I do, but it’s not always obligatory. If I care enough about something, I won’t demand payment.

A bit amusing to see Rosenbaum now throwing around words like "monetize" and "profit." I guess the love of the game only goes so far. (I hasten to add that I would hate to lose his website and sincerely hope he can indeed keep it going.)