The Dismantled: Film Critics Get the Axe

[tenia]

I really prefer the : "Criterion also rarely ventures beyond Japan, France, and Italy when it releases a non-English-language movie. This means that the Criterion Collection is hardly as representative of the “best” of world cinema as it claims."

[cdnchris]

Didn't see this anywhere else:
At The Movies will be gone in August

[domino harvey]

http://www.criterionforum.org/forum/vie ... &start=400" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Perkins Cobb]

Why the hell would anyone interview Feng about any topic in life? His responses are almost as bad a Armond White reviews. Just this answer gave me nausea:

Do you distinguish “high art” films from low-brow, pop culture films?

No. This is actually a very dangerous and simple-minded distinction. “High art” can be suffocating, boring, stilted, pretentious, and racist/sexist/biased without the artist consciously intending it. Studying “low art” can be very revelatory because we can see what the majority of people in a given time liked to enjoy when they had free time. This provides insights into how people of an era perceived themselves and the world.

it really is like something you'd hear two college freshmen discussing over gratuitously priced coffee in a random American campus town - loudly and with such conviction you can only laugh at their simplistic naivete bolstered by such sincere self satisfaction that they are just soooooooo smart to have figured that out. it's, like, so deep brah.

I also hear two of the guys from Cinemania having this conversation every time they both turn up at the same screening.

[MichaelB]

This was pretty much the entire philosophical rationale behind Toby Young's film criticism when he edited the long-defunct Modern Review and was briefly the Guardian's film critic - a truly ghastly time for anyone in independent film distribution and exhibition.

In fact, because I knew that the paper's then editor Peter Preston knew his films, I wrote him a polite letter explaining that while having an Armond White-style controversialist like Young as his lead film critic might do wonders for the paper's profile, his deliberate sidelining of more adventurous cinema was having a measurable impact on their box office - given their tiny marketing budgets, getting sympathetic coverage in papers like the Guardian was an absolutely crucial part of their overall PR strategy.

Preston never replied, but Young was let go not long afterwards, and I'd like to think I had something to do with it - though I'd be astonished if I was the only person to complain about him.