I’m inclined to agree with the “she/they” theory — I think Armond was itching to rant about the terrible “criticism” that goes on at AICN or by some of the jokers at Film Threat, and you inadvertently bore the brunt of it. To White, SpoutBlog is probably synonymous with those “Top Ten Cartoon Remakes by French Auteurs Not Named Michel” features you guys do.

And even if online film writing sucks by and large, I don’t think a reasonable person would select you, Karina Longworth, as the epitome of everything wrong with it. That’s like saying, “Television sucks…” (fair enough) “…just look at that show, Mad Men!” Probably best to use a better example.

Well said, zxcvb. You too, Karina. I think the ultimate lesson for myself in this case is: Don’t Live Tweet.

Situations like these are why we try not to get negative or snarky at Hammer to Nail. Even hints of that stuff gives me an icky feeling. Glad I’m not a gossip columnist.

Maybe he simply doesn’t care for your writing.

One’s professionalism is not determined by what “professional organizations” one belongs to, or whether one is covered by a dental plan.

It is determined by the work, by the writing, by the attention to craft and to the subject about which one writes. By that measure, of course Karina is a professional film journalist. End of debate.

Are you offended above all that someone would claim you’re “unpaid”? Do you really think that “being paid” gives better credentials to your job? Apparently that’s what Armond White implied… but is that the end all argument to figure out whether a critic is worthwhile? “Oh yeah! Someone is giving them money, so what they do must be worth more than someone who does the same thing pro bono”. (sarcastic impersonation) let alone that maybe people with money to spare want reviewers to be as populist as possible to increase readership, to push the movie business, to excite consumerism at all costs.
Incidentally it also implies that editors/employers have an economic incentive to promote “in-depth criticism”, which they don’t. Everybody in this niche knows better.

Salary argument dismissed. That’s what old “professional” unionized conservative film journalists (I can’t call them critics either) use to distanciate themselves from the new generation and the new internet paradigm. But bloggers need a more pertinent argument to defend themselves. Not the salary, not the circulation, not the instantaneity, not the anarchy… but insights, straight up critical skills.

It was pretty stupid for these “pros” to use blanket statements such as “bloggers” in an all-encompasing family, opposed to the (flawless?) family of paid journalists who never did anything wrong BECAUSE they get paid. Such vague generalisation is definitely un-professional.

Your mistake is the mentality believing that getting hired by a print magazine is the ultimate goal, and being a blogger is a “better than nothing” while you wait. The “profession” is sinking… why would you need to be considered a “professional”? You seriously misunderstand the long term electronic shift of all media, and you underestimate the intrinsic quality of being a blogger (precisely against everything professional journalist stands for today!)
But then again, if you’re a careerist, I understand you care more about money than about what some fools call “cinema” and “criticism”.

Capitalism, a love story!

@Jason and HarryTuttle: I’ve never thought it was a bad thing to try to make a living off of my interest in cinema. If it is, then what can I say? I’d rather be a bad person than homeless.

and if it makes you feel any better I’ve been homeless and it didn’t particularly make me a good person…

“I’d rather be a bad person than homeless.” I wonder if it’s occurred to you that the two states are not mutually exclusive.

OK, back to biting my tongue.

Karina,
I’m certainly not on Armond White’s side (cause his critics union doesn’t give him any special credits other than corporatist self-recognition within the press) but I don’t think he meant in any way to blame you (or bloggers) for “making a living”.
You appeal to pity there, and it has no bearing on credentials or worthiness.
Are you suggesting the correlation between the honesty/nobility of “earning money” and earning de facto critical authority in your profession? Just deal with each aspect of this “job” at their own level. Mixing the two (selling out or dealing with it without looking for excuses) is YOUR dilemma, not the debate for THE profession.
It seems you got it as wrong as Armond did about this disingenuous antagonism between the paid and the unpaid.

Between this and Anne Thompson’s “Bloggers Break Rules” piece over at IndieWire, I have one question:

Who are you, Harry Tuttle?

Your pseudonym’s taken from Brazil, you talk about writing, art and commerce like you know what’s right, but, frankly, I tend to trust people who speak from atop Ivory towers only when I can see the real names on the base.

If you were exposing safety failures at a nuclear plant or anti-democracy crackdowns in China, using a pseudonym would be understandable. But you’re just talking loud and saying nothing.

Grown-ups put their name to what they say. It’s how we know they’re grown-ups.

James.

Everybody:

I am pretty sure that when Karina wrote, “I’ve never thought it was a bad thing to try to make a living off of my interest in cinema. If it is, then what can I say? I’d rather be a bad person than homeless,” she wasn’t ACTUALLY saying that those were the only two alternatives, nor was she invoking some kind of pity defense (”a girl’s got to earn a living” or somesuch).

It was a sarcastic response to Harry’s line of argument, that this whole brouhaha (perhaps from both Armond’s and Karina’s perspectives) is about getting paid — that getting paid equals being a professional, period, and that all other factors are secondary. Harry doesn’t feel that way, Karina doesn’t, and having worked with him for years at a newspaper that paid less per piece than most current blogs, I can safely say that Armond doesn’t, either.

Armond’s rant, I think, is about professional standards, or his perception of the lack of professional standards — about the insights and the quality of the writing, which he feel are lacking online.

I disagree, and I think when he makes that argument he’s either operating from a position of ignorance (an intellectually honest person would admit that AICN and Reverse Shot can’t be tarred with the same brush) or else he’s been enlightened since his last public rant about online criticism and chooses (for whatever inscrutable personal reason) to pretend he never got the memo, that his skewed perception is reality, because he can’t give up the Last Angry Man shtick that’s so integral to his persona.

But accidentally or on purpose, it’s ludicrous to apply a guild mentality to newspaper criticism and defend newspaper critics as a species, since much of their collective output is, and has always been, boringly written and lacking in substance and too beholden to the agendas of newspaper owners and the movie studios whose ad dollars they crave and whose marquee talent they use to sell papers.

Yet that’s what Armond is (inadvertently, I guess) doing when he rides this “bloggers vs. real media” horse yet again — setting up a blanket us vs. them distinction, with the side of right represented by Armond (unsurprisingly, since that’s the shtick). That’s what my friend Marshall Fine is doing, too. Marshall, if you’re reading this, you’re a fine writer yourself, and your Peckinpah book has been in my short stack for years now, but wouldn’t you agree that The Star isn’t the best platform from which to ally yourself with Armond in defense of the qualitative superiority of print criticism?

It’s interesting that in the coverage of the Hamptons panel, and in previous flurries of writing about old vs. new media and online vs. print criticism, the practitioners of online criticism seem to be a lot more honest about assessing the general quality of work in their own media. In contrast to the bleating of newspaper veterans who sense that the tide has permanently shifted and they’re experience the final days of Atlantis, here’s no vain, deluded chest-thumping coming from the online world that I can see — other than to point out that while online media don’t pay, they permit writers much more freedom to experiment with uncommercial subject matter and unusual form than print outlets ever have.

That may be self-serving, but it’s a valid and irrefutable point. And the fact that practitioners of online criticism can make it is a huge a compliment to online film criticism generally — a statement of commitment to innovation and creative freedom, and a relative immunity to commercial pressure that newspaper and magazine writers can’t counter in any dramatic way, except with the moldy red herring of, “Oh yeah, well, we have editors!” (which in this cost-cutting day and age is increasingly untrue) and “We have fact-checkers” (most of them don’t have that anymore, either, and haven’t since the early part of the decade. New York Press fired its fact checkers about seven years ago, and has not made a habit of seriously editing anybody in the film section, ever).

Sturgeon’s rule that 90 percent of everything is crap applies to old and new media alike, to television and cinema, to books and paintings and limericks. It’s good to keep it in mind, I think, when we’re having this discussion, which the blogosphere seems to do every few months or so.

Newspapers aren’t dying. They’re being incrementally absorbed into a huge thing called The Media, a beast that newspapers, magazines, television, radio, YouTube and blogs are all a part of.

Karina’s a part of it, too, and she’s one of the best critics and commentators we’ve got, as good as almost any of the supposedly hallowed print writers whose salaries and medical plans she’d like to have (I would, too — who besides an independently wealthy person, or somebody with a “U2 was better before they were famous” mentality, would turn down their nose at such a thing?). She has eclectic taste, she’s honest, she’s funny and she can broach complex concepts in plain language. Very few contemporary film writers, in old or new media, fit that description.

Plus, the true test of a really valuable critic is whether you are able to think of particular movies without recalling what the writer said about it. There are at least a dozen recent films that make me recall a phrase by Karina.

–Matt

Isn’t it convienant that when attacked by someone like White the whole argument somehow turns to him attacking some kind of online community of writers but when you want to be appreciated the community seemingly doesn’t exist anymore. I mean which is it? When somebody has something negative to say about your writing it’s because they’ve equated you with a larger group of writers most of whom are also convieiantly writers of inferior quality? Who are these inferior writers of online reviews I wonder? Not your small coterie of associates and crony’s I’d assume. If you’re going to be somewhat autonomous you’d probably have to take into account the possibility that White simply doesn’t like the writing and not start rallying the troops

Honestly I am jealous. You know you have arrived when Armond White starts hating on you.

Sorry you didn’t find the thread entertaining. I was chuckling everytime I wrote one of my six posts considering the fact that I don’t even know who the hell Armond White is. Apparently he’s some guy who thinks Michael Jacksons moonwalk is a male fertility dance. I have also never read an entire review by Karina or youself and simply enjoy leaving posts on these sites because I’m lonely. Maybe next time we have a trivial pursuits nights at my house you guys can come over and help me get the orange slice that always seems to allude me while making witty asides about Gloria Swanson’s brazillian…

White sure gets a lot of mileage out of his hissy fits. I wish I could be as good at self-promotion as he is, but I don’t like to go negative.

But it’s Armond White. It does not speak well for the Hamptons Film Festival that they put him on a panel about “film criticism.” He’s a spewer of opinions, but hardly a critic. His opinions don’t matter because he doesn’t base them on anything except his own attitude. If you’ve forgotten, go back and read his stuff.

Before you went to a newspaper or a magazine now you get on the internet. What’s the difference exactly? In the days of yore you used to ply office politics by the water cooler now you can do it from your comfort of your couch? yawn.Karina’s doing the same thing any critic’s ever done. If the internet didn’t exist she’d go cull favor with the people at a magazine, associate her self with a group of up and comers or attach herself to a few pet filmmakers and promote, promote, promote. That’s what she does now. Nothing wrong with that per se but frankly it’s a little tiresome to keep hearing about how radical this is. Why is it important? because Karina does it with cat glasses on? Maybe you honestly think the writing is radical, I really couldn’t tell ya… but I do find Armond White to be far more of a wildcard than Karina. Not that that makes for good criticism neccesarily but personally I think film has become so boring and stupid, so much of a conformist, safe resume game and worse than the worst corporate office that anyone who’s not at least a little crazy by it or is pretending to be a sane voice of reason within it is just selling the system back to you. For all the talk about the democratzation of film because of cheap tools, the internet, video, fcp how come film feels more conservative now than it did thirty years ago when those things didn’t even exist yet? I think your post is pretty misguided. The internet is a business and so is film like any other business. There’s nothing even remotely different about that. The end of your post pretty much says it all to me “At least you’re using these tools to get paid at what you love to do, and spinning out some provocative articles along the way” not the words but the lethargy of it.. Armond Whites got a really good review of Beeswax by the way…it works for me because he compares Beeswax to a better more important film. I really think he does this not to be a jerk but to keep some equilibrium about quality and intensity…if he were merely writing about the film the review was about the tone of his piece may have been similiar to the tone of the section of your post I quoted. Welcome to the brave new world!

I like your glasses and don’t think the Bujalski films are horrible films just a lot closer to your standard fare then everybody likes to imagine unfortunately…. but then you’ve just reduced what i’ve said in my various personalites to those two points. No wonder I had to become an internet troll. There are some good points in some of the posts I’m fairly positive of it. So don’t let me being a troll deter you.For one thing It could alert you to the huge chasm between what you think your doing and it appears your doing from the outside. That’s the radical thing about the internet to me. The funny thing is I bet you’re a pretty decent person but from my perspective there’s a far greater share of marketing going on here than love for cinema and principle I just wonder if you realize that…

[...] hurts the credibility of the film blogosphere like bad rumors. Not even supercilious comments from Armond White or Peter Bart (before he gave in and started blogging himself) have cut so deep as the [...]

Die then. Perish!!!!!!!!!!