I’m not sure what it means that one weekend, I sit on a film festival panel about criticism and barely get a word in edgewise, and the next weekend become the center of a scandal on another film festival panel while actually physically attending yet another film festival on the opposite side of the globe. I guess I am more interesting in absentia. More remarkable is that, thanks to the magic of Twitter, I was able to comment on an argument about myself from 7,000 miles away, in virtual real time.
To recap for the Twitilliterate: there was a panel on film criticism at the Hamptons International Film Festival this weekend. I was not there; I was, and still am, in Abu Dhabi at the Middle East International Film Festival (see my coverage here). According to Michael Tully, on that panel Karen Durbin (film critic for Elle, with whom I shared space on another panel the week before at Woodstock) mentioned my writing on this blog as an example of high quality “in-depth criticism” happening on the web. When the conversation shifted to the “internet’s democratization of authoritative/professional voices,” Durbin again brought up my name as an example of something worthwhile online. Then things got weird.
According to Tully’s report at /Hammer to Nail, NY Press critic Armond White then “dismissively reminded Durbin that he was proud to be a member of a professional organization. When she asked him if he’d read Longworth’s writing at Spout, he replied that he had and stressed that she/they were not a member of their own organization [the New York Film Critics Circle] for a reason, adding, ‘The reason is they don’t rate.’” After that, there was apparently some heated cross talk, and “it felt like all hell was about to break loose, but instead of turning into a full-blown war, everyone regrouped and took the discussion in another direction.”
It’s hard for me to know how to respond to the criticisms leveled against me without having been there to hear them for myself, but I can try to speak to the concept of professionalism in general as I think it applies to me. This entire panel has been reduced to “Armond White Disses Karina Longworth,” but I find it hard to believe that this is all really about Armond White thinking that I am a bad writer. If there are several ways to interpret this incident, I chose to believe, as Tully put it, that White “didn’t actually know who Durbin was referring to but he knew that she was talking about internet writing and that was enough to warrant a curt dismissal (hence, his use of the word ‘they’ instead of ‘she’).” I think this is about death.
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Another blockbuster, another record broken. What’s the big deal? Well, the biggest deal might be that film critics are wasting their time reviewing movies like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, because a billion trillion negative words written about the blockbuster sequel couldn’t have kept it from breaking the Wednesday opening record. Grossing $60.6 million over a day and two nights (the figure includes Tuesday’s midnight show tally of $16 million), Transformers 2 knocked Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix off the throne.
I haven’t heard of anyone liking the sequel, so it’s very possible that word of mouth will keep the movie from making too much more over the weekend. But then again, if another one of my weekends is completely rained out, I’ll probably go see the thing just to see how godawful it is (this Best Week Ever post makes me masochistically curious to see it). The first Transformers was a total bore, so I’d be happier with elements as ridiculously terrible as racially offensive robots and parachute farts, as long as there was something interesting going on.
The only thing keeping me from rounding up a large posse for a MST3K-inspired viewing is the idea that buying the tickets will only encourage Paramount and Michael Bay more (how about a group of us goes and buys Star Trek tickets and then sneak into Transformers? Paramount can’t complain, since they’ll still get the money, only for a better film).
Check out the film blogs’ response to the record breakage after the jump:
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Film critic and artist Manny Farber died last night at the age of 91. As can be expected, David Hudson has already begun a prodigious link round-up at GreenCine, so I just want to point to a few online resources for those looking to bone-up on Farber’s work, or maybe even check it out for the first time.
- A San Diego PBS segment on Farber’s paintings.
- Negative Space, available in its entirety on Google Books.
- An interview about Farber with Robert Walsh, who wrote the preface for a reissue of Negative Space.
- A clip from The Honeymoon Killers, a film on which Farber famously lectured.
We all freaked out when famously blog-hostile reporters Peter Bart and Patrick Goldstein recently got on their knees and started their own blogs, but really, the weird part was that these guys were so insistently anti-blog to begin with. They’re both big on railing against critics, and their alleged impotence when it comes to influencing the audience (to reject industry product); they both act like for a professional critic to offer an assessment on a Hollywood film is to somehow throw handcuffs on the potential ticket buyer’s ability to exercise free will (to consume industry product). Well, what are blogs, if not a space where the audience shrugs off those and other types of handcuffs in order to trade notes on their consumptive desires and experiences? You’d think they’d be an industry booster’s dream.
All of that’s a long lead up to the fact that I don’t know exactly how to parse this blog post by Goldstein, in which he once again beats the “who needs critics?” drum, and uses his blog to annoint Hollywood producer Avi Lerner as the “out of touch” review slinger’s populist replacement:
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