This post is in response to a question asked in the Ask Karina thread by eugene: “You referenced this in your “Bagger” post, but what do you think is the future of film blogging? Where is all this going?”
I generally feel uncomfortable predicting the future, but I feel very comfortable diagnosing what’s wrong with the present!
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Variety published three separate but similar “Top Stories” Sunday (one - two - three) on the topic of blogs and how certain bloggers (mainly Nikki Finke, pictured) exhibit questionable journalistic practices. What seemed at first to be an excessive, behind-the-times and otherwise forgettable trio of articles has today (and initially last night) become a topic of discussion for many film bloggers, including some who were mentioned in these Variety pieces who felt the need to respond.
My personal response is primarily, as I said, one of disregard. But here’s a quick commentary: I enjoy Finke and others as I might have appreciated Louella Parsons or Hedda Hopper decades ago — with a grain of salt. The fact that some bloggers are taken more seriously for their rumors and faulty reporting styles than, say, any one of the hundred other fanboy movie blog sites out there is the problem of the reader (especially the one who’s a Hollywood player), not the writer.
Though the timeliness of Variety’s blogger-hating trilogy comes on the heel of recent errors and conflicts involving Finke and others, there’s no more necessity in such articles as there would be for a trio of stories about the trustworthiness of Fox News. Don’t read the blog, don’t watch the channel, don’t read the trade magazine if you don’t like their content.
Anyway, I’ve given my two cents; read what others have to say after the jump:
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Historic news! David Hudson, the master of film blogging behind GreenCine Daily, is leaving that site to start a new blog for IFC. That blog, called The Daily, will launch January 1. Meanwhile, GreenCine Daily will be taken over by Aaron Hillis, freelance writer and co-founder of Benten Films.
Why is this a big deal? In the brief history of the film blogosphere, nobody has ever even tried to aggregate film news and commentary as thoroughly and elegantly as David Hudson. And maybe it’s holiday season fuzzy headed-ness on my part, but the idea that there will soon be two places for me to go for curated bloggy aggregation kind of blows my mind.
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A number of our blogging friends have picked up the Alphabetical Favorites meme. The idea is that you list 26 favorite movies, one for each letter of the alphabet. Some people are adding comments, but I think it’s more interesting to just toss the titles out there, to see how they fit together within a single list and how they match up to other lists. Also, it’s been a hell of a week and I’m exhausted. I will say this: after not being able to think of a single movie beginning with the letter “J” that I enjoy more than Joe Versus the Volcano, I noticed that several commenters at the House Next Door had slotted the same film in the same face. So much for Todd McCarthy’s contention in his Doubt review that John Patrick Shanley’s first directorial effort was “misguided.”
So! My list is after the jump.
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“There is, of course, cause for concern, and even alarm.”
These were some of the first words out of moderator Annette Insdorf’s mouth, at the start of a panel called Snip Snip: Are Cutbacks in Film Distribution and Criticism Affecting Quality Filmmaking? in Telluride on Sunday. She ticked off all the alarming factors––studio-funded arthouse distributors like Paramount Vantage and Picturehouse are shutting down; marketing costs for the average film have risen to the $20 million range, which means that true indie distributors can’t compete; there’s a glut of films in both festivals and in theaters; print outlets dedicated to film have all but disappeared, and general interest publications have come to see critics as a luxury. She closed this listlessness-inducing laundry list with the question, “Will we simply have to read blogs to be informed about non-Hollywood cinema?” The distributors and journalists on the panel (including Michael Barker of Sony Pictures Classics, Anne Thompson of Variety and Scott Foundas of Village Voice Media) ended up taking this querie and running it into a lively, contentious debate. But first, Paul Schrader declared that he’s already heard the death rattle of cinema as we know it.
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Remember that interview that Variety EIC Peter Bart gave MTV in June, responding to the “boycott” of his publication by a handful of fanboy sites who insisted that the trade had repeatedly failed to properly credit their “scoops”? Variety’s Anne Thompson resurrected the debate and the Bart quote this morning in a blog post pegged to Comic-Con, where a gang of outlets of various sizes––including us––will be fighting to post the same material at the same time. If my post about The Watchman goes up 20 seconds after Cinematical’s, will I get in trouble for not giving them “credit” for “breaking” the story? What’s the netiquette??!!???
She’s mostly looking at the divide between a “legit” outlet like Variety and the independently run sites like Film School Rejects, but I think Anne makes some good points about this stuff not being the black-and-white matter of thievery that some of the sites would like to believe. As far as I’m concerned, this is the key part of her piece:
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Note: This review appeared in slightly different form during the Tribeca Film Festival.
I saw The Wackness last spring at a special screening held for the critics participating in the Moving Image Institute last week. Afterwards, Sony Classics president Michael Barker was asked about critical response to the film thus far. Barker disclaimed that “most major critics” hadn’t yet reviewed the film, but then said something surprisingly candid about the makeup of the film’s detractors. “What’s the demographic of the critics who don’t like it?” he began, starting a statement with a question in expert post-Robert Evans mogul style. “Female. Single. Mothers with teenage kids––they don’t like the movie.”
Who ever is doing research over at Sony deserves a raise. I fit just two of those descriptors, and I don’t like it, either.
Maybe it’s true that even professional critics struggle to get beyond their own natural demographic biases. A certain (very young, very male) segment of the film blogosphere lashed out at Sony for buying The Wackness towards the close of Sundance––not because they didn’t like the film, but because they loved the film so much that they were moved to protect it from what they saw as the risk of a mis-managed mainstream release. I thought this campaign was absolutely inane at the time—in the virtually non-existent narrative buying climate of Sundance 2008, the boys should have been happy that their pet project was picked up at all––but having finally seen the thing, I’m at no loss to explain why those writers have embraced this film. With its full-on, fully uncritical glorification of adolescent male self-indulgence and permanent immaturity, The Wackness is a kind of cinematic embodiment of certain tendencies that make the sub-AICN movie web go round.
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When I read that Patrick Goldstein, author of the L.A. Times column The Big Picture, was launching a new blog under the auspices of the paper, I didn’t think it was that big of a deal. I think the exact thought that popped into my head was something along the lines of, “Oh hey! He likes to package pseudo-populist opinion as though it’s unimpeachable fact––he’ll fit right in!”
But the rest of the internet is, like, freaking out. Shoutcasting the story as “BREAKING” news, FishbowlLA went on to relate that the Times plans to put “Goldstein’s knowledge and sources to work in a blog that brings responsible journalism to the faster-than-pulp pace of 24/7 online entertainment reporting.” Finally, a “responsible” corrective for our chaos!
But all meta-commentary on this issue of international importance pales in comparison to the hundreds of words put forth by Jeffrey Wells. …Read more
Peter Bart now has a blog, but that’s no reason for him to play nice with the blogosphere. In a post from earlier this week, he did his best to discredit any opinion about this impending Hulk movie that is not his own:
The dweebs may not like the effects. The star, Edward Norton, may not like the cut. And the blogosphere is steeped in bad buzz. So here’s what Universal decided to do about it Sunday night: Throw a party, invite 5,000 folks to a screening and celebrate The Incredible Hulk as an instant hit…The audience roundly applauded the set-pieces of CGI mayhem, as if to tell Comic-Con-ish doubters, “Get a life.”
Because of course, it’s better to manufacture the illusion of “an instant hit” than to actually make an attempt to appeal to the “Comic-con-ish” built-in fans of the brand. I could go on and on about how to claim that the reaction of an invited audience (probably predominantly made up of people on the Marvel, Paramount or associated payrolls) is more valid that the worries of a film’s core ticket buyers is unforgivably solipsistic and probably not in line with Variety’s ostensible mission to couch all value judgments in assessments of commercial viability. But instead, I’ll just quote at length from one of Bart’s more articulate commenters,
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Yesterday, I posted about Jamie Stuart’s In Spring, a video which had the filmmaker visiting the offices of THINKFilm and turning an interview with Werner Herzog (ostensibly occasioned by the impending release of Encounters at the End of the World) into––I thought––a brilliant piece of satire on the current state of indie film distribution in general and, unavoidably, the rumored struggles of THINKFilm in particular. It was also, on a not entirely subtextual level, about the thorny relationship between journalists and their subjects. Stuart has been doing meta festival coverage for awhile, but In Spring felt like a giant leap forward in his critique of the press process. In my post, I wondered how he was getting away with it. “What does he tell publicists he’s going to do?” I wrote. “Will any of them ever let him do it again?
By the end of the day yesterday, Stuart had removed the video from his website. He replaced it with a short video response, in which he explained that although THINK had no legal recourse against him, when they asked him to take the video down he complied based on the inference that somebody’s job was on the line.
I was away from the computer for most of yesterday afternoon and was kept abreast of the ongoing status of In Spring via emails and IMs on my phone. It wasn’t until today that I noticed that around the same time that Stuart was being pressured to remove the video––and just about when a FILMMAKER Magazine blog post about Spring was being removed––another blog post popped up, defending THINK’s right to protect themselves from negative reporting. Or, “reporting.”
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A day after learning and announcing that his job at Premiere.com had been eliminated, Glenn Kenny has already set up a new personal blog, free of association with Premiere/Hachette. Well, sort of: the subtitle on the TypePad blog is, currently, “Film writer Glenn Kenny’s own bought-and-paid-for-blog, thank you very goddamn much.” The title-title is Some Came Running, and in the first entry, Kenny explains what he hopes to do with it: “Consider this space the drunken boat we stand in, trying to pull either and/or both of these figures in. Not to be loopy, or maudlin, or anything. Just a fancy way of saying…let’s hang, my friends.”
Related: “Hachette has always been an abortion of a magazine company,” writes Nick Denton at Gawker.
Another week, another dose of frustrating news about the state of film journalism. This morning longtime Premiere film critic (and occasional SpoutBlog commenter) Glenn Kenny used his blog to announce that his “position at Premiere.com is being terminated.” Glenn says he’ll keep up his Premiere-hosted blog if he can; otherwise, he’s looking for freelance work. The comments on his hour-old post are already getting lively; check them out and join in here.
I saw The Wackness (which has its New York premiere tomorrow at the Tribeca Film Festival) at a special screening held for the critics participating in the Moving Image Institute last week. Afterwards, Sony Classics president Michael Barker was asked about critical response to the film thus far. Barker disclaimed that “most major critics” hadn’t yet reviewed the film, but then said something surprisingly candid about the makeup of the film’s detractors. “What’s the demographic of the critics who don’t like it?” he began, starting a statement with a question in expert post-Robert Evans mogul style. “Female. Single. Mothers with teenage kids––they don’t like the movie.”
Who ever’s doing research over at Sony deserves a raise. I fit just two of those descriptors, and I don’t like it, either.
Maybe it’s true that even professional critics struggle to get beyond their own natural demographic biases. A certain (very young, very male) segment of the film blogosphere lashed out at Sony for buying The Wackness towards the close of Sundance––not because they didn’t like the film, but because they loved the film so much that they were moved to protect it from what they saw as the risk of a mis-managed mainstream release. I thought this campaign was absolutely inane at the time—in the virtually non-existent narrative buying climate of Sundance 2008, the boys should have been happy that their pet project was picked up at all––but having finally seen the thing, I’m at no loss to explain why those writers have embraced this film. With its full-on, fully uncritical glorification of adolescent male self-indulgence and permanent immaturity, The Wackness is a kind of cinematic embodiment of certain tendencies that make the sub-AICN movie web go round.
…Read more
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