On Friday evening at SilverDocs, I attended a panel on film criticism moderated by Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post, and featuring contributions from critics David Edelstein, Lisa Schwarzbaum and Amy Taubin, and filmmaker/documentary programmer Thom Powers. In his opening remarks, Kennicott positioned the panel as a referendum of sorts on “Wanted: Documentary Critics”, a blog post by Powers in which he posed the question, “Auteurism had Andrew Sarris. Abstract expressionism had Clement Greenberg. Punk rock had Lester Bangs. Where is the equivalent voice for today’s documentary scene?” I was surprised that the conversation that ensued mostly skirted the issue of “where” contemporary documentary film will find its defining critic, and was instead weighed down by argument as to whether or not this is a valid question at all.

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Today in The Assault On Film Criticism: two salvos from journalists who just don’t seem to get the online tools and communities that they’ve credited with having ar too much power. Since neither argument is new I would have ignored these stories individually, but together…

Let’s start with The Wrap, and the kind of story they seem to publish a lot of: 300 words, no news, hyperbolic conclusions. This one’s about FlickTweets, a new site that compiles Twitter updates from about movies — gasp! — normal people. The Wrap’s Maria Russo says the site “could be what helps studios and film critics, not usually the best of friends, find common cause. Both are under siege by the armies of critics at the movies these days packing iPhones and Blackberries.” Theorizing that FlickTweets “could be disastrous for the movie business,” Russo concludes by insulting the intelligence of just about everyone in The Wrap’s target audience: “it’s not clear that the studios — or film critics — could even come up with a defensive strategy.”

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A plaque was recently erected in front of Roger Ebert’s childhood home, and to further commemorate the occasion, the critic has put together a gallery of other film critic’s childhood homes. The house where I lived from ages 6-17 (and again for 6 months of post-college unemployment, a period marked by a lot of Real World/Road Rules Challenge watching and a desperate attempt to get a job as a PA at the E! network) is represented in the gallery, as are images of the domestic sites that spawned critics like Carrie Rickey, Joe Leydon, Mick LaSalle and more. My dad still lives in the house depicted, so when film criticism becomes fully extinct and I’m forced to move back home, my photo can be painlessly repurposed for a gallery of Current Squats of Destitute Former Film Critics.

Here’s what I would like to learn from a movie about film critics: What makes them pertinent to the needs of society? Has the self-empowering progress of the blogosphere endangered the future of the profession? Most importantly, what kind of a fascinating loon do you have to be to watch movies all the time?

You will find answers to none of these provocative questions in Gerald Peary’s For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism, a light, impact-free survey of talking heads that adds absolutely nothing new to the general perception of the practice. Those viewers whose interest in watching critics talk about themselves parallels the curiosity behind, say, wanting to see an Asian elephant at the zoo won’t find themselves disappointed. (I can see it now: “Oh, so that’s what an A.O. Scott looks like…”) Everyone else may find the content lacking a much-needed edge.

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So with the film officially getting released finally, it was now time for a strategic marketing scheme. Slumdog Millionaire was first shown at the Telluride Film Festival in late August, and then at the Toronto Film Fest a week later. At both places, the film received unanimous praise and even received the People’s Choice Award at the latter.

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Not everybody loves Slumdog. Much like your favorite band that got too big, many indie film sites have abandoned the picture and moved on to other movies. An mild indie backlash was probably inevitable [sic].

Above: quotes from a post at The Playlist breaking down Slumdog Millionaire’s bumpy road from target of pre-production bidding war, to its loss of initial distributor Warner Independent, to virtual Best Picture sure thing. This is a useful endeavor. It would be more useful if it were a little more accurate.

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The Oxford Film Festival took place over the weekend, and if you follow film blogs, chances are the only thing you know about the event is that Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeffrey Wells had so much trouble with the wireless internet in his hotel room that he threw a fit, refused to attend a panel for which the festival had flown him out to appear on, threatened to leave town, then decided to stay when the festival put him up in a new hotel. This incident has made Wells the target of a ton of criticism — on Twitter, in the comments on his own site, on other blogs. And with good reason –– as Eric D. Snider put it, “This is ungentlemanly behavior of the worst order, Wells. You should be ashamed to have wasted the festival’s time and resources so childishly.” Fair enough.

But I also wonder if maybe there was a point buried within Wells’ tantrum that we’d be remiss to ignore.

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Steven Soderbergh was on hand at the Eccles Theater in Park City tonight to screen a “work-in-progress” cut of his latest low-budget digital picture for HDNet Films, The Girlfriend Experience. Starring porn star Sasha Grey as a high-end escort who alternately goes by the names Chelsea and Christine, the film is not the salacious, graphically sexual verite that fans of Grey’s previous filmography might have expected/hoped for. Instead, it’s a cold (although understandably, necessarily so), hands-off portrait of a certain New York City life about a month before the 2008 presidential election.

With panic over the economic crisis inescapable even in the extremely moneyed circles in which she does business, our heroine sees clients, argues with her live-in personal trainer boyfriend, brunches with a call girl friend, lunches with a journalist (played by real-life prostitution expose writer Mark Jacobson) and meets with a variety of men who can stand to help her “expand [her] business.” Through it all, she maintains an impenetrable (no pun intended) facade, until a “connection” with a new client and the manipulations of an online hooker review writer (played by none other than film critic/blogger Glenn Kenny, apparently typecast for his talent at cracking even the toughest girl’s shell via his written word) combine to damage her armor.

It’s probably not fair to offer a full review of a work-in-progress, but Experience fascinated me enough that I do want to throw out a few comments.

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The hottest topic of conversation leading up to this year’s Sundance Film Festival? That virtually no one is actually going to this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Over the past couple of weeks, what started as a whisper has steadily grown into a ear-splitting groan, and with the Festival beginning tomorrow, it’s become a meme that’s too pervasive to ignore.  I had heard either directly or via reliable second-hand testimony that a number of familiar faces (including a celebrity photographer, the film critic for a very high-profile weekly magazine, and a publicist representing a major distributor) were all skipping the festival this year; on the indie/freelance journalist end, reporter Anthony Kaufman took to his blog to detail the five reasons he’s decided not to head out to Utah.

Once the “Sundance: it’s gonna be a ghost town!” chatter had certifiably reached fever pitch, I went looking for Sundance regulars who would go on the record about why they’re skipping the festival this year, and what they plan to do instead. Always the skeptic, I had initially wondered if the Sundance Ghost Town Meme was a fiction invented by publicists and sold to the media in order to cover for what many expect to be a down year for sales. But when it came down to it, 5 out 6 of the people who were willing to talk to me at length and on the record about their planned Sundance absence were at least part-time journalists. Now, I wonder: is there even going to be any media left for publicists to sell fictions to?

In my conversations with five journalists about their Sundance dealbreakers, a number of common threads emerged. I break them down after the jump. If you’ve got your own not going to Sundance story, do let us know in the comments.

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So yesterday, the Los Angeles Film Critics made the stunning move of voting Wall-E as the Best Film of 2008. Stunning, because this is the first time the body has ever given their top honor to an animated film; stunning because last year, they gave it to the decidedly less commercial There Will Be Blood, thereby giving that film one of the boosts it needed to be nominated for Best Picture. The rest of the LAFCA awards were split amongst a wide range of films: Danny Boyle for director, Sean Penn for Actor, Happy-Go-Lucky’s Sally Hawkins as Actor, and, in the biggest wealth-spreading move of all, Waltz With Bashir as Best Animated Film.

Now, today, the New York Film Critics Circle are voting on thier awards as we speak, and the results are leaking in dribs and drabs via member Mike D’Angelo’s Twitter stream. Like their LA counterparts, the New York critics have so far shared the love amongst a number of pictures––Rachel Getting Married for its screenplay, Slumdog Millionaire for its cinematography, Hawkins for Actress, Mike Leigh for Best Director––and so unless Happy-Go-Lucky takes Best Picture, we can either call this magnanimity, or we can call it what it likely is: there is not a single film this year that stands head and shoulders above the rest.

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Conservative film blogger Dirty Harry is often best ignored when he’s aggressively railing against the liberal Hollywood elite, but when he offers a faux-populist view of filmgoing that’s so obstinately limited in scope that it’s actually potentially dangerous, I have to say something.

The gist: the cursed Hollywood elite is once again pushing movies with purely elite appeal for awards, and audiences are not responding to these films because after years of reading reviews written by partisan elitists who are out of touch with What The People Want, they no longer trust film critics. Also, elitism! An excerpt:

From early predictors, it looks as though the ever-widening disconnect between Hollywood and their audience will reach into 2008. The Visitor, The Wrestler, Slumdog Millionaire, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Rachel Getting Married… Any of these on your radar? Any of these captured your imagination?…what a sad statement that the films the industry are most proud of are met with almost complete indifference at the box office.

Dirty Harry’s commenters take it from there; the basic consensus is that if any of the above named films get the Best Picture nomination that should rightfully go to The Dark Knight, why they’ll … become really indignant about the tyranny of the liberal media? Not watch the Oscars? Boycott movie theaters? So, pretty much status quo, right?

Anyway. First things first: that Variety story he bases the post on is three weeks old, which is a lifetime in the prognostication game. And let’s leave aside the fact that neither Slumdog nor the Wrestler have opened anywhere yet, and that only a very small percentage of the population would admit to having their “imagination captured” by a Woody Allen film, even though Vicky is still on almost 100 screens almost three months after its release and is currently about a million dollars away from being Allen’s highest-grossing film in 22 years.

Regardless: Dirty Harry chooses to extrapolate two films named in that story as evidence that “the films the industry are most proud of are met with almost complete indifference at the box office”: Rachel Getting Married and The Visitor. I’m far more of a fan of one of these films than the other, but Harry’s assessment of audience “indifference” is misleading for both. As is common for him, he willfully refuses to acknowledge that expectations and accounting are different for films that open on 3 screens and then expand, than they are for films that roll right out into 3,000.

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TV and film critic Andrew Johnston (long with Time Out New York, more recently a contributor at The House Next Door) died over the weekend at age 40, after a battle with cancer. I didn’t know Andrew personally, but I knew his writing through his Mad Men recaps at The House, which this season I began religiously checking every Sunday night after watching each new episode twice in a row. Now House Next Door creator Matt Zoller Seitz has published a tribute to Johnston, which is a must-read whether you’re familiar with his criticism or not.

Two things pop out: first, Johnston leaves behind a legacy of supporting other film and media writers, most notably by helping them get jobs. As Seitz writes,

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Behold, Roger’s Little Rule Book, Ebert’s lengthy, biting, and hilarious list of dos and don’ts for professional film critics.

All of Ebert’s suggestions are good, although I especially like the one about “No posing for photos” with famous people (”No movie star ever wants to do this. They may smile, but they’re gritting their teeth”), with the exception made for “real photos of you really with a movie star…taken at a real event by a real other person unknown to you who didn’t ask anyone if he could take it.”  But also, as Gary Susman notes at PopWatch, most of the Rules seem to directly reference Ebert’s At the Movies replacement, Ben Lyons.

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I was pleased to be asked to participate in indieWIRE’s post-TIFF critics poll, through which consensus selected Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s Still Walking as Best Film, Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler) as Best Performance, and Les Plages d’Agnes by Agnes Varda as Best Doc. Unfortunately, I didn’t see any of those movies, but the three titles I named as my favorite films of the fest all made the poll’s top ten: Summer Hours, Rachel Getting Married, and Treeless Mountain. For Best Performance, I named Treeless‘ Hee Yeon Kim, Mathieu Almaric from A Christmas Tale (maybe technically a Cannes film, but he still blows most of the competition out of the water, as far as I’m concerned) and Matthew Newton, director/writer/star of Three Blind Mice. I didn’t see as many docs as I would have liked (I guess I’m saving them for the fall season of Stranger Than Fiction, programmed, like TIFF’s Reel to Reel, by Thom Powers), but by far my favorite was Blind Loves.

We still have a bit of TIFF coverage in the can for posting over the next few days, BTW. Look for interviews with Jonathan Demme, Anne Hathaway, Ari Folman and more by the end of the week.

After reading Anne Thompson’s post on the dismal reception given to the youth-baiting rethink of At The Movies starring Ben Lyons and Ben Mankiewicz, I decided I had better watch The Two Bens’ first episode online to see what all the griping is about. It actually starts off rather well: Mankiewicz is totally qualified for this job, although it’s a bit of a wonder he was even hired, what with his TCM-honed, “I am going to explain this very slowly because my viewers may be aged” manner of speaking. But then he tosses it to Lyons, who says something completely incoherent about Burn After Reading being “almost like an exercise in drama,” and then they cut back Mankiewicz, who struggles to croak out, “Yeah, that’s an interesting point,” whilst swallowing his own testicles. At that point, I stopped.

Interestingly, another thing that I wasn’t able to force myself to watch all the way through this week also had to do with the sorry contemporary incarnation of the former gold standard for televised movie reviews.

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