Regarding the news that Michael Phillips and A.O. Scott have been hired to replace The Two Bens as hosts/dueling critics of At the Movies, at first there didn’t seem to be much to say other than what everyone else was saying — basically, “Yay! A rare victory for intelligence/maturity/old-fashioned film criticism values!” I like Anne Thompson’s headline on her post on her new indieWIRE blog: Disney/ABC Replaces Lyons and Mankiewicz with Adult Critics Scott and Phillips. That about sums it up, no?

And yet, it’s undeniably of note that, here in on the margins of pop culture where we have conversations about things like film criticism, a return to something like the old way of doing things is met with such relief. This morning I read several blog posts and whatnot about the changes going on at the New York Times. The paper’s culture editor, Sam Sifton, is replacing Frank Bruni as their lead restaurant critic. At one point Sharon Waxman was reporting that Trish Hall, an editor of a few NYT food and lifestyle sections, had been tapped to take Sifton’s old job, but Sharon is now backtracking on that. Still, the swap of Sifton for Bruni is enough to open up a dialog about the idea that arts reporting and food criticism exist on enough of a parallel that the same person could qualify for both jobs, and thus the issues plaguing one kind of criticism would be spoken of in the same breath as the issues of the other.

Reading food blogger Josh Ozersky’s take on the NYT swap, I was struck by how easily his language could apply to our sphere, at least up to a point. A lengthy excerpt:

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A post this morning at The Awl ruminates on The New York Times‘ apparent love affair with Nora Ephron, writer/director of Julie & Julia. The paper has taken to covering her/the movie about once every other day in the month leading up to the film’s release this week, to the point where Nikki Finke has cried conspiracy. Choire Sicha gives the paper a bit more credit; though he criticizes the Times for having “no idea what lays beyond its own fortress walls,” he sympathises with the media’s attraction to Ephron as a “charming, fun whirlwind” and a “bridge” between New York old money and Hollywood commerce.

This is all very interesting, but it would be easy to read The Awl’s post and make the dangerous inference that since The New York Times is gaga for Julie & Julia, and because The New York Times tends to “exhibit absolutely clearly that they have very little idea anymore what readers are, or even should be, interested in,” ergo, there somehow won’t be much of an appetite for Ephron’s food porn outside “their bubble,” which Sicha accurately assesses Ephron is “deep inside.”  But to make such a leap of inference would both give the film too much credit, and Ephron’s extremely commercial instincts not enough. I saw the film at Traverse City over the weekend, and while I personally wish it was, well, better — imagine a movie split between post-WWII France and New York in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that actually treated its twin protagonists as engaged products of their socio-historical surroundings rather than just borderline-sitophiliac ciphers! –– the 500 elderly Midwesterners I saw it with seemed completely satisfied. It may be true that Ephron represents, as Sicha suggests, a link between New York and Hollywood that this city’s newspaper can’t resist, but The Great New York Times Ephron Splooge is probably not as much about either coast as it is about much of the country in between.

In this New York Times story (cleverly topped with a 600px wide still featuring Greta Gerwig in a bikini), Michael Cieply reports on Sony Pictures Classics’ plan to premiere the Duplass Brothers’ Baghead first in Austin, and then spread the film out to strategically-selected cities throughout the country before opening the film in New York or Los Angeles. Why do it this way? The implication is that Sony is hoping to benefit from positive word of mouth and blog coverage in college towns, hipster meccas and smaller cities where a recommendation from a friend carries more weight than a film review. But in order to convey that message, Cieply has to implicitly diss the publication in which his story is published. An excerpt:

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I know I should be able to pull off some kind of stunning analysis of this morning’s New York Times story, in which Tom Cruise’s producing partner Paula Wagner defends United Artists against the bad buzz swirling around Valkyrie, but I’m not feeling it. The story just adheres to such a tired formula: “The Internet says there’s trouble, but I talked to a studio exec for an hour and a half and she said everything was okay! And Bram Stoker’s Dracula made $83 million! So take that, Internet!” Yawn. Plus, the timing of the piece just seems bizarre. It’s been ages (in internet time, at least) since Valkyrie’s release date was pushed back to February 2009. Cruise is getting good press for his cameo in Tropic Thunder. Why would UA jump to defend themselves now? Why not just let Bryan Singer shoot (or reshoot) whatever he needs to shoot, and project confidence about the film and the release date through non-defensive silence?

Whatever. I’ll just point you towards David Poland’s piece on the piece, which begins as a clarification of the statement “Valkyrie is dead,” which was quoted from Poland’s blog in the second sentence of the NYT piece without much context. Mostly, he’s annoyed at being lumped into a story in which Roger Friedman is heavily quoted. “I just wanted to say, I would never make any of the silly, lazy reaches that The Inhuman Stain would. They are unfair and uninformed. But then again, what do you expect from a gossip columinst who works for a right-wing organization that stands against much of what he stands for and who “reports” what he is told to report?”

But it could be worse. “At least [NYT's Michael] Cieply didn’t call me ‘a blogger,’” Poland writes. On his blog.

My favorite part of David Carr’s NYT profile of Robert Downey Jr (and, judging by the way he foreshadows it in the story’s second paragraph, maybe Carr’s favorite, too):

[Downey's] romance with mood-altering chemicals didn’t end after he got out of prison. By 2003 he was an uninsurable serial relapser famous for being pulled out of hotels or other people’s homes in an addled, disheveled state. As a movie star with a lot of pals, he lived a life beyond consequence until he finally wore out the endless mercies of the entertainment business. After he was fired from his spot on Ally McBeal, the bottom finally came, at a Burger King of all places.

On or around Independence Day in 2003, he stopped at a Burger King on the Pacific Coast Highway and threw all his drugs in the ocean. And while he was sitting there chewing on a burger, he decided he was done. This being America, five years later you can walk into that Burger King, and if you order a Kids Meal you can get your own Robert Downey Jr. action figure, wrapped up in gadget ware. (And what does Tony Stark want when he escapes his kidnappers? A good old American cheeseburger — from Burger King, natch.)

Isn’t it funny how it all comes together? Downey’s recovery, his personal victory over almost-certain death. His character’s victory over almost-certain death within his big Hollywood comeback movie. The marketing of said big Hollywood comeback movie. It all revolves around Burger King, and specifically, the Burger King cheeseburger as touchstone of both near-death experience and synergistic lunch. “Is this a great country or what?” Carr asks––smirkingly, maybe, but not totally disingenuously. Surely, nowhere else in the world could an actor’s biography be modified to better showcase a studio’s corporate sponsor.

The first guest speaker on the first morning of the Moving Image Institute in Film Criticism and Feature Writing, New York Times critic A.O. Scott made a comment about the problematic nature of Iraq films that seemed to me to serve as a wider metaphor for the current crisis facing those of us struggling for security and longevity as film writers. To paraphrase, Scott suggested that dramatizations of the Iraq conflict have so far been generally disappointing because not only do we not yet know the outcome of the war, but it’s hard to hypothesize what either a positive or negative end would actually look like. This is essentially how I’ve come to feel about my chosen profession of late: unable to imagine what either a best or worst case scenario would actually look like, the idea of establishing long-term career goals seems unfathomable.

The Scott session, for me, reinforced the notion that there’s a divide between those of us who struggle to cobble together a living out of our engagement with the online film community, and those who, because of age or professional stature or other factors that I’m too young and naive to grasp, see the increasing empowerment of the audience as a nuisance.

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The worm turns and squirms in Frownland, an aptly named film made on the cheap in and around New York. An up-close, painfully intimate portrait of a hapless, manipulative schlub, a Loser with a capital L, the film offers for our horror and our empathy a creature whose very existence is a rebuke to the stultifying uniformity (the niceness, the neatness) of what now often passes for American independent cinema. Written and directed by Ronald Bronstein, making his feature-film debut, this is personal cinema at its most uncompromising and fierce.

The first paragraph of Manohla Dargis’ rave review of  in the New York Times. Read the full thing here.

Last week I walked five blocks to my favorite neighborhood cafe, managed to snag one of the “good” tables (near an outlet and a window, not too small), switched a couple of chairs around so I could sit on one that wasn’t wobbly, bought my Americano, and settled in to get lots of work done. But I couldn’t get on the Internet. No one around me could get on the Internet. And several people had asked cafe employees to restart the router several times. No one could figure out what the problem was. I ended up quickly drinking my coffee then packing up and walking home. A good hour, gone.

A few days later I went back to that cafe, and a barista told me what the problem had been: Some numskull was downloading a movie! Clueless or just selfish? Who knows. The point is that this whole movie downloading thing isn’t what you’d call a breeze. At least not yet.

But it’s still on everyone’s radars. The Sunday New York Times had three articles on the topic: “The Shape of Cinema, Transformed at the Click of a Mouse,” “The Revolution Will Be Downloaded (If You’re Patient,” and “Little Films on Little Screens.”

I wish the dude at the cafe had read the piece by Manohla Dargis (”The Revolution Will Be Downloaded”) before he screwed with the wireless network a couple dozen people were trying to access. Here’s a paragraph:

When all the planets are aligned and your computer has enough memory and hasn’t been deluged with spam for lots of little multicolored pills, it will function just dandy. But try to download without enough disk space and through a wireless connection, as I initially did, and you may soon wonder why you’re spending so much time and energy to watch films you’ve never heard of on your computer rather than watching a “Children of Men” DVD on your dreamy big television.

True enough.

And here are some bits from A. O. Scott’s article (”The Shape of Cinema”):

It is now possible to imagine–to expect–that before too long the entire surviving history of movies will be open for browsing and sampling at the click of a mouse for a few PayPal dollars….

…you have the potential of tens of thousands of movies competing for the burdened attention of the viewers…. How will they be sorted out? How will you know which ones you might want to see?

A.O. Scott, who says the question is asked out of plain-old curiosity, not out of fear that the professional critic is a waning vocation, ends up basically answering it later in the article:

It has become something of a truism that Web culture is driven not by traditional, top-down forms of tastemaking like the judgments of professional critics or the strategies of corporate marketers, but rather by the lateral operations of social networks.

…What will guide those choices? Will the social networks that drive taste on the Web discover new and neglected works? Will they manage to circumvent both relentless marketing and criticial myopia? If the short history of the Internet teaches anything, it’s that any decisive, early answer is sure to be wrong.

These are good questions for everyone at spout.com–employees and community members alike. The website was certainly created with those intentions–to help people sort through the “Long Tail,” to point to good movies that might be overlooked, and to listen to the opinions of real people, not marketing experts. But as with any community, the people who are in it ultimately determine the direction. We’re as eager as A.O. Scott to see what happens.

I’m sure I’m not the only one raising a glass to the good news that indieWIRE’s Undiscovered Gems film series is on for a second year. The New York Times and Emerging Pictures came through again with the support to make it happen.

For those who aren’t familiar with Undiscovered Gems, for ten years now indieWIRE has been making an annual list of films they love that have not been distributed in the US. This year, for the first time, critics from all over participated in the voting through indieWIRE’s online critics poll. (Here’s the resulting list of “best undistributed films.”) While the list has always created awareness of the films, in 2006 the films on the list became a film series, with one film shown per month in selected venues.

This year, as indieWIRE’s announcement says, “the series will bring one film per month from indieWIRE’s annual list to theaters in a minimum of 15 cities, including New York City; Wilmington, DE; Ft. Lauderdale, Lake Worth and Key West, FL; Martha’s Vineyard, MA; Buffalo, NY; Tulsa, and Oklahoma City, OK; Scranton, PA; Cary, NC; Ann Arbor, MI; and Washington, DC.” Audience members will vote at each venue, resulting in a winning film, which will be announced in December 2007 at an award presentation in New York City.

Steve Barron’s Choking Man will kick off the series next week. The film was awarded “Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You” at the 2006 IFP Gotham Awards ceremony.

The obvious thing to love about this series is that great films are getting an audience and at least some of the attention they deserve. But I also love the choice of cities for the series. Some are obvious (umm, New York and Washington?), but how great to live in Buffalo or Scranton or Tulsa and get to see these films! I realize resources are limited, but that’s what I would like to see more of in the future–more small cities in out-of-the-way places getting access to great undiscovered films. Wouldn’t it be cool is we could vote for cities next year, like Four Eyed Monsters did in its DIY distribution efforts?

Ah, the age-old debate: Do you have to get a formal education to succeed in the arts? From painting and poetry to song writing and filmmaking, successful artists have done it both ways–with school and without. (Unsuccessful artists have done it both ways, too.) Either way, the bulk of the learning emerges from doing, right? And formal programs are so often lagging behind what’s really happening in the field. Of course, we all know that one of the most valuable things to gain from going through a program is connections, but are they worth the college debt? Especially considering that few people find the arts to be a lucrative career path?

As a writer, I have struggled with these questions myself, so a headline in yesterday’s New York Times caught my eye: “Where’d You Go to Film School? In My Bedroom.” The article points out how a formal education in filmmaking can seem even more pointless in “the era of miniDV digital video cameras, Final Cut Pro editing systems and YouTube auteurs with development deals.”

But now there’s something in between a formal education and the clueless dive-in-head-first approach–filmmaking tutorials offered on DVDs and CDs. On one level, it’s super exciting to think that you can gain some level of expertise and direction without wasting all the time and money on school. I’m a big fan of figuring out what your story is and then telling it, without a whole lineup of excuses that do nothing but set you back. (I’ll tell it after I get my degree, or after I save X amount of money, or after I move to New York…you know the drill.)

At the same time, while it’s important to just tell your story, maybe knowing how to tell your story is the thing you can’t learn off a DVD. Maybe you need another human being–a mentor–to ask the right questions and push you in the right way. Maybe you need someone experienced to help teach you how to weave together your narrative and the technical aspects in an engaging way. Here’s how a film professor quoted in the Times article put it:

Tom Denove, vice chairman for production in the film, television and digital media department of the film school at the University of California, Los Angeles, contended that educational software often misses the real point of making a film: the inherent power of a narrative.