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:
Avi Lerner is my favorite producer in Hollywood because while everyone else makes such a big show about how much they care about art while busily doing whatever dirty deeds they have to do to get a movie made, Avi is up front about his point of view: If the money is right, he’s ready to pull the trigger…
But what impressed me when we had lunch the other day was that he goes to the movies every weekend like a regular moviegoer, paying his $11 to see whatever new Hollywood film has popped up in the local multiplex. Sometimes he’ll see as many as five films in a weekend. Since today’s critics are famously out of touch with the common taste, I decided to recruit Avi as my own personal multiplex movie critic. He doesn’t use as many five-dollar words as Manohla Dargis and he doesn’t have quite as firm a grasp on the auteur theory as Kenny Turan, but he knows what he likes–and why he likes it–which is always a good starting point for any critic.
Turan, of course, works in Goldstein’s office, and Dargis used to, so even if he’s genuine about the “you guys just don’t get it” sentiment, that those are the two critics he names suggests that there’s got to be a certain amount of winking going on here. But it’s still offensive to suggest that a big Hollywood producer who doesn’t pretend to “care about art” is the voice that should be making declarative statements of quality over someone like Dargis, who is paid not to phone in facile “see it/skip it” consumer reports, but to file dispatches from a battlefield where anything made in the name of art is an underdog fighting (and, more often than not, dying) against the mechanized killing machine with which Lerner is in league.
It’s one thing to suggest that newspaper critics don’t always know how to talk to their audience. It’s quite another to suggest that the audience would be better off if the critic’s voice was drowned out by the voice of the industry. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that advertising’s job?
Related: The Death Squads and the Film Critics
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