SpoutBlog on spout.com

Here’s what I would like to learn from a movie a 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.

Peary, a longtime film critic making his directorial debut here, apparently spent years gathering the dozens of interviews threaded throughout the movie. But a plurality of voices does not yield a valid thesis. By trying to bring the history of film criticism into focus, he has grand ambitions. I admire them, but not the resulting product. Here are a few other things I would like to learn: Do junketeers and unpaid web critics deserve equal consideration alongside the (dwindling) collection of salaried ones? Are there cultural, sociological, age or gender issues that play a role in the degree of influence a film critic can have? What qualifies someone as a “professional” critic? Perry doesn’t know, or doesn’t care, or couldn’t get his subjects to address these potent, debate-worthy topics.

Although he makes a valuable attempt to combine insights from older critics with the developing voices of the blogger crowd, Peary’s movie joins a handful of other recent documentaries about the job that completely ignore the notion of critical legitimacy. Jamie Kennedy and Michael Addis’s Heckler (for about fifteen minutes, a brilliantly assembled encapsulation of stand-up comedian anger issues) tries to entertain its audience by almost exclusively taunting the lowest common denominator — basically, a handful of narcissistic young critics willing to let Kennedy trash them on camera in exchange for free publicity. There’s no differentiation between these people and the spate of talented folks writing about more important issues than whether or not Son of the Mask deserves a moment’s notice.

While I have only seen the first nine minutes of Sujewa Ekanayake’s Indie Film Blogger Road Trip, it appears to suffer from the opposite problem. Assembling a series of highly perceptive movie bloggers, Ekanayake fails to explore whether their competence has become threatened by an overabundance of amateur critics. I care about the insights of my colleagues Anthony Kaufman and Stu VanAirsdale, but the implicit assumption that these guys possess greater validity than an excitable fanboy whose blog attracts sizable traffic requires fleshing out.

For the Love of Movies at least possesses superior intelligence to the other two entries in this makeshift nonfiction trend, but it never radically engages with the material at hand. Peary’s own film writing proves he’s got the chops, and since he’s been at it for a number of years, you would think he could formulate the varying stages of evolution that the critical practice has undergone. But his even-handed, chapter-based approach doesn’t allow for these important topics to gain any traction. The curse of the average film critic movie lives on.

It seems to me that all three documentaries suffer from a central fallacy: That film critics themselves make interesting subjects. Sure, I get the value of Andrew Sarris and Molly Haskell, but I don’t necessarily care to know what a cute couple they turned into (I mean, good for them, but it hardly benefits the movie). Sarris’s famous dispute with Pauline Kael about the questionable strengths of the auteur theory would make for a nice segment if we could see some footage of the two of them having it out. Otherwise, you’re probably better off reading the original essays where the battle lines were drawn.

I first saw a rough cut of For the Love of Movies last year at the Moving Image Institute for Film Criticism and Feature Writing, where Peary asked us to keep our reactions under wrap. In the room, however, a number of dissatisfied responses immediately arose during the post-screening discussion. Peary admitted that he avoided trying to represent the act of criticism itself, given the prosaic outcome of simply showing a critic typing away in front of a computer screen. Fair enough — I appreciate that he opted out of making a distended Warholian experiment nobody wants to watch. Nevertheless, the focus on the craft feels disingenuous. The majority of For the Love of Movies features critics talking about their inexplicably profound connection to the silver screen, and how they wound up expressing their affection for it through the written word. If there truly is potential for a great movie about critics, I believe it lies not with the premise of writing movie reviews but with the subtleties of active participation in a diverse and ever-expanding community of fiercely devoted movie buffs.

Here, Perry lacks focus. He arbitrarily drifts from the “elite” critics to the not-so-elite with little regard for the distinctions between the two. And, let’s face it, there are distinctions. I’m sure many critics, particularly those whose entire careers revolve around maintaining a web presence, want to move beyond the facile critic-blogger binary to a place where those differences are treated as irrelevant, but for now the tension between the two ends of the spectrum ought to get more screen time. Peary’s camera shows us the lavish annual awards banquet hosted by the New York Film Critics Circle, where humble guys like Tony Scott and Dave Kehr awkwardly handle the spotlight, but the director devotes no time to the notable absence of certain non-print critics, whose absence lead to the existence of New York Film Critics Online.

Even as he remains within this limited crowd, Peary actively ignores the inherent drama taking place within it. We see no exclusive peaks at the heated behind-the-scenes arguments between NYFCC members about the movies that deserve proper notice. If such incidents leak out to the blogs every year, it couldn’t be so hard to address the clandestine squabbling in Peary’s movie. These incessant debates, which range from hilariously trivial to passionate and occasionally mind-blowing, at least show what distinctive personalities exist in the heart of film critic central. I’m not suggesting Peary should condescend to this bunch, but it’s absolutely worthwhile to analyze the ubiquitous eccentricities of the scene.

A lot of critics embrace their obsessions, but this driving force often alienates them from addressing anyone but their peers. When Cinematical/Fearnet/eFilmcritic writer Scott Weinberg claims that “If movies could kill you, I would have been dead years ago,” I feared for his health. (To Weinberg’s credit, he seems to get along pretty well, so I’m mostly using his histrionic statement to illustrate a point.) If critics spend all their waking moments with the lights out staring at a static screen, it raises the question of how much the real world that gives rise to those moving pictures actually informs their understanding of them. I’m not saying this isolationist effect universally afflicts all critics — merely that it strikes me as an essential part of the Conversation. Angela Chrislieb and Stephen Kijak’s 2002 documentary Cinemania profiles cinefiles whose movie-watching tendencies turn them into unique social pariahs. Presumably, most critics steer clear of this fate in order to deliver sane, coherent film analysis, but you wouldn’t know it from Peary’s documentary.