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Monday 7 July 2008

Among the critics -1

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That distinguished film writer, Richard Schickel aims a thunderbolt at bloggers who think they have a right to be reviewers:

Let me put this bluntly, in language even a busy blogger can understand: Criticism â” and its humble cousin, reviewing â” is not a democratic activity. It is, or should be, an elite enterprise, ideally undertaken by individuals who bring something to the party beyond their hasty, instinctive opinions of a book... I don't think it's impossible for bloggers to write intelligent reviews. I do think, however, that a simple "love" of reading (or movie-going or whatever) is an insufficient qualification for the job. That way often leads to cultishness (see the currently inflated reputations of Philip K. Dick or Cornell Woolrich, both easy reads for lazy, word-addicted minds).

And we have to find in the work of reviewers something more than idle opinion-mongering. We need to see something other than flash, egotism and self-importance

It's an interesting piece -  especially in its emphasis on the difference between criticism and reviewing  -  but I wish Schickel wouldn't indulge in throwing insults for the sake of it. Is blogging really the equivalent of "finger painting"? Yes, sometimes, but not always. Of course, there's the danger that allowing a million voices to have their say will just produce one huge wall of noise. But blogging also gives a platform to people who have genuinely original things to say, but who don't belong to what is, in many respects, a self-selecting and rather cosy clique.

As I've mentioned before, I've had enough bad nights at the cinema over the past decade to begin to wonder about the value of an awful lot of  film reviewing.  I hate to raise the subject of Michael Moore yet again (yawn) but he seems to me an interesting example of how many of the critics fell down on their job, lavishing praise on his documentaries because they agreed with the message, and ignoring the, ahem, problematic content. When I was researching a Times feature on Bowling For Columbine back in 2003, I rang the editor of Sight and Sound to see what he thought about the controversy raging over Moore's dubious technique. I expected to hear one of those stirring "all cinema is subjective" speeches that are the stock-in-trade of Moore's defenders. In the event, I discovered that he wasn't even aware there was a debate in the first place. As it happens, Richard Schickel - who's on the Left, by the way - was one of the few professionals willing to speak out.

Maybe Moore's new healthcare film - now playing at Cannes - will rise above all that. We'll see. As far as his earlier polemics are concerned, it's clear that most of the reviewers fell down on the job. On-line amateurs did an awful lot more of the digging. Some of them wilfully misread the evidence. But others did important work. Of course, most films aren't political documentaries, but there's a lesson here. If there's a crisis in the reviewing trade - of which I'm a part - most of the blame lies with the reviewers rather than the fractious interlopers from blogland.

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