Exile on 15th Street, N.W.

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By Alison Willmore on 06/18/2008

Filed under: Critic watch

At the New York Sun, S. James Snyder writes about both the ever-discussed endangerment of the print critic and last week's gathering/reading of selections from "Exile Cinema: Filmmakers at Work Beyond Hollywood," a book of film essays edited by Michael Atkinson, who also writes IFC.com's DVD column. Snyder slips in a bit of news on the first front I hadn't yet heard: "Three weeks ago, what has become a familiar scene played out once again at the Washington Post, as acclaimed writers Stephen Hunter and Desson Thomson accepted buyouts and resigned their full-time positions."

Mr. Hunter is one of the few film critics to have been given the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. While I've never much cared for his work, particularly when he suggested the Virginia Tech massacre could have been instigated by overconsumption of the films of John Woo (choice sentence: "Their possible influence on Cho can be clearly seen in 11 of the photos that feature handguns."), it smarts to see that only five years after winning the prize he's gone, his position likely with him.

As for the reading, Glenn Kenny has a report at his blog Some Came Running.

[Photo: Mark Wahlberg in "Shooter" -- totally based on a novel by Stephen Hunter. Paramount Pictures, 2007]