2009′s Most Memorable Critical Dust-Ups

From Sundance punch-outs to industry infighting, a rundown of the year's most memorable critic-led battles.

Roger Ebert vs. Armond White (August 14)

This seemed to be a watershed year for the contrarian New York Press critic, whose New York magazine profile in February and anointment as the chief of the New York Film Critics Circle served as kindling to the blaze that erupted when White wrote a scathing review for “District 9″ entitled “From Mothership to Bullship” that prompted several months’ worth of comments that were passionate rebukes from both angry fanboys and cinephiles. (It didn’t help he gave a positive notice to the widely reviled “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra” the same week.) And yet, for one shining moment, White found a defender in Roger Ebert, who wrote that White’s opinion was “often valuable because it is outside the mainstream” and chided the fanboys for becoming fans of the film before they had even seen it, as White had.

Of course, White’s reviews are always reliable for entertaining comment threads, but Ebert’s defense of White proved to be more so — and the commenters were influential, as well. Ebert decided to change his mind the next day — the headline of his article “Not in defense of Armond White” after a reader supplied him a chart of movies that White had liked versus ones he didn’t. After discovering that White preferred “Transformers 2″ to “Synecdoche, New York,” Ebert concluded that White is a “troll.” Although many would agree that Ebert needn’t elaborate on that point, the entire exercise elucidated what readerships want from reviews these days, whether that’s affirmation for their own opinion or somebody to disagree with.

James Rocchi on “Couples Retreat” (October 7)

For a lesson in the disconnect between film critics and mainstream audiences, one should refer to the comments thread of Rocchi’s review of “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.” However, for a fascinating discussion on how web etiquette and film sites have evolved, one should refer to Anne Thompson’s “Full Disclosure: Bloggers Break Rules” post from October that leads with the line, “James Rocchi is the contemporary model of [an] online era film critic.” Indeed, Rocchi is a prolific writer for MSN Movies and Redbox, as well as keeping his own site, and as such, writes both features and reviews. When he was invited to the “Couples Retreat” junket in Bora Bora, his coverage became the flashpoint for the year’s second great debate on the ethics of being a film writer in a Wild West-like online world of set visits, embargoes and press days.

As a critic, Rocchi ultimately panned the film and his report from the Polynesian island was a wonderfully written, self-aware piece that offered insight into how a film journalist operates these days and detailed the exotic activities that were crammed in between interviews with Vince Vaughn and Kristen Bell, like feeding stingrays. But it was published just when the Federal Trade Commission announced they would be cracking down on bloggers who don’t disclose payments or free goods from an advertiser that they write about, and Rocchi was soon in the middle of a heated debate. (Rocchi’s appearance on the Showbiz Sandbox podcast was as tense as these kind of things get.) Yet Thompson’s column wasn’t about payola, it was about the new rules of film writing, and it brought out no less than Ain’t It Cool‘s Harry Knowles, ComingSoon.net‘s Edward Douglas, and Dark Horizons‘ Garth Franklin, among others, to comment on how those rules about the horse trading that goes on to get coverage have changed even during the past 15 years they have been in business online.

Anne Thompson vs. Kent Jones (November 11)

In this day and age of internet anonymity, it was refreshing to see many sign their own names to the nasty responses to Thompson’s analysis following the news of L.A. Weekly film critic Scott Foundas leaving his post for the associate film programmer job at the Film Society of Lincoln Center (and a contributing editor to the Film Society’s Film Comment). What irked many was Thompson’s reference to Kent Jones, the man who previously held the job, as someone who “screw[ed] up” his chance at running the New York Film Festival, and the artistic direction of the Film Society as a whole. Besides Jones being much beloved by the New York film community — he’s now the executive director of Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation — Thompson’s post touched on the general antipathy towards newly installed Film Society executive director Mara Manus, known more for her fundraising acumen than her interest in film, and came days after Newsweek‘s film critic David Ansen had taken a gig as the artistic director of the Los Angeles Film Festival and Variety critic Robert Koehler programmed his first AFI Fest.

The exodus of top critics from the profession lead Thompson to profess “film criticism is a dying art.” With all three of those factors taken into account, it’s understandable why Manohla Dargis, Amy Taubin and even Jones and Foundas came out of the woodwork to torch Thompson in the comments for her characterization of Jones and the state of film criticism. This is the kind of backroom discussion that rarely slips into public discourse, but this corker of a conversation shed some light not just on the state of the East Coast cinemarati, but underlined a year in which film journalism and criticism is undergoing major changes and taking many different forms.

[Photo: "Dirt! The Movie," Common Ground Media, 2009; all other photos property of their respective owners and used without permission]

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