Nothing Else to Do?

How an L.A. event last weekend showed us what happens when film critics stop being polite and start getting real.

Peary actually responded by bringing up a criticism of a chapter of his film called “When Criticism Mattered” that Chicago Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum felt was inaccurate, saying Rosenbaum “is a web person, he lives in web culture and is involved in all sorts of groups who argue with each other and have a dialogue with each other and for him, film criticism is totally vibrant today. For me, my answer is okay, I’m glad all you guys are talking to each other, that’s fine, but the big thing to me that’s missing is critics are no longer helping put people into seats for really, really interesting movies.”

Rainer argued that, “What’s sad now about criticism is not so much that it’s dead, but that there are probably more good critics potentially in a position to be critics right now — critics who have written, who are writing, who should be writing, who have stopped writing — than there has ever been in the history of American journalism. There are just fewer and fewer places where these people can be published.”

He and Taylor both commented on the changing climate for film journalism, with Taylor mentioning a recent anonymous example of having to write a profile of a male movie star for a major women’s magazine and being surprised when after turning in the piece, her editor said, “well, actually we wanted a piece about how hot this guy is. Could you go back and ask him whether he had an affair with Y movie star on the set of X film or whether he hated her guts?”

Rainer said he saw the tide starting to turn away from serious criticism when Siskel and Ebert came on the air and “suddenly, criticism became a celebrity occupation and all sorts of people who really had no business being critics wanted to be critics because they wanted to be on TV. I taught a class once at a prominent film school in criticism and I never had such a photogenic class in my life.”

Ironically, Peary’s film about the profession goes a long way in preserving and promoting the importance of serious film criticism, and reflects on the days when debates about the current cinema were worthy of pages in the New Yorker rather than a back-and-forth on Twitter feeds. Though “For the Love of Movies” is now available on DVD through the official web site, it will continue to travel across the country on the festival circuit through April and New Yorkers will get their own screening and panel discussion on June 1st at the BAMcinématek. Here’s hoping that Schickel will make the trip.

[Additional photos: Richard Schickel in "You Must Remember This: The Warner Bros. Story," Warner Bros., 2008, Robert DeNiro in "Taxi Driver," Columbia Pictures, 1977; Andrew Sarris in "For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism," AG Films, 2009]

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