I recently found an article, entitled “Do Movie Critics Matter?” It was written by Armond White, who is the chairman of the New York Film Critics Circle. As one would imagine, he has quite a few interesting things to say. Some of which I agree with, others not so much.
Here are a few of the best quotes from White’s article.
“It's always a good year at the movies, even if the great films can be counted on a few digits and never get mentioned at the Academy Awards. That's why we need film critics—to help us understand the sute of movies, our cultural life, and our general moral and political being.”
While I don’t agree that every year is a good year at the movies (for example, 2011 was pretty awful, in my humble opinion), I do agree with him that film critics are necessary to help the general audience understand more about the world we live in.
“It seems that film critics, as a breed, survive even though so much else in our culture is moving further and faster away from intelligence, individuality, morality, and literacy: As the filmmaker James Toback put it, "the deterioration of life as we know it." Still, film critics persist, just as great movies—such as Jan Troell's Everlasting Moments, Michael Jackson's This Is It, and the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man—persist, in the face of technological changes that leave little room for art, reflection, or human expression.”
I certainly see where he’s coming from on this, but I also see that film criticism has “evolved” over the last few decades, mostly through the internet and how that’s made anyone be able to post their own thoughts and feelings on a movie through blogs or Youtube videos. You could argue wether this has been a change for the better or for the worse, but it has changed the way film criticism has been handled.
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