Anghus Houvouras on critics and whether they matter…
Last year I attempted to answer a question that feels asked as often as opinions about film are stated online:
It’s a difficult question because of how radically the film criticism has changed. I won’t bore you with a detailed historical breakdown of the medium, but it’s worth reviewing the basic timeline of the critical ages.
The Golden Age (Film critics are writers): 1910 – 1959
The Silver Age (Film critics become artists): 1960 – 1980
The Thumbs Age (Film critics become celebrities): 1980 – 1999
The Internet Age (Everybody’s a critic): 2000 – Present
So you have the infancy of film criticism that modeled most other popular critical mediums. The Silver Age saw new voices and new styles of analysis. The Thumbs Age saw film criticism enter the television age and reducing everything to simple binary constructs. Movies became pass/fail scenarios. The Internet Age started with film websites eroding the traditional brick and mortar print critics and then transitioned into the onslaught of social media and blogging that made everyone with a computer and a connection an armchair expert.
The modern state of criticism is pretty bleak. The iconic critics of past ages have passed on. There are precious few voices that been able to capture the same level of zeitgeist in the 21st Century. The identities of individual critics have become far less valuable than the websites they write for. Someone attempting to be a film critic in the current landscape is awash in an endless sea of sites, blogs, and YouTube Channels delivering a constant stream of perspectives on not just movies but trailers, commercials, and micro-analyzing the most minute statements looking for shreds of a story to stretch out for 10 minutes. The few voices who managed to make a name for themselves during the internet age fell off the map, were released from popular sites for being too costly, or were discredited for being repugnant human beings with grabby hands (Hi Devin!).
To save you some time, I’ve asked and answered this question before: Do critics matter? No. They probably never did. Siskel & Ebert came the closest in a time where their two thumbs were seen as the authority in deciding whether a movie was worthy of existence. The key word here is ‘mattered’. They certainly mattered to the film studios who court them with free screenings, promotional items, and set visits. Generating press requires warm bodies to write the stories from the time the movie is announced through the release of the Blu-ray (more on that in a moment). They also ‘mattered’ to websites looking to generate clickable links.
The main problem these days is that most critics don’t just review movies. They have to be press junket attending, opinion giving pundits responsible for generating more content than a traditional movie critic. You’re as likely to see a movie critic writing about a behind the scenes photo from Spider-Man: Homecoming as reviewing Fifty Shades Darker. For the record, that’s not a criticism as much as an observation. The fact is most publications and online sites can’t support having a person only wear one hat. Your movie critic has to also share his opinions on the latest Netflix offerings and break down trailers. There aren’t that many critics who just do movie reviews these days. It’s become a facet of their repertoire but not their sole focus.
So we’re in a day and age where there are more critics than ever (and multiplying rapidly), a distinct lack of prominent critical voices, and the critics themselves are part of a broader mosaic of entertainment news and opinion punditry that has them sharing opinions on tangent elements of the industry rather than just the finished product.
The film critic of 2017 is a wildly different creature than their peers of previous generations. There isn’t the same focus on the study of cinema as an art or a foundation of journalism. At the dawn of the 21st Century, prominent film voices were coming from websites and were schooled on film from the shelves of the local video store. We’re not that far away from a day where newer film critics probably never even set foot in a video store. They’ll be students of streaming services, relegated to the classics from whatever studios Netflix has distribution deals with.
“This sounds a lot like Psycho, but I haven’t seen it since Paramount only distributes through Hulu and Amazon Prime.”
Shudder.
The more I dive into this subject, it seems like the conclusion is solidifying like drying concrete. I’ve got some more thoughts on the matter. Stay tuned.
Anghus Houvouras
Originally published February 23, 2017. Updated April 16, 2018.
