It's old news that times are tight for professional movie critics at magazines and newspapers -- which means the Times got around to reporting it on Tuesday. More chilling is this list of critics who've left or been pushed from their jobs in the last two years.
Ahh, why should you care? Aren't movie reviewers -- those elitist thumbsuckers who dare to tell you what to think about "Alvin and the Chipmunks" -- an eminently disposable part of a troubled medium?
Sorry, no. I don't trust the IMDb user comments or Ain't It Cool News to point me to movies the studios aren't marketing down my throat, or give me a handle on how to consider the ones they are. I look, or looked, to Kevin Thomas, Jami Bernard, Michael Atkinson, Eleanor Ringel, Nathan Lee, and David Ansen. It's called informed context, and anybody who can provide it in our hoarse, hectoring 24/7 media culture should be trusted and prized, not shown the door.
Some, like Bernard, are reinventing themselves on the web, and of course the irony is that the readership for a film critic is now global rather than regional. I get emails from around the world; 10 years ago I'd just be hearing from that cranky guy in Everett. You'd think the media moguls, for all their talk about bringing the newspaper into the 21st century, would figure out a way to leverage that.
But maybe I'm wrong. Comments, please.
