Film Criticism

[Finch]

Won't Kickstarter claw the money back for you? I never pledged to any campaign.

[jazzo]

Unfortunately, no. From the comments, some have reported the issue and tried, but were unsuccessful.

Every campaign has a disclaimer that you’re pledging at your own risk. I’ve just only been part of ones that were either fulfilled without issue or never materialized at all and they were just a loss, but never one where a product was produced, distributed to two-thirds of the backers, but then scrapped for the last third, only to be sold for profit on another platform.

[DeprongMori]

I hope you get it. The advance passages and interviews he released during the campaign were incredibly well done, especially the more recent, deeply moving Milch interview.

I just wish he was a bit more honourable. If he’s filling new book orders from Kickstarter stock, that’s just shitty. If, for whatever reason, he isn’t in the financial position to fulfill 400 orders already paid for, communication of that would go a long way with backers.

That’s a shame he didn’t come through for a number of backers. I was fine with the delay given the circumstances in his life, and once the book was completed I got my copy with the bonus items pretty promptly. I wasn’t aware others got burned.

[domino harvey]

This passage from Peter Armitage’s 1961 article “the War of the Cults” (tracking nascent film criticism periodicals) in Motion quite struck me

[Matt]

There's a terribly cruel irony in this: Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote a piece for a monthly column in the Chicago Reader called "Moving Places: Does Film Criticism Still Exist?" only to be told that they weren't going to run it or any future columns from him.

The following was written as my second planned monthly column for the Chicago Reader, after the first of these ran in their March issue. The paper decided it wasn’t currently equipped to handle editing articles by freelancers so they paid me for this piece but decided not to run it or to run any future columns of mine, at least for the time being. They also emphasized that they would be open to future “pitches” of mine, assuming that I would want to offer any.

[Walter Kurtz]

1. The Reader kicks a guy in the teeth who wrote for them for over 20-some years?
2. One of the very few watchable English-language films released in 2025 (The Mastermind) can't get a decent USA distributed blu-ray release?

Predictions:

3. Famines, plagues, disasters... and then a dozen fiery angels lighting up the nighttime sky.

[hearthesilence]

The Reader has been undergoing major changes so I guess this may be a byproduct of that. They switched their publication to a monthly basis beginning THIS month, and I imagine things are still settling over there. It's a non-profit now so it's probably an even more scrappier operation than usual. Still sucks for Rosenbaum but it's not exactly a great time to have your income tied to the newspaper business. (I mean, it wasn't really "great" before, but now it's even worse.)