Film Criticism

[Mr Sausage]

I'm sorry I called you an anhedonic mummy...

[knives]

Hah. From my earliest days, I tended to peek ahead to the end of mysteries (and similar stories). Too much suspense/tension damaged my ability to enjoy a story.

Honestly same. I’m also terrible at guessing plot points so mysteries don’t work for me that way. Probably explains why how done its work better for me then the whos.

[Michael Kerpan]

I'm sorry I called you an anhedonic mummy...

(Made me laugh)

[colinr0380]

The UK magazine industry is in a bit of upheaval at the moment. In the editorial of the latest issue of Sight &Sound (December 2024) Mike Williams laments the news that Total Film, the magazine set up to compete against its rival in the same Hollywood news sphere, Empire in 1997, had its last issue in October. At the very end of the editorial Williams says long live the rest of the print film magazines currently on the market at the moment, from Cahiers du cinema and Empire to Neo and Little White Lies...

.... only for this months edition of Neo (Issue 245, December 2024) to announce in its own editorial that, just as it celebrates its 20th anniversary, that issue itself is going to be its last. This one hits a bit harder than Total Film in that I have been regularly picking up Neo for years now, particularly for Jonathan Clements' "Manga Snapshot" column, and also for its rundown of the upcoming month releases in anime, manga and Asian film in general, which always provides all of that information in one place rather than having to trawl through the forum or multiple websites for it. So that's the end for now for a specific magazine dedicated to anime and manga coverage (and the Asian music scene too) - luckily OtakuUSA magazine turns up on the shelves of WHSmiths, although being an American magazine, that of course is going to have a more US focus to it, and it comes out bi-monthly I think. As Clements says in his final column:

Twenty-five years ago, Jim McLennan, the editor of Trash City magazine, stated that the ultimate aim of anime journalism was to render itself obsolete. The last anime journalist out of the building, he said, could turn off the lights, because if the mainstream was carrying anime coverage alongside real films, interviewing anime directors, and reviewing the new titles, then there was no need for a specialist sector.

When athletes are flashing Dragonball Z hand signals, and Uniqlo sells Evangelion T-shirts, anime is certainly mainstream... in a sense. But for every Makoto Shinkai interview in Sight & Sound or SFX, there are a dozen TV shows that go unnoticed, and a cluster of movies that get no attention at all. That's going to be someone else's problem from now on.

Print costs money, and everybody on the web wants everything for free. When the All the Anime blog was shut down earlier this year, I was told that kidz today aren't interested in "long-form journalism", which apparently means 800 words or more.

[Walter Kurtz]

That's sad. I like to hold books and magazines. I'm very tactile I guess. I'm also glad Cineaste is still being published. For me it's easily the finest English language film mag in the world and has been for twenty years and has more worthwhile annual content in it's quarterly issues than the monthlies do.

[Michael Kerpan]

Worthwhile material on anime online is pretty hit-and-miss (mostly miss).

[MichaelB]

Except you can only organically experience a film on a narrative level one time.

Not if viewings are decades apart and you can't remember the first thing about it.

[Maltic]

Hah. From my earliest days, I tended to peek ahead to the end of mysteries (and similar stories). Too much suspense/tension damaged my ability to enjoy a story.

I'm in this camp as well.

Perhaps it's ADD, but complicated plots tend to bother me and I often find myself reading up on a film before having finished it, just to "get the plot out of the way".

As a native Danish speaker, I have a hard time with English subtitles as well, when the language of the film is not (also) English and it's a wordy film that I haven't seen before.

I don't first-watch films with the commentary track on, though.

[Michael Kerpan]

Glad I am not alone in my proclivity for self-spoiling.

[Never Cursed]

I seem to remember a time when Jacobin had decent film critics (or at least people that were capable of seriously talking about film) on staff, but clearly that has passed - what on earth has happened over there that listicles like this get published?

[MichaelB]

Talking of plots, while the redesign of Sight & Sound brought with it an unarguable benefit in that the mag can finally display Eastern European diacritics for the first time in ages, I think the decision to reduce plot synopses from 250 words to 50 was a serious misstep, and I hope they have a rethink at a time when it doesn't look like a screeching U-turn.

Speaking from very long experience of writing them, 250 words was pretty much perfect - you can summarise all the really important narrative beats in that, without going into needlessly distracting detail. But 50 words is barely enough time to briefly set the scene.

[domino harvey]

Adrian Martin has a new book, Filmmakers Thinking - with an intro by Radu Jade

[yoshimori]

Talking of plots, while the redesign of Sight & Sound brought with it an unarguable benefit in that the mag can finally display Eastern European diacritics for the first time in ages, I think the decision to reduce plot synopses from 250 words to 50 was a serious misstep, and I hope they have a rethink at a time when it doesn't look like a screeching U-turn.

Speaking from very long experience of writing them, 250 words was pretty much perfect - you can summarise all the really important narrative beats in that, without going into needlessly distracting detail. But 50 words is barely enough time to briefly set the scene.

Not to quibble, but my experience suggests that - for those who somehow have no access to three or four shots of a film, a moving picture being worth a pretty significant number of words - a 100-word synopsis, judiciously crafted, does everything that needs to be done. As for "reviews", I rarely get past the first sentence!

[MichaelB]

Whereas my three-and-a-half decades' experience of writing synopses at multiple lengths and of using historical synopses in connection with encyclopaedic projects like BFI Screenonline suggests that while you can certainly offer a superficial overview at 100 words (although I'd say this is the absolute barest minimum, 50 being seriously inadequate), you really need something closer to 250 to create something that's actually useful to future scholars - especially if that synopsis is the only one available, sometimes with regard to a film that is either locked away in an archive or which no longer exists at all. And it invariably took me considerably longer to get a synopsis down to 250 words than it did to write the first draft!

[FilmPodcaster]

I was just catching up on a number of the posts talking about Ray Carney from 2021. I have mixed feelings about him. He has helped me see a lot more about cinema and it's possibilities. I owe a lot to him. However, I find his trashing of most of what's been produced in Hollywood to be pure rhetoric. He has his points, but he's too simplistic about it. I noticed that someone found his message from his mailbag on his website where he does talk about mainstream movies he likes. He also puts down directors who others champion, like Kubrick, Welles and Lynch. Yes those directors have metaphors (which we all know Carney hates), and are picturesque filmmakers, but so what ? There films certainly go beyond that and have rich emotional experiences, complicated characters and don't offer easy answers, which are the kinds of films Carney champions. I suspect if everyone hated Lynch, Welles and Kubrick that he'd champion them. It seems to me that he's a contrarian. He has to go with the under dog no matter what. I appreciate that about him because he certainly champions great artists (Leigh, Cassavetes, May) but he takes it to a whole other extreme. He uses rhetoric to prove a point. It's just not very thoughtful.

Also metaphors are not necessarily static. And once you decide on how you see something it certainly has emotional power behind it. I used to agree with him that they were static, unfeeling and unemotional. I don't anymore. I will say, however, that feelings that can come from the human face or watching characters interact is usually, for me, more powerful and valuable.

I think it's also interesting that the various film scholars I've interviewed (I run a YouTube Channel) all dislike his work. Jonathan Rosenbaum told me he doesn't think Carney is a good writer. Same with Joseph McBride and James Naremore. Is it because of his trashing of anything mainstream or what others consider art films, that he doesn't ? I'm not sure.

Rosenbaum wrote an article about his issues with Carney's writing that people may find valuable. I'll paste it below.

https://jonathanrosenbaum.net/2025/10/r ... assavetes/

If anyone is diving into Carney for the first time, what I'd suggest is to not take his criticisms of others too seriously. Again, he has some valid points but to me it's a lot of rhetoric. It's more beneficial to read about what he champions.

[domino harvey]

I mean, it’s pretty obvious why no serious film writer respects him and I don’t believe you’re being sincere when you act like you don’t know why: he excludes, with extreme derision, 95% of all movies out of hand (conservative estimate, probably even worse than that) and prioritizes aspects of film which are few people’s favorite things about the art form. This is appealing to some young people just dipping their toe in the waters because it makes tackling something as intimidating as cinema much easier— almost everything sucks, pshew, I don’t have to worry about it anymore! But this kind of absurd reductionism and exclusion looks more and more idiotic the more you discover about film for yourself

You can read more of this forum’s thoughts on Carney here

[Matt]

Matt Zoller Seitz has been laid off from New York magazine / Vulture after 14 years.

[Michael Kerpan]

Matt -- This thread should perhaps be called "Lingering Death of Film Criticism"

[Finch]

I pre-ordered his Deadwood book from his store. I'm so grateful he's reprinting it as I missed the original run. Good luck with the store, Matt and Judith!

[jazzo]

I’m pretty torn on MZS, at least on a personal level. I’ve always been a fan of his criticism and film writing and own a number of his books, feeling like we shared similar sensibilities about what we enjoyed or wanted from our art and entertainment, so was happy to become one of the original 2019 Kickstarter backers for his A Lie Agreed Upon: The Deadwood Bible, my all-timer for greatest television show. I was so early in the campaign,in fact, that he hadn’t quite figured out how he was going to ship to international backers when I pledged.

Eventually, things were worked out. All backers would pay the cost of the book upon completion of the campaign, and anyone outside the US would be contacted separately for a more realistic shipping charge when their book was ready to go out.

The campaign was successfully funded past its goal. The book was worked on and expanded, and then, due to some deeply tragic personal circumstances for Matt, its publication delayed.

It was, however, finally finished and in 2022, I was sent a request from Matt and Judith for my additional shipping charge to Canada (twice the amount to a US address), which I PayPalled immediately, and which he confirmed receipt of through email, with a promise of immediate fulfillment.

Nothing came, and about four months later, I followed up.

No response and no book.

Updates to the Kickstarter campaign ceased in September 2022, with a promise the final 400 pledges would be shipped soon. From the bitter complaints in the comments section of the campaign, I gather most of those were never shipped.

It’s four years later.

Matt hasn’t responded to any of my inquiries through Kickstarter, the emails we shared, nor his Bluesky or the MZS bookstore contacts, which Judith now runs for him.

About a year ago, he started selling original Kickstarter hardcover copies of the Deadwood book out of his online bookstore, but at a huge markup.

I reached out, very politely, to ask if the remaining pledges from the campaign were going to be fulfilled soon, and heard nothing back.

Now a reprint of the hardcover is being sold through the store. I sent another polite inquiry to see if those reprints would at least be used to finish off the remaining Kickstarter backers, and again, heard nothing back.

It’s a shame. I empathize with his personal and professional situations and still enjoy his writing, but there’s an underlying bitterness there for me. I feel like I’ve been ghosted by a friend after loaning them money, and it all feels tainted now.

[hearthesilence]

I think this is why I've gone from seeing Kickstarter campaigns on a regular basis to only GoFundMe campaigns - people suck at fulfilling these "promises," they just want to take your money, and at this point there's no use in pretending otherwise. I gave to a dozen Kickstarter campaigns run by people I KNOW, and only ONE has ever followed through - a download of their documentary, which may be easier to deliver, but AFAIK they delivered on everything they offered to backers. Everyone else, nothing - one person even texted me with a contrite emoji a month after the campaign ended saying "I owe you a poster" but never came up with anything.

[jazzo]

Yeah, not to derail this thread too much, but same for me.

Except Don Hertzfeldt’s campaigns. He’s been incredible.

[colinr0380]

I have to say that I had the same experience: backed the Deadwood book Kickstarter and then... nothing aside from a message about contacting about extra payments for shipping at some future point. I know that MZS was going through a number of really terrible family issues at the time, so never really pursued things, and left it at that. But it did make me more cautious about Kickstarter pledging for a while there. But at least I don't feel like I was the only one now! So, don't worry that you missed out Finch! (And ironically you were the one who got me into Deadwood in the first place, as I bought the complete series DVD set from you a number of years back!)

But, to also back up jazzo's comment above, Don Hertzfeldt did a lot to win me back with his projects that came through; as did Hal Hartley (who handled the inital unforeseen inability to film Where To Land after a successful Kickstarter - because it was due to film in 2020, and we all know what happened then - with the offer of full refunds or payment in other material such as books or DVDs of his other films; and then eventually did a second Kickstarter to successfully produce the film). The Robert Woodhead (ex- of AnimEigo) projects have all come through as well (or as with the Macross II edition that has taken over a year in production, there have been regular updates on progress), though for the last couple I have had to add on an extra pledge to cover shipping costs at the end so that has to be factored in now, which seems reasonable with all the situations going on in the world at the moment.

[Finch]

jazzo's experience makes me wish I hadn't placed the order! I was already wondering why there was no estimated release date. I used a credit card instead of PayPal.

[jazzo]

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.