Alternative Film Guide

In the New York Times, A.O. Scott discusses Roger Ebert and film criticism:

"In Awake in the Dark, an anthology of "The Best of Roger Ebert" published by the University of Chicago Press two years ago, you will find a 1990 essay by Roger’s friend Richard Corliss of Time and (at the time) Film Comment lamenting that the noble, still-young tradition of [Andrew] Sarris and [Pauline] Kael, and of James Agee and Manny Farber too, was in danger of being permanently dumbed-down and quantified. Passionate argument and reasoned judgment, he warned, were being driven to the margins by scales of one to four stars, by opposed thumbs and sound bites.

"The title of Mr. Corliss’s essay was ‘All Thumbs, or, Is There a Future for Film Criticism?’ This kind of rhetorical question is meant to be answered in the negative, and if the future looked grim back in 1990 -­ when Entertainment Weekly’s letter grades and the proliferation of [Gene] Siskel and Ebert knockoffs seemed to threaten the integrity of the critical enterprise -­ what must it look like now that the Internet is gobbling up all discourse? If a star- or thumb-based rating system was the enemy of nuance and complex thought, what are we to make of the splattered fruit at rottentomatoes.com or the numerical averages at metacritic.com?"

Technorati Tags: Roger Ebert, A. O. Scott, Pauline Kael, Richard Corliss, Manny Farber, James Agee, film criticism, Andrew Sarris

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