The end of movie critics

There was a time when I dreamed of being a movie critic for a living. That was at least partly my motivation for applying for the arts writing program at Columbia. I realized that it was a long shot, since there aren't that many movie critics and it's a tough gig to get, but I thought maybe I'd luck into it somehow.

But in the past few months there has been story after story about newspapers eliminating their movie and TV critics and just running the Associated Press reviews, to save money. Because any review of a movie is just as good, and who cares what local people think about movies? It's just a waste of money to pay someone to sit in the dark and spout off afterwards, all you get is a diversity of views and a variety of interesting writing about an important part of popular culture.

This is the latest one to go down. (Not that I condone this guy's catty, if cryptic, attacks on Richard Roeper and A.O. Scott in the last graf, though his final line struck fear into my heart.) In about five years, you'll be able to count all the movie critics on one hand. Apparently, I was born a few decades too late if this was what I wanted to do.

More on this topic, for the truly bored (or the truly interested in the kind of thoughts that occupy my brain. I wrote an essay for arts and culture class on this topic.)

* The War Against Movie Critics from Salon
* In Defense of Film Critics from the Christian Science Monitor
* Variety editor Peter Bart (producer of Revenge of the Nerds II) suggests critics should no longer exist, because they don't like the same movies "regular people" do, such as Norbit and Wild Hogs.
* The Chicago Sun-Times' Jim Emerson explains why that is a stupid thing to say.
* A.O. Scott of the New York Times on why he's a critic, or to answer his detractors, " just who he thinks he is."
* A contrary opinion: E! Online says that all critics are self-important blowhard who hate fun, while sensible, normal people just want to see things blow up and the good guys win every time. Sigh.