These were very distinct realms, often harboring mutual hostility. The daily and weekly reviewers gibed at the professors, while academics looked down their noses at nearly all mass-market critics. Andrew Sarris got a pass, chiefly because he had influenced so many film teachers, but I remember being embarrassed at faculty parties when people outside film asked me what I thought of Pauline Kael’s latest review. I never read her, and nobody I respected did either.

The burst of TV review shows in the late 1970s, launched by the success of Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel’s Sneak Previews, only intensified things. Siskel and Ebert realized that audiences had a keen appetite for clips—not the glimpses we get in trailers, but somewhat longer bits that would give us the flavor of a new release. But the film professoriat deplored the three-minute reviews, the shorthand judgments (thumbs up, thumbs down), and the plethora of clips. It seemed to us that the skinny guy and the fat guy, regardless of whether they recommended the movie or not, were functioning as part of the publicity for the film. The rise of movie review programs seemed to be in sync with 1970s strategies of saturation booking, shock-and-awe TV ads, and a general sense that each weekend’s releases were obligatory pop-culture events. Movie criticism was becoming an extension of the industry. The drift toward reviewing as infotainment was even clearer when Premiere emerged in the 1980s and Entertainment Weekly in the 1990s.

Roger Ebert was a regional critic who wrote occasionally for slick magazines; his Esquire profiles of Lee Marvin and Robert Mitchum have become classics of fly-on-the-wall New Journalism. The TV show made him a national figure, but I think it only reaffirmed academic indifference to him and to journalistic criticism generally.

We were too smug. Even if the show did promote Hollywood for 90% or so of its running time, it created an occasion for Siskel and Ebert to point out worthy smaller films. Now that Roger’s death has opened a flood of reminiscence from across the country, it’s obvious that the show helped cultivate a variety of tastes. For thousands of children and teenagers, Siskel and Ebert opened a door to kinds of cinema that was not part of their ordinary life. And as VHS and cable television expanded, viewers in Dayton or Fond du Lac could catch up with what the pair had talked about. Siskel and Ebert made cinephilia of all kinds respectable.

For me, Ebert was the man to watch. He was the designated film geek, while Siskel was a stand-in for the divorced dad looking for a movie to take his kid or his date to. Ebert could praise studio tentpole items and self-consciously serious art movies but he didn’t stint genre films, offbeat items, and independent fare. He practiced what Matt Zoller Seitz has called “silver linings” criticism: If something was good of its kind, give it the benefit of the doubt. He was closer than most mass-market critics to Cahiers du cinema’s “criticism of enthusiasm,” the idea that one should write only about the films one admires. It’s significant that just before his death, his blog posted the news that he’d still be writing, but “I’ll be able at last to do what I’ve always fantasized about doing: reviewing only the movies I want to review.”

As I came to know Roger in the early 2000s, I realized that the TV Ebert showed only one side of him. He did have the newspaperman’s love of the punchy lede and the rapid retort, skills on display in his banter with Siskel. But he was also an all-around intellectual in a way that few film critics have ever been.

He read widely in politics and science. An English literature major, he knew Dickens and Shaw intimately. The appreciative essays collected in the Great Movies volumes show a wide and deep knowledge of the arts. In public forums, he defended evolutionary theory and the prospect of living without a god to worship. Ever refusing the demarcation between high culture and low, he loved Simenon as well as Shakespeare, and he was proud of having written the script for Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. He had a wicked sense of humor too, as can be confirmed by his submissions to the New Yorker cartoon caption contest.

Roger was a journalist through and through, but he could have been quite comfortable in university teaching. He taught a famous night class at the University of Chicago, while maintaining a breathless schedule of writing and travel. For decades he conducted sessions of close analysis at festivals and conferences, even on cruise ships. “Democracy in the Dark,” he called these encounters. He would screen a film once all the way through, and then replay it on laserdisc, inviting anyone in the audience to call out, “Stop!” and then let everyone discuss what was happening. Sometimes the audience would spend days with a movie. People loved the chance to share a communal experience of coming to know a film intimately.

That sense of communal participation was magnified by his online activities. Ever eager to communicate with anybody, he embraced the Internet faster than any other critic, and his zeal for Facebook and Twitter became legendary. He got thousands of comments, and he replied to an astonishing number of them.

Roger visited Madison twice for our local festival, and I saw his teaching abilities at full stretch. In 2003 we screened A Hard Day’s Night at the Orpheum Theatre. The vast picture palace was packed, and Roger’s introduction was greeted with nearly as many whoops and claps as the movie itself. In 2006 he returned to do Q & A on Laura, another of the nominees in his Great Movies pantheon. During the same visit he sat down with our graduate students and discussed cinema with them. I saw then that Roger was an educator, but one without a theory to peddle. He was a straightforward, kindly person with an unbiased intelligence. He was as interested in people as in ideas.

Contrary to what you might have expected, I’m not going to suggest that Roger bridged the gaps among the different film cultures. Those gaps remain, even in the age of the Web. But without being an academic, or an industry insider, or a specialized cinephile, he made a great many people think seriously about film as an art.

Roger showed that popular film criticism could be an intellectually honorable enterprise—more than that, a calling. We have, I think he would have said, enough missionaries for this or that divinity. We need more missionaries for movies.

1. In a significant development for internet cinephilia, Hulu is heading down more of a movie buff route than Netflix is and has grabbed the Criterion catalogue for streaming on Hulu Plus. In a significant development for the deaf, the hard-of-hearing, and Americans who watch early Guy Ritchie movies, Netflix is boosting its volume of subtitled English-language streaming content, which is more complex than you might think but also has some questioning Netflix’s math. And in a significant development for people who write up links to media industry news, Redbox is still working on its own streaming site, but it might emerge too late to compete effectively.

2. If you have a few hundred million dollars lying around, you could bid for Blockbuster, though you’d also have to contend with studios still looking for what’s owed to them. Those studios’ windowing experiments haven’t significantly affected dwindling DVD revenue, so Disney is turning to a new digital distribution strategy (as well as raising its Redbox and Netflix rates). Unfortunately, it may find that no one wants to purchase online movies (as opposed to renting) or to actually pay anything for them.

3. 16mm film stock is looking endangered, as is Hollywood film production in Michigan, while the New York Film Critics Circle is scrambling online to stave off such a fate, and some European filmmakers are turning to fan-financing to keep going.

4. Once again, Hollywood movies have been declared dead (shouldn’t they technically be a zombies by now?); and once again, box office revenue is up but attendance is down (except among older audiences, interestingly); and once again studios love franchises, and international box office is key (even more important than Oscars). Maybe Hollywood scouring Europe for remake ideas and turning to untested directors are new? Well, not really.

5. Apple might improve the sound quality of iTunes downloads, but some wonder if users would really care and if it’s just an excuse to enable higher charges. Sony plans to stay on iTunes, but has also just launched its own streaming subscription service, which is cloud-based and not yet mobile. But according to some really cool charts, the revenue right now is in single downloads, not subscriptions.

6. Apple has concerned many with its new App Store subscription policy for magazine, newspaper, video and music distribution, which some predict will bring open war, kill publishers, kill streaming music services, turn away developers, violate anti-trust laws, and possibly get even more unreasonable. Google has launched a web-access counter-plan, which could capitalize on the Apple backlash, but some are skeptical about its potential too.

7. Google has cooked up a new algorithm for better searches, which, though it hasn’t really said so, mostly involves weeding out useless content farms. Thus far, it seems to be working, though some wish Google was more open about its algorithms. Speaking of useless, as I was just there, Flowing Data presents some info on troll comments, and speaking of access, as I am about to, much of rural America is getting the short end of broadband.

8. Borders’ bankruptcy has shaken the publishing industry, and some are projecting the death of bookstores, but a former Borders exec observes that Barnes and Noble is doing fine and points out the bad strategies behind Borders’ demise. There are also concerns about the future of USA Today and hyper-local news online, plus a questionable publisher’s limitation for library e-books, though we may get to read them on a free Kindle.

9. You might see some tanned gamers around, because they’re spending less of their budget on video games and more on outdoor activities. Or maybe they’re just seeking increased social experiences, as social gaming is on the rise, a factor that companies like News Corp. are capitalizing on and which challenges the future of blockbuster games.

10. Some good News for TV Majors links from the past two weeks: Live Well Model, Sheen Coverage, Public Media Importance, Ivi Halted, Streaming Competition, The 10pm Problem, BBC News US, Retrans Money, TV Criticism, Sports Impact, ESPN Endorsements.

11. Oscar Day bonus entry! The Guardian details the Academy voting membership structure.

When Susan Sontag published her “A Century of Cinema” (aka, “Decay of Cinema”) article 15 years ago, I scoffed. I quickly resigned myself to the idea that Sontag had simply lost touch with contemporary filmgoing. Recall, after all, that the article is not so much about the death of cinema as about the death of a certain kind of cinephilia.

Since then, I have come to understand what she may have meant. In the intervening years, film scholars have underscored that writing about movies in a certain way (but also watching, rewatching and debating them) is a crucial aspect of a robust cinephilic culture. See for instance Antoine de Baecque’s seminal study, La cinéphilie: Invention d’un regard, histoire d’une culture, 1944-1968 (2003). Feeling the need to put one’s thoughts into print– as critics, and perhaps now as bloggers– is central to the intensity that characterizes cinephilia.

Sontag seems to have noticed the waning of this dimension of cinephilia even then. In fact, her career is evidence of it: she wrote less and less about movies. (I survey her film writing here.)

Setting aside de Baecque’s claim that cinephilia of a certain kind ended in 1968, I wonder if this “letting go of criticism” applies to France, or even to Canada or Britain. (I limit this list to those countries whose criticism I know best, although we could certainly cast a wider net to include criticism from other European, Middle Eastern, Asian and Central and South American countries, among others.  In fact, Amaya’s work on Cuban film criticism may illuminate precisely this question.) Perhaps the troubles of American film criticism are unique— the exception. In this sense, the question is not how much money there is to be made from criticism, but how much money is used to support it. In France, Canada and elsewhere, state subsidy permits film criticism to live on. Grants allow magazines to keep publishing. The Québécois film journal 24 Images, to cite but one example, benefits from Canada Council for the Arts moneys to produce its publication and website, which can be found here.

Perhaps this decline in American criticism is yet another reminder of the hard-fought battles other national film cultures have undergone– in France, during the late 40s and early 1950s– to protect their national cinemas from American penetration into their markets. Hollywood’s aggressive approach may have led to policies that now inoculate other film cultures against this decline in criticism.

In a word, perhaps we shouldn’t be talking about “letting go of criticism.” But rather, “letting go of criticism in America.” While American popular criticism may be on life support, is that true elsewhere?  It remains an open question; still, there’s evidence to suggest ‘exceptionalism’ in this case.

At the Movies

The few, which include Scott and Phillips, are a dying breed, a group of often academically trained critics who tend to place film within histories, industrial traditions, aesthetic structures, and broad social and political concerns. They are being replaced by a new generation of young technocrats whose sole expertise seems to be to summarize, to decide whether they liked the film or not, and to put together websites. I think I know where these young technocrats come from.

Some of us suspect, and Scott let’s on that much, that Siskel and Ebert, the creators of At the Movies, were the beginning of the end. With their attempts at creating criticism for the masses who apparently needed the final dictum to be a binary sign, the “thumbs up” or the “thumbs down,” Siskel and Ebert redefined criticism. Who could imagine that a film critic, a master of words and images, would resort to the crudest form of communication to do final praise or condemnation? Siskel and Ebert, who perhaps mistook their task to popularize as a task for diluting the intellectual and affective power of criticism, benefited from this and their thumbs became the brand of their intellect.

Why did they allow it? Who would want her/his intellect to be represented by thumbs up or down? For years, these thumbs affected box office success and were reproduced in other media to signify film curatorial arbitration. These thumbs made careers and broke them, but their power went beyond; these thumbs came to be equated to film criticism.

For roughly ten years I have taught film classes in three fine institutions of higher learning (University of Texas at Austin, Southwestern University, and University of Virginia) and in all of these institutions I thumb-wrestled with Siskel and Ebert and, too often, they won. My students have regularly reduced the task of criticism to making flipping remarks on taste and writing petulant evaluations of film quality based on gut-feelings, a la Romanesque. My job doubles, for I not only have to teach to understand criticism as the intellectual practice of locating a film text into historical and contemporary contexts, but I also have to help my students unlearn the vices and schemas about criticism that they have grown up with, thanks to popular film criticism.

I am sorry Scott. I also thumb-wrestle with you and I do not feel particularly sorry for having your show cancelled. But of course, I did not win. The technocrats won.

Metacritic.com is one of the most popular places for people to go and make sense of movies. I cannot call it criticism; not even the creators of metacritic.com can. But it performs this role just the same; with simple signs and colors, metacritic.com scouts a world of signs and evaluates them using algorithms and mathematical formulas that end up signifying taste. From 0 to 100, they have 50 times more subtlety than Siskel and Ebert.

1. The upside and downside of Twitter and celebrity: Conan O’Brien turned to Twitter to entertain us (thus becoming what he once mocked). He then used Twitter to turn one woman’s life upside down, and she charmed us all by channeling her sudden fame into good causes. But Twitter doesn’t always have such delightful results, as evidenced by the fact that Academy Awards ceremony co-producer Adam Shankman chose actors like Zac Efron and Miley Cyrus to present at the Oscars because Twitter followers told him to. Where’s Fail Whale when you need it?

2. The viral video of the fortnight was OK Go’s Rube Goldbergian “This Too Shall Pass.” It’s sponsored by State Farm, which dismays some (I assume Sarah Polley wouldn’t approve) who also point out that Honda and others did this first. Regardless, it looks cool, and Wired found out how they pulled it off. By the way, there was a previous video for “This Too Shall Pass” involving the Notre Dame marching band, but you likely missed it due to ridiculous embedding restrictions. There’s a very important lesson in there, internet. In fact, OK Go has since left its record label EMI over the issue. Viral video runners-up: SNL presidents, Avatar/Pocahontas mashup, Mean Disney Girls, the Russian singer, Battlestar Galactica–Sabotage video.

3. Jesse Thomas composed a fascinating “State of the Internet” video, featuring such facts as that 247 billion emails are sent each day, but 81% of them are spam. And Zaheer Ahmed Khan has a fun list of Internet firsts, like the first item sold on eBay: broken laser pointer, purchased by a collector (?) for $14.83. Who could have predicted then what sites Twitter, Facebook, Linked In would be worth now? Speaking of internet firsts and future loads of money, Business Insider’s Nicholas Carlson has the contentious story of the founding of Facebook.

4. Scholar Thomas Doherty says film criticism is dead, and (not dead) film critic Richard Schickel seems inclined to agree, having said during a recent panel discussion, “I don’t know honestly the function of reviewing anything.” Chuck Tryon disagrees with Doherty, as does Jim Emerson, and Keith Uhlich pulls no punches in depicting what he thinks of Schickel. Meanwhile, (not dead) film critic Armond White once allegedly kinda sorta said he wished filmmaker Noah Baumbach was never born, but I’m not sure whether the resulting kerfuffle qualifies as film criticism dead or film criticism alive.

5. Doherty can amend his article with the news that Variety has kicked to the curb its last remaining salaried (but not dead) film critic, Todd McCarthy, as well as its last theater critic. Former Variety columnist Anne Thompson says the trade has cut its lifeblood, (not dead) film critic Roger Ebert gives the move an impassioned thumbs down, (not dead) film critic David Edelstein remembers the way Variety used to be, and McCarthy himself offers some thoughts. Best headline, from the LA Times: Variety Lays an Egg. Variety also has a lawsuit to deal with in regard to a negative film review. Variety’s defense? Film criticism is dead.

6. Bloomberg’s BusinessWeek detailed the decline of Miramax, and in its wake, Levi Shapiro points to The Messenger as a new example for indie cinema to follow, while Paramount is trying a new approach with producing “micro-budget” films. With the studio infrastructure for indie cinema broken down otherwise, film festivals might be ever more important in taking up the slack, if they can do it right and especially properly utilize both online distribution and marketing. In that regard, Lion’s Gate is trying to take advantage of social media marketing for its April release of Kick Ass, and Break.com is succeeding with its online distribution of low-budget videos, though their indie fare is decidedly lowbrow, rather Hurt Locker territory.

7. Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panah (The Mirror, The Circle, Offside) was arrested in a government crackdown on dissidents. Countryman and international art cinema icon Abbas Kiarostami has decried this development, the LA (Not Dead) Film Critics Association has expressed its dismay, and you can too via an online petition. For more on the broader context, The Believer Magazine has a revealing report on filmgoing and filmmaking in Iran.

8. Speaking of The Hurt Locker, hooray for Kathryn Bigelow’s Best Director Oscar, which New York Times (not dead) film critic Manohla Dargis was thrilled about. However, Rachel Abramowitz offers the cold slap of reality in her LA Times piece about the ongoing challenges for women in Hollywood. The other woman everyone fell for at the Oscars was Gabourey Sidibe, and Feminista Files blogger Erika Kennedy detailed the insulting backstory of her Oscar dress saga and defended Sidibe as a role model. Howard Stern should give that a read.

9.  In DVD news, an Indiana prosecutor wants only G movies in Redbox kiosks, Blockbuster is going back to imposing late fees, and the MPAA had small win in their big fight against DVD copying software, but this chart of DVD sales struggles will make them unhappy. Disney has  shortened the Alice in Wonderland DVD release window, but speculation that Hurt Locker’s post-Best Picture difficulties with booking theaters are due to the film being out on DVD might give other studios pause (literally!).

10. My favorite News for TV Majors story links: There Will Be Retrans, CNN Fears Facebook, Flushing Measurements, TiVo News, Indecency Backlog, Cable Channel Fees, Exec Interviews, Viacom & Hulu Break Up, Old Spice Ad, and NCIS Fandom.