Dying as Fast as the Compact Disc

I had a professor who reminded me of Pauline Kael. My professor had a profound sense of authority and audacity to her, and she could instantly command respect as well as admiration (incidentally, she was the same professor I mentioned in my review of "Every Little Step"). I deeply admired her intellect, just as I deeply admire Kael's (may she rest in peace). In 2001, when Pauline Kael died, I was a freshman in high school, just starting my true love affair with the movies and having no idea who she was. I had grown up with Siskel and Ebert, and even then I never listened to them or read their reviews, and I only slightly remember the death of Gene Siskel, but I knew that "Siskel and Ebert give it two thumbs up" really meant something.

With Kael's death, many have since argued that film criticism is dead, or at least it's barely on life support. Many simultaneously claim that the collapse was brought on actually by Siskel and Ebert themselves with their simplistic little thumbs, effectively "dumbing down" film criticism. Some have argued that Ben Lyons was the final insult.

I asked on the Internet Movie Database if film criticism is really dying. One individual wrote a response: criticism is dying, in all cases, and the significance of a film's successful outcome, due to journalistic criticism, is getting smaller, due to the fact that "NOBODY gives a sh*it" (individual's words).

The individual further argued that it would be difficult for any of us to remember a time when somebody said, "If that critic thinks it's a bad record of a bad movie, then I'm skipping it." Nobody cares anymore about "what 'he,' 'she,' or 'they' of 'that' magazine (for example) say about anything. And we should be thankful that the power of the review is dying. In the 70s or 80s, if a movie managed to get a bad rating, by a media-darling of 'bigger significance,' distributors would in some cases drop the ball on the project. Because of that, some ares in the States, or some countries even, never got a chance to see a specific movie (for example)--just because of what ONE SINGLE person thought. It's a new age and era, and even though the reviewer will live on, his power and significance is undoubtedly dying as fast as the Compact Disc."

Quite a pessimistic assessment.

On a side note, my question was not so much whether or not film criticism is as potent as it used to be, but whether or not it was as worthy to read as it used to be. My curiosity was not based on the lack of influence from the film critics these days, but by the so-called "death" in film criticism quality.

Kael once said that if you wanted to actually write what you thought, you had to find the right magazine. She knew these people, she said, and they were not as stupid as what they were writing. Thankfully, the internet has provided a vehicle in which many can engage in dialogue on the cinema. It seems pointless to debate the "death" of movie criticism, but perhaps the commenter was accurate: maybe it is a good thing that the voice of one is trumped by the voice of many. I don't know; I tend to side with the argument that "a person is smart, people are dumb."