More thoughts on criticism -- critics and reviewers

 Both reviewer and critic are honorable professions, with, if anything, the former being more valuable. The best reviewers by a wide margin used to be the team that put together Maltin's Movie Guide. As far as I can tell, no one has stepped up since to fill the gap, another case of the internet crowding out quality with crap.

The purpose of criticism is to deepen our understanding of a work and explore its connection to larger themes, genres, social issues, politics, psychology, etc. The primary purpose of reviews is to let people know whether or not they might like a movie, book, restaurant, or whatever.

It follows that the target audience of reviews is people who have not seen or heard the work in question. This doesn't mean that people won't sometimes seek out reviews after watching, reading, or listening to the work in question. Many of us like to compare our reactions to those of people who get paid to do this, but the reviews themselves are virtually never written for this segment.

It also follows that criticism is almost always most meaningful when the reader knows at least something about the subject. Here too, there can be some gray areas, particularly when the work in question is widely known or when it connects to larger questions about other topics. The book and the movie The Grapes of Wrath would qualify under both of these criteria.

Pauline Kael was probably our best movie critic, and yes, I know I'll get some pushback on that one, but historically that pushback has mainly come from people who strongly disagree with her assessment of various movies, which is understandable since Kael was also a terrible reviewer. If you try to boil down her thoughts about a film to "this part was good, this part was bad," she would seem arbitrary and erratic. The rule of thumb for reading Kael is that long is almost always good and short is generally bad. For this reason, literally, the last book of Kael's you should read is 5,001 Nights at the Movies, which unfortunately seems to be her most popular title.

Though heavily influenced by Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert was mainly a reviewer. Almost all newspaper movie critics are. It is difficult to be anything else, given the space constraints that almost all of them work under. Bob Chipman is one of those rare examples of a good critic who is also a good reviewer. Denby is a better critic than reviewer. The new guy at the New Yorker is a competent reviewer and a lousy critic, but we'll get to him in a future post.

It is important for a reviewer to have good or perhaps even more to the point, predictable tastes. This is particularly true when the reviews break with what you'd expect. A show like The Crown getting good notices tells you virtually nothing — it was all but grown in a lab to push reviewers' buttons. On the other end of the spectrum, when Siskel and Ebert both gave thumbs up to the over-the-top sex and gore of Re-Animator or when pretty much every review singled out William Fichtner's performance in the Grindhouse homage Drive Angry, you pretty much know you've got something good.

(Fichtner is one of the most reliable and underrated actors in Hollywood, so this was always pretty much a safe bet, but seriously, he is wonderful as the coolest satanic emissary you'll ever regret running across.)

With criticism, predictable or compatible tastes are often completely unnecessary. The director Barry Sonnenfeld likes Jerry Lewis comedies. I find them difficult to choke down. I do, however, enjoy listening to Sonnenfeld explain why he admires Lewis, and hearing him discuss those films that I don't care for deepened my appreciation of a number of comedies I am very fond of, including Men in Black.