Movie Cricket

Elsewhere on this blog, the Cricket has noted the shrinking ranks of paid professional movie critics writing for print publications in the United States. (At last count, 55 of them have lost their jobs since 2006, through buyouts, layoffs, reassignment, retirement or having their publications die.)

According to John Podhoretz, the neocon commentator (and former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush) who maintains the title "movie critic" at The Weekly Standard, that's OK.

Most movie critics are hacks, Podhoretz argues in this column, "reporters or editors who didn't get another plum assignment and were thrown a bone by a gruff but kindly managing editor."

And while those paid hacks are losing their jobs, a proliferation of movie criticism flourishes on the Internet. "The only difference between them and the professionals is that they don't get paid, except for a few dollars a week from Google ads," Podhoretz writes.

Here's the nut of Podhoretz' argument:    

"This deprofessionalization is probably the best thing that could have happened to the field. Film criticism requires nothing but an interesting sensibility. The more self-consciously educated one is in the field - by which I mean the more obscure the storehouse of cinematic knowledge a critic has - the less likely it is that one will have anything interesting to say to an ordinary person who isn't all that interested in the condition of Finnish cinema. Amateurism in the best sense will lead to some very interesting work by people whose primary motivation is simply to express themselves in relation to the work they're seeing - a purer critical impulse than the one that comes with collecting a paycheck along the way."

Yes, you read that correctly: A conservative is arguing against collecting a paycheck. But that's not where Podhoretz' argument is at its faultiest.

Amateurism is a lovely concept - since the root of "amateur" is "amator," the Latin word for "lover" - and there are many interesting and intriguing movie writers who do it simply for the love of the craft. But, with the exception of the golf legend Bobby Jones, it's hard to name an amateur who was markedly better at something than the pros in that field.

Being a paid movie critic means, for starters, that you have the time to watch more movies than someone who reviews as a hobby. Sure, that means the "Finnish cinema" that Podhoretz mocks - but it also means small gems that get overlooked in the din of blockbuster marketing campaigns. Amateur bloggers may have seen "Slumdog Millionaire" at the Toronto film festival last fall, but it took the paid critics to trumpet that discovery for the world to hear it.

With fewer paid professional movie critics working, there are fewer voices championing discoveries like that. And when many of the critics losing their jobs are from regional papers - Denver and Detroit, Seattle and San Antonio (just to name a few recent examples) - the chorus of critics' voices concentrates in places like New York and Los Angeles.

Podhoretz may believe that nobody notices bylines, and wouldn't know who their local movie critic is. But, based on the Cricket's personal experience meeting people, movie fans would miss us if we were gone.