Movie Cricket

You might want to sit down for this one. It's a biggie.

According to this report in Women's Wear Daily, The New York Observer has laid off several of their veteran writers — including their film critic, Andrew Sarris, who has been at this movie thing for 53 years (first at The Village Voice, and since 1989 at the Observer).

The Observer still has the flamboyant Rex Reed writing movie reviews along with other entertainment coverage — which is the film equivalent of dumping NPR for a morning-drive shock jock.

Sarris is considered (by some) the dean of American film critics, in large part for his 1968 tome The American Cinema, which neatly categorized 40 years' worth of movies and sorted directors by tiers — the highest, The Pantheon, including Charles Chaplin, Robert Flaherty, John Ford, D. W. Griffith, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Buster Keaton, Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, F. W. Murnau, Max Ophuls, Jean Renoir, Josef von Sternberg and Orson Welles.

It was in this book that Sarris coined the phrase "auteur theory," the idea — borrowed from the French, and applied to American film — that the director is not just an air-traffic controller of a bunch of collaborators (writers, designers, actors, etc.), but the God of the film set through whom every artistic choice happens.

Read some of Sarris' recent reviews (one posted yesterday) on the Observer's web site. And here's a brief tribute by The Oregonian's Shawn Levy.

Sarris now becomes the 57th film critic since January 2006 to lose his job with a print publication — through layoffs, buyouts, reassignments, forced retirements or having their paper shot out from under them. But Sarris is not just one of 57 varieties, as it says on the Heinz label.

The Cricket seconds Levy's sentiment: "Even if you preferred Pauline Kael, who was a superior writer (the rivalry between them was a very real and even personal thing), you must acknowledge that the film world gets a little smaller with his dismissal."