Ride It.

A.O. Scott over at the NY Times, does a wonderful analysis of my favorite film of all times.
Go to it by clicking on the pic!

A Knight's Threat.

Jim Emerson has written a great article about two of the subjects that have interested me the most in the last few weeks: the sad disappearance of film criticism from print media and the ridiculous fanboy-ism of "The Dark Knight" followers who have become Neo-Nazi in their threats about why the movie they like best is the one that needs to win every year end award.
About the Batman insanity he writes "[According to "The Dark Knight" partisans] The picture must be showered with year-end awards consistent with the all-consuming Batmania of last July, no matter what else was released in 2008.", then he makes a hilarious point about how these people, who now condemn critics for not falling for the hoopla, are exactly the kind of people that choose tabloids and gossip over actual film criticism.
Emerson points out, "So, to conclude, dead critics who are not now hailing "The Dark Knight" as the greatest cinematic achievement of the year (or all years) are being inconsistent with what they may or may not have said earlier, and are thus sealing their own coffins."
The entire article is a must read and a sad reminder of why we need film critics to survive.
Read it here.

The Assassination of the Film Critic by the Coward Establishment.

During the last couple of weeks a lot has been made about the fact that newspapers and print mediums have been firing critics en masse.
Literature reviews are scarce in mainstream newspapers, culture critics have been replaced by uneducated gossip writers and not counting established film writers like Roger Ebert, the idea of film criticism has been reduced to PR clippings that focus on Angelina's latest scandal while promoting her new movie.
It's truly a shame that society has reduced the debate of arts to a cult instead of encouraging it, since talk about art inspires art.
As Nick James reminds us "Never mind that it was a bunch of critics that transformed cinema in the 1950s to create the nouvelle vague, or that another bunch paved the way for Britain's "Angry Young Men" to transform British cinema in the 1960s."
Roger Ebert writes a fantastic, funny piece in his blog and "Sight and Sound" offers a fascinating take by James on how the British are facing this phenomenon. Both articles are a meta reminder that without these people there wouldn't be pieces demanding pieces were being written and what a boring world would that be.