Should film critics become professionally celibate?

http://www.movieline.com/2010/03/when-the-critic-met-the-star-a-movieline-ethics-seminar.php

The above concerns LOS ANGELES TIMES film critic Kenneth Turan and his relationship with actress Zoe Kazan (REVOLUTIONARY ROAD) plus Kazan's parents writer/director Nicholas (son of Elia) Kazan and writer/one-time director Robin Swicord. Besides proving that West Los Angeles suburb Pacific Palisades, CA must be like a small town, Turan's article is illuminating for his I-won't-recuse-myself-from-championing-Zoe's-new-movie candor.

This kind of forthright yes-I-have-friends-who-make-movies opinionating hasn't been seen too often. Andrew Sarris was one exception--he was forthright about his friendship with filmmaker Robert Benton (STILL OF THE NIGHT, NOBODY'S FOOL, THE HUMAN STAIN) in the pages of THE NEW YORK OBSERVER.

Pauline Kael's I'll-write-about-you-but-I'll-keep-my-relationship-with-you-private attitude towards Sam Peckinpah, Paul Schrader, Warren Beatty and Robert Altman has been the norm with regards to the practice of film criticism.

And I haven't even brought up the topic of critics who allegedly hustle screenplays to actors/filmmakers.

James Rainey on L.A.'s Pacifica station KPFK also passes as a comment on local poetry.

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES' media critic James Rainey had a column in yesterday's CALENDAR section; the column was essentially a moan about why KPFK-FM, the leftist Pacifica station, isn't capable of becoming more disciplined and safe-left like National Public Radio.

Here's a paragraph from that article, describing a split in the local KPFK board (highlighting by me):

"What remained was an elected board divided between two groups that I'll call the Liberal Pragmatists, who crave predictability, professionalism and bigger audiences, and the Ecumenical Fundamentalists, who want every subgroup given voice with public-access TV style purity."

With the exception of "bigger audiences" (something that local poetry doesn't really want due to fear of "the wrong people" attending/taking part), Rainey's statement can be taken out of its original context to describe local poetry.

Except that I'd use "Literary Poetry Fundamentalists" to substitute for "Liberal Pragmatists" and "Ecumenical Community Reading Amateurs" substituting for "Ecumenical Fundamentalists."

AT THE MOVIES:RIP.

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/03/see_you_at_the_movies.html

The above is Roger Ebert's glass-more-than-half-full eulogy for the AT THE MOVIES show--essentially the remnants of SNEAK PREVIEWS, the Siskel-and-Ebert show I first remember seeing on the Dallas, TX PBS outlet KERA-TV beginning around 1978 (when I was a college student living in Wichita Falls, TX).

Ebert and his wife Chaz are planning on a new film review show for TV--and I wish them well with their endeavor.

I'm curious as to who they can cut a deal with, given that there will be a lot of media conglomerates with we-don't-have-room-for-this-esoteric-low-dollar-generating-stuff attitude like the Walt Disney Company (which dealt the death blow to the Michael Phillips/A.O. Scott AT THE MOVIES this week).

The glass of local poetry books--something that can be seen as either half-full or half-empty.

Earlier today (March 24th), I picked up copies of my latest chapbook NEVER MET BUKOWSKI from PIP Printing (have done business with them since 2000) at their Sun Valley, CA location.

I'm still a holdout from the period where poets self-published their own chapbooks (either through the former Kinkos or places like PIP) and sold them to each other at readings. This is not a popular avenue anymore, since a lot of local poets would rather have their books published by small presses instead.

There's a lot of erosion-through-change of the local poetry scene since 2000. Once upon a time, there were quite a few more independent bookstores in LA/OC--and, in several cases, the stores would support local poetry and purchase chapbooks that were self-published and non-barcoded.
Now, there are far fewer independents--and some of those stores mimic the conformity of the local scene in only wanting local poets "established" with small press credits (it can't be just any small poetry press, it has to be the "right" press).

And sometimes, even those local poets don't always make it into these local independent stores with "high standards."

Today, I was at least happy to go by Skylight Books and see that Brendan Constantine's LETTERS TO GUNS (from Red Hen Press) is now being carried.

I really admire Brendan's poetry and respect him as a person (although our relationship hit a speed bump some years back which it has never fully recovered from, unfortunately)--so I'm happy to discover he's getting greater exposure to the Los Feliz/Silverlake reading audience.

Now, if Kerry Slattery of Skylight (plus other people she's deputized as buyers for the store) could start carrying chapbooks/books from some of Brendan's talented peers (Amelie Frank, Rick Lupert, Elizabeth Iannacci, the late Erica Erdman), that would be even better.

Before Nancy Pelosi is elevated to sainthood......

Yes, we now have a mild dose of health care reform that will admittedly do good for some citizens--plus enrich the insurance companies of the USA. And perhaps some marginal improvements can be made over the next few years.

But there's now plenty of canonizing of Nancy Pelosi (who seemed to follow the Rahm Emanuel playbook of pressuring people on the left such as Dennis Kucinich and Bernie Sanders--instead of gathering a few more Blue Dogs and even Republicans into the tent), plus overgushing from the I Want To Believe Obama-ites like THE NEW YORKER's Hendrik Hertzberg and film critic/occasional opinionator Roger Ebert (no, passing a heavily watered-down health care "reform" bill does not equal the day Barack Obama was elected President).

Nancy Pelosi, if she had really been All That, wouldn't have been so eager to strip out the public option from the final bill.

And we face a crossroads regarding the President and his future agenda. If US citizens want to see any real change, the pressure (without racial slurs, blue faces from breath-holding and tacky behavior from either the left or the right) needs to be applied to ensure Obama understands he's President of the United States--and not just an errandperson sent by multinational corporations and the Pentagon to keep doing the same old things in the same old ways.

We need real reform--not just incremental consumer-benefit crumbs that will pacify us when the White House thinks of putting another Guantanomo prison in Afghanistan and looks the other way at the abuses of Wall Street (i.e. placing big bets on continued domestic economy crumbling to make big money for a select few).

Recommending Kevin Baker's article "The Vanishing Liberal" in April's issue of HARPER'S.

Worth buying HARPER'S at the newsstand (or subscribing online) for this article, subtitled "How the Left Learned to Be Helpless."
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/04/0082894

Think of AMERICAN IDOL as an interview process for a corporate job.

When it comes to pop culture discussions, New England-by-way-of-California poet Victor Infante (who I've often disagreed with on poetry matters) and I have a little bit of common ground.

Here's a repurposing of a comment I made on Victor's blog (found at http://www.victorinante.com ) about AMERICAN IDOL:
Here are my thoughts on the show (and I've watched entire segments over the years):
There's something about the AMERICAN IDOL judging process that goes beyond "niceness" or the myth of necessary roughness to prepare people for stardom. It is the sad collision between individuals with dynamic, individual, not-easy-to-categorize talent--Adam Lambert being an example from last season--and the myopic demands of Simon Fuller's 19 Entertainment, which produces IDOL. In Lambert's case, you get an artist struggling to reach gold-album status.

But with more malleable artists like Kelly Clarkson (excepting her brief rebellion with the MY DECEMBER album) and Carrie Underwood, you get adherence to formula--and, overall, huge sales to people who don't want or expect much from pop music. Think of AMERICAN IDOL as essentially a screening process for a high-level corporate position. Of course, I could compare the show to what some poets feel they have to do to please professors and fellow poets on the Masters of Fine Arts trail. But I'll decline for now.

When a contrarian film critic gets skewered by film publicist--plus his fellow critics.

http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/2010/03/white_rips_hobe.php

The above is a bit of inside-baseball, but it's a rare demonstration of what happens when a film critic's pointed opinions of a filmmaker and his work cause the critic to be 86ed from a film screening.

This happened about four years ago when then-LA WEEKLY critic Scott Foundas was banned
from a screening of Kevin Smith's CLERKS II because Foundas upset Smith's sensitivities in
panning the meant-to-be-mainstream JERSEY GIRL.

But Foundas (now working for the Film Society of Lincoln Center) hasn't aroused the kind of antipathy that NEW YORK PRESS critic Armond White has.

My opinion is that Leslee Dart, Scott Rudin and Noah Baumbach should not have banned White from the screening of Baumbach's GREENBERG. But at the same time, White hasn't done himself any favors with angry, overheated responses which have mostly devolved into settling scores with THE VILLAGE VOICE head critic J. Hoberman (at one point, White calls Hoberman's position something like "inherited hipsterism"--odd since Hoberman inherited his post from the departure of Andrew Sarris, who was definitely not in the hipster category).

This temporary exposure of film-critic feuding and filmmaker/publicist attempts at quality-review control will probably carry on for another week (GREENBERG will have a wider opening next Friday), before it becomes almost completely forgotten like the Foundas/Smith dustup.