It really must be a sign of the times that Entertainment Weekly has laid off its second great film critic, after Lisa Schwarzbaum took a buy off earlier this year. This one hurts worse than many others because Gleiberman has been writing film reviews for EW as long as I’ve been reporting on film criticism, going on 15 years now.
When a movie comes out there are only a few voices that matter. I know many self-invented film critics (really, bloggers who have decided they can be called critics) are filling the gaps and taking jobs because they’ll work for less, or in some cases, for nothing. I know that we live in a time where everyone is, quite literally, a critic. I know that film reviews read like user reviews at Amazon or Yelp, just a general take that hovers around “I liked it” or “I didn’t like it.” But film criticism — GOOD film criticism — expands and enriches our experience of cinema itself. At its best, it opens up closed minds. It inspires. It can teach. Only a few writers out there know this. Even fewer who know it still have jobs. One of the best just lost his.
The truth of it is Entertainment Weekly needs Gleiberman more than he needs them. I know what their site is becoming. You can read the writing on the wall. They’re going to offer blogs for “prestige,” like the hideous Huffington Post has done (ruining the internet along with aggregate sites that do nothing but show us primates where the like button is). They’re going to be user-driven, comment-driven, splattered with cleavage shots of Kim Kardashian, just like the HuffPo. After all, survival is all that matters. Quality, worthiness, must then take a backseat. You can say it’s justified for that reason and maybe it is. I don’t know. After twenty years online I’m seeing a wasteland. A once vibrant place of discovery that the internet once was has devolved into sites that will do anything, say anything, show anything, fire anyone to ensure smooth traffic to their sites. Hysteria tweets, headline grabbing tweets, slide shows — click here! Drive up traffic, make money. It seems easy enough, right?
I remember when film criticism really mattered. Film critics aren’t “friends” with filmmakers the way bloggers are. We’ve lost so many good ones. Some writers have launched their own sites. I don’t know where Gleiberman will land but I do know I’ve been reading him, and linking to him, for 15 years now and this represents, to me, a major blow to the good fight. We can’t give up our support for good, unbiased film critics. If we do that, movies will take a giant crap even more than they have. Critics — the good ones — are the gatekeepers. They aren’t fanboys. They are “movie buffs.” They are writers. They are illuminators. They bring their life experience, and their experience seeing and writing about film, their knowledge of film history to their work. Gleiberman pushed the edges. He changed my mind more than once about a film. And he wrote beautifully. Here’s hoping he lands somewhere capable of recognizing how valuable he is.
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