The first week of January they said, “We would have told you sooner but it all happened so fast.” (This is a smokescreen.) And with that,
Flixster “bought” Rotten Tomatoes (Fox would maintain some kind of controlling interest–for purposes of quality assurance, I guess) and
I would no longer report to our big, climate-controlled office in Brisbane (think foosball table, Coke machine, randomly located lazy-
boys) and would instead report to a San Francisco loft space in Potrero Hill (think high ceilings, folding-table-as-desk, enormous windows).

On the first day of the job, the face of Flixster, Joe, threw a meeting. At 4pm the very friendly faces of Flixster and the five RT implants stood in
a circle and heard Joe welcome us and say, “We just signed a huge deal for $11 million worth of advertising.” Eleven million dollars’ worth of advertising.

Frankly, that’s genius. What is advertising online but a tool akin to word of mouth in a social setting? “Getting our name out there” is a
real thing but it often has intangible results. We might have been fools to sell Inet advertising for real dollars in the early days of the dotcoms. Maybe that’s why the dotcoms went bust. We failed to call a faith a faith.

Two days ago, Anne Thompson reported on the deal Flixster/Rotten Tomatoes signed with iTunes. I work at RT and this is how I found out about it. No matter. The point is that in the old days a deal of this magnitude would have resulted in parties, bonuses, congratulatory watches. Today, it’s just fueling the witchcraft of the 3X Marketing Plan: say something three times to make it real.

On a side note, I teach at DeAnza College and use my iPhone on campus. I can pretty much see Apple HQ from my parking spot while my phone sputters and I drop calls. Can we call that iRony?

Recently there have been some rows about the further diminishing of film criticism. Eric Kohn weighed in, Glenn Kenny took exception, Kim Voynar blogged. A.O. Scott talked about the end of “At The Movies” and then Andrew O’Hehir told us all to stop whining. And of course there were lamentations on Twitter.

Twitter is rife with critical insight. It’s a public forum full of private ideas, agendas and longings. But it’s also a hairless little battlefield where ego meets id. After Pete Hammond’s piece on film criticism and its possible deadness appeared online last Thursday, I noticed this reaction on Twitter: “quote whores and junketeers…are the real pioneers of this industry.”

I agree. Weren’t it for quotewhores and junketeers, “general audiences” wouldn’t know what a film critic is—I’d love to be disproven here but thumbs are why Rotten Tomatoes uses Fresh/Rotten as its rubric.

If you can write quotable copy, it will appear on posters—with your name and the name of your publication. It’s mutual advertising, good for everyone. If your name can be found on enough posters, you will be remembered by the public. If you’re remembered, you’re read and your outlet can keep publishing and everyone can keep eating.

Pullquotes don’t just come from reviews. In the months that followed Boxoffice hiring Mr. Hammond, I was regularly battling studio publicists who would pullquote him as he left a theater and cite his previous employer. (This is common practice—you grab a writer, he says something fast, the publicist uses the lines by the big names followed by the catchier phrases.) I don’t have fingers to count how many showdowns this led to. What results is a highly efficient use of the writer. Critics didn’t invent pullquoting, so to blame them for curtailing discourse is confused. As filmmaker Alejandro Adams just said to me, “Bitching on Twitter is Pete-Hammondese for the hip.” Indeed, pullquotes live their brightest, if shortest, lives on Twitter. There are armies of genius tweeters there, pushing their brands and ideologies and sometimes sermonizing in 140-character bursts. Dare we call them “critics?”

Boxoffice Magazine is a 90-year-old trade journal which also happens to be the official magazine of the National Association of Theater Owners. Its legitimacy is ensured by business people who buy popcorn machines and theater seats. These business people, by the way, are also the ones who book films in theaters where people buy tickets to see them.

The issue ceases to be whether or not criticism is dead—it’s not. It’s paid criticism and with it the edifice, etiquette and protocol it carries. Either writers are paid to file a three-paragraph standard review of a film that identifies what it’s about, how effectively it does its job and whether or not it’s worth price of admission, or they’re not paid and are left at liberty to write about the film’s larger implications, ethos or their personal relationship to it. There may be room in those three paragraphs to fit in criticism—addressing issues of the art form, ideology, the specific film in the broader spectrum of the filmmakers’ work or peer group—but in this context it’s icing.

Meanwhile, the fact the writer squeezes in personal bias in a form that’s so rigorously codified apes the old auteur idea. The auteur’s authority was derived in part from his ability to infuse his film with an artistic agenda that the Studio who paid him (for his marketable skills) tried to suppress. We’ve romanticized the auteur into a badass and now it seems we’re asking critics to follow suit—Pygmalion in reverse.

Now that outlets are forced to practice this hardly sustainable skeleton crew + business-as-usual model of operations, the playing field is divided between the “fun for the family” critic and the cultural commentator, between the Paids and the Paid-Nots. The Paids have to turn over reviews in a newsday—obviously we’re all competing with the Internet. The Paid-Nots have more breathing room for ideas and more time to craft copy. Both are muscling for readers.

Roger Ebert has said there are great critics online. “Great” “critics,” but the point is Ebert’s love list is largely made up of Paid-Nots. So was A.O. Scott’s. So is mine.

When Ebert first stood up for the quality of work to be found on the Internet, the name he pimped was Slant’s Ed Gonzalez. It was legitimacy brokering legitimacy—Ebert didn’t invent the pullquote either. Slant’s release calendar is comprehensive, Gonzalez’s editing is impeccable, but the writers are unpaid. I had drinks with two of them a few weeks ago. They’re loyal to the site and for good reason. And their insights—I’m sure they’d skillfully fit them into standardized reviews, but those revelatory insights sprawl out big and nuanced and sometimes only partially digested in a forum that’s well managed and edited.

As for these distinctions between profession and avocation, mind you, while I’ve been writing this I’ve fielded nine emails, some extensive, on matters ranging from Cannes to freelance inquiry. Writing is hard and working as a writer is harder.

Everything is being crammed into corners and that seems, in most instances, the only way these things can survive.

Badasses, file your line to the left.

Compromise is not concession.