Having made a couple of tiny movies myself and been eviscerated and celebrated by critics, your article is a beautiful cleansing of the personal palate and a joy to read, so thank you for that, but I would question your suggestion that critics have no power.
Recently I was asked to speak at a lockdown protest in Dublin. I was a little afraid of the inevitable canceling but I was also shamefully aware of the acquiescent silence from our nation’s artists so I agreed. The speech was embraced by some and rejected by others, both of which are valid. But a film critic from one of the major national newspapers used his Twitter feed – endorsed by his newspaper – to portray the thousands of people at the protest, (many of whom were families with young children), as far right rabble. Then he insisted that all state funding should be pulled from any future projects of the filmmaker who spoke.
This critic has interviewed me in the past. Written articles. Reviewed my work. He has my number in his phone. But he wasn’t at the protest. He met none of the people there. Didn’t watch the speech. Never spoke to me about any aspect of it.
Yet, backed by multi-millionaire bosses of a newspaper, he demanded that my work be defunded. Not my speech. Or my politics. But my work. And among the tiny coterie of critics that keeps this culture in a politically paralysed stranglehold, he was hailed as a hero for doing so.
When a protected critic is celebrated for cancelling any powerless artist on the grounds of disagreeing with a speech then the beauty of constructive criticism becomes just another exercise in destructively ugly power.
“Yet, backed by multi-millionaire bosses of a newspaper, he demanded that my work be defunded.”
Naturally he did – or those MSM multi-millionaire bosses would have defunded him. For the most part the MSM are sheer evil, and are colluding with the Ne-Marxist Left to destroy the middle Class led Democracies. You spoke as a Conservative voice, and so are the enemy of their system.
Franz Von Peppercorn
2 years ago
I think the outrage might have something to do with the fact that people watch in silos now. If Ted Lasso were on terrestrial TV in the past it would be loved by some viewers, liked by many, and disliked by some who watch it anyway as that’s what is on. Any criticism isn’t personal.
To watch Lasso now is to make a decision to watch it, you have to be an apple user (which is itself often tribal), then you have to sign up for the package, and since Apple+ isn’t full with content, Lasso might be the only reason to subscribe. Having made that decision you are literally invested. Criticism becomes personal.
Marcus Scott
2 years ago
It is probably largely economic.
The incestuous relationship between advertisers and the media and the fact that mainstream media is dying a slow death makes publications hyper sensitive to upsetting the advertisers themselves, their agencies, their lawyers, etc.
If you are a critic and you plan on thrashing the latest offering from Netflix or Sky or Marvel you better check with your Chief Financial Officer before you do that because you might be giving him or her a very big headache.
J Bryant
2 years ago
Great article. It’s hardly surprising, in our hypersensitive, outrage-driven world, that critics of any art form had better moderate their opinions–at least if they want to make a living from criticism.
“Smaller journals can be a little spicier, though: Becca Rothfield’s masterly evisceration of Sally Rooney’s “riskless and conciliatory” novels in The Point last year was a bracing antidote to Rooneymania.”
And I would add the ever-acerbic Sarah Ditum’s review of Rooney’s latest novel here on Unherd last week.
“Alan Pakula’s 1971 thriller Klute”
If I was inclined to hate this article (which I’m not), all would be forgiven for reminding us of Pakula’s masterpiece.
Tony Lee
2 years ago
Excellent piece and some genuine belly laughs too, thank you. In my humble opinion, self-preservation is the more powerful force behind mediocrity and playing it safe. It was also quite ‘popular’ under Stalin.
Paddy Taylor
2 years ago
One of the problems for critics is that they have to make a living.
In days gone by, once a critic had secured a berth at a national newspaper or magazine, they could pretty much write what they liked, without too much fear, and could live off their earnings as a critic.
Freed from the need to please, critics could be as honest – or as venomous – as they wished.
Now, if you want to make a living you need to be writing in dozens of different places and you are taking a huge risk if you savage a particular actor, movie, writer, book, restaurant – whatever it is you’re critiqueing – because a bad review, if taken badly, can seriously damage your career.
As a freelancer, it only takes one publicist to take your name off the roster for an interview junket, or to mention your name to an editor as persona non grata, and suddenly one of the handful of publications that take your stuff no longer does – it can seriously damage your income.
Thus savage reviews become mixed, ambivalent reviews become great, and good reviews become gushing.
Last edited 2 years ago by Paddy Taylor
Richard Powell
2 years ago
I rarely bother reading film critics these days. Their judgements are not particularly interesting and certainly not to be relied on. The worst film I’ve seen in the last couple of years (and I’ve seen Cats) was The Souvenir. Yet the critics unanimously adored it. Many amateur reviewers on IMDb and elsewhere are more informative and perceptive.
There still seem to be plenty of forthright book critics, however.
Tony Taylor
2 years ago
My mum let me watch Klute when I was 12 (there’s a long story about that for another time), and I found it puzzling, but when I later watched it as an adult I found it boring. I loved The Parallax View both as a teenager and an adult. I watched All the President’s Men when I was 13 and loved it, but when I saw it as a grown up I thought it was pretty good but I realised Redford is a terrible actor.
Phil Simmons
2 years ago
I’m sure this article will ring true with anyone who’s ever reviewed anything in the public media. A lot of the outrage expended by third parties on behalf of poorly-reviewed authors can be seen as a kind of reverse logrolling, with the outraged wishing to be seen rising to the defence either of their friends or of well thought-of people in their own field in the hope of the favour being returned. Even in the tiny and recondite world of poetry, where I did most of my own reviewing work a few years back, a negative appraisal of the work of X would invariably attract furious responses from Y or Z. There are poets and editors I considered friends who simply stopped talking to me, far less offering commissions, after someone else they knew had been criticised, however vaguely or constructively. And I was far from being a Roger Ebert or Clive James, even in that closed, obscure world!
Last edited 2 years ago by Phil Simmons
Gary Beaumont
2 years ago
I struggle to believe that any rational person would take a blind bit of notice of anything most critics write/spout.
Michael Loudon
2 years ago
Ted Lasso is a fine fairytale fantasy. Uncomplicated in plot and theme. All about redemption through kindness.
Personally I love it, especially for the occasional pure football jokes – for example Ian Wright appearing as a pundit with the words: “I hate to say it but Tottenham are a top top team”. That episode released on the day Spurs went top of the table and Arsenal slumped to the bottom. And the “top top” angle, as football fans will know, relates to a snide remark by Alex Ferguson that Stephen Gerrard “isn’t a top top player”.
If Sarah Manavis didn’t like it, so be it. I’m puzzled that anyone would bother to berate her – as her review seemed to bear little relation to the show that the rest of us enjoy.
Arild Brock
2 years ago
Good and timely article.
I am not sure which “sin” is worst: to have a critical opinion or to have an opinion at all – beyond the banal and subjective like/dislike dichotomy.
Probably the biggest “sin” is to have an opinion which you hold to be more than a matter of “free choice”. You, the critic, may like what you like, but don’t try to make ME feel less free to choose at will what to like.
Dr Stephen Nightingale
2 years ago
UnHerd has an amazingly strict banned keyword filtering set, considering you’re supposed to be such an ‘antiWoke’ medium. I’m reposting this without the apparently offending word, because ‘approval’ is just another name for one of Dante’s infernal levels of limbo.
You forgot to mention Barry Norman, master of the subtly damning movie review for a couple of decades from when Film 74 burst onto our small screens.
Of course it is so much easier to post a reply to any article these days, and so the unimaginative, reflexive, ad hominem reaction looms large in every comments section. But the thing is, there aren’t that many daring movies and it is harder to find out what’s on since the demise of the local print media, which always had potted summaries of films that were on at the local screens so you could know what to go out and see.
There is however a much broader range of media, including many many online genres, and so discerning audiences are getting fragmented. Followers of niche music videos on YouTube were just treated to a killer takedown of the “Unison MIDI Chord Pack” by Tantacrul. Go watch it, it’s very entertaining.
Stephen,
I spent 4 very enjoyable years as a Producer/Director of Barry Norman’s Film Night – when he left the Beeb and joined Sky.
He was indeed the master of the subtly-damning review – but even a critic as redoubtable and long-established as Barry would sometimes have to pull his punches, due to the realities of the business. If we managed to secure a studio interview with a director or star of a film that he might otherwise have savaged, he would take a much gentler tone in his criticism or we’d not get the interview next time.
If we couldn’t get them into our studio then I would often do the junket interviews and sometimes would have a very friendly and positive interview with someone whose film Barry would then go on to maul in his review. It would always seem a little unfair to intercut those intvw soundbites with Barry’s criticism, as the interviewee would thus be denied a right-to-reply to the critcism. Nothing one could do about it as my interviews often predated his review by a week or so.
I once fell foul of a publicist for writing a one-line critique (for the Top 10 rundown so, although spoken by BN, not really part of his review) and she ensured I missed out on a few choice intvws as a result. It wasn’t even that bad a line – I wrote of a not very funny Jim Carey vehicle called “Me, Myself & Irene” the following: “Jim Carey plays good cop and bad cop in a film that’s not much cop”. Yet even a throwaway comment like that had a negative impact on what we were “given” as a show.
I was working for a broadcaster, so they kind of needed us to promote their films, but a freelancer has no such cover – as i referred to in my earlier comment down the page.
I think even Carey himself would get a belly laugh from, “Jim Carey plays good cop and bad cop in a film that’s not much cop.”
Stephen Portlock
2 years ago
To me it’s about fairness. I’ve written reviews for the disability press and on one occasion when I found a comedy show a tad ho-hum it seemed only fair to acknowledge that my fellow audience members appeared to enjoy it far more than me – even while acknowledging that like me and like the performer on stage they were visually impaired so maybe somewhat partisan. As for Greil Marcus’s Dylan review, he could only get away with that rudeness because of his stature and the fact that his review would exist alongside other reviews or articles by him on Dylan.
My favourite demolition job is still Terry Eagleton’s magnificent takedown of The God Delusion in the London Review of Books.
Yes, absolutely wonderful. He completely demolishes Dawkins.
‘Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.’
‘He seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however supersized. He asks how this chap can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms.’
‘On the horrors that science and technology have wreaked on humanity, he is predictably silent. Yet the Apocalypse is far more likely to be the product of them than the work of religion. Swap you the Inquisition for chemical warfare.’
Tony Taylor
2 years ago
New owner takes over team hoping to wreck it or sell it – now, where have I heard that before? Oh, that’s right – Major League (which is great) and Any Given Sunday (which is slop, and right in the massively overrated wheelhouse) and Slap Shot (which is an all-time top 10 sports movie) and there are probably more. Did The Manageress have the same lead-in plot? I forget. Was Warren Clarke trying to sell the club?
Last edited 2 years ago by Tony Taylor
Mikey Mike
2 years ago
I hope at least some of the criticism Sarah Manavis received for not falling in line with the deification of Ted Lasso had to do with the quality of her contrarian undergrad-writing-her-first-movie-review vibe. I’m in agreement with the author’s concerns about the dying art of the hatchet job. But my goodness, Sarah Manavis should be an emblem of the dying art of readable prose. She’s a right awful composer of sentences.
Sarah Maravis: Why Ted Lasso is the most overrated show on TV
As an American living in Britain, I should love Ted Lasso. When you first move, it’s fun to compare what’s different in the UK and the US. You talk to new friends about cereals that have different names; funny idioms that sound Midwestern; the things you’re taught at school, such as skewed versions of revolutionary history and, in Ohio, abstinence.
But then you get bored – because it’s boring. You quickly realise that there’s only so much mileage you can get out of compare and contrast, especially when trying to form real bonds with new friends or make romantic connections. For this reason, it should be obvious that Ted Lasso, Apple TV’s fish-out-of-water series about an American managing a British football team, has no legs. And yet, it’s one of the most celebrated shows running today – with near-universal critical acclaim – for reasons I couldn’t tell you.
The very premise of Ted Lasso makes no sense: Ted is an American football coach (played by Saturday Night Live alumni Jason Sudeikis) who has only ever worked at university level. But despite this inexperience, he has just been hired to manage the made-up Premier League team, AFC Richmond, as it faces relegation. The viewers soon discover that his controversial hire – the fan uproar over which is portrayed with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer – was the conniving plan of the club’s new owner, Rebecca Welton (her cheating ex-husband supports the team: she hopes to punish him by destroying the thing he loves most).
The show was originally based on a promotional video Sudeikis created for NBC Sports entitled “An American Coach in London” (an idea that is fine for a four-minute clip and works less well stretched out in 40-minute stints over ten episodes a season).It has an audience rating of 96 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes – a status reserved for Oscar winners and timeless classics – and has been nominated for a gobsmacking 20 Emmy Awards for its first season. It is near-impossible to find a review that isn’t glowing, all commending its “joyous”, “heartwarming”, “honest” approach to the trials and tribulations of sport and life (“especially what we need during these unprecedented times!”). This praise should suggest that Ted Lasso clears the obvious hurdles its hokey premise presents. Watching it, I was baffled to find this was far from the reality.
Much of the plot, jokes, and dialogue revolves around the fact that Ted is from Kansas (similar to Sudeikis himself, who created and writes the show) and is folksy – cloyingly warm with a hammy Southern accent and a cartoonish moustache. He approaches the players with kindness and empathy; a contrast from what they’re used to from typical Premier League managers. The rest of the cast – footballers, WAGs, management staff and sport reporters – are archetypes seemingly written by Americans whose only brush with present day Britain is through viral Lad Bible videos, The Crown, and Love Island (even setting aside the borderline offensive portrayal of Nigerian players and British curry houses). These characters behave according to an American understanding of how awed and inspired Brits must be by American insight and perseverance.
The show is clearly built for an American audience. Any British swearing is assumed to get a laugh: “tits” and “wanker” are thrown around in nearly every episode. (American exceptionalism creeps in as well – in the first season’s finale episode, the team scores a last-minute goal by adopting American football positioning out on the pitch.) It’s hard to get through a scene without a joke about how the US is simply different from the UK (“You don’t know who Jimmy Buffet is?”; “Tea is horrible!”) or a bit of dialogue purely written so that Ted can say an idiom that will sound hick-ish to his British colleagues (“When it comes to locker rooms, I like ’em just like my mother’s bathing suits. I only wanna see ’em in one piece.”) The plots are ludicrous – which would be fine, if they were funnier. The opening scene of series two sees the team’s mascot – a dog – inexplicably on the pitch during a match and killed during a penalty. Another character – a player for Manchester City – leaves his club to go on a Love Island knock-off because his dad said he wasn’t scoring enough goals.
If the humour falls flat, viewers should at least be left with the deeply moving character development fans and reviewers rave about. But each episode functions like a predictable sitcom – all of its emotional moments are sewn up quickly, and there isnot much of a continuous narrative arc across the series. In the first episode of the new season, player Dani has his “yips” cured after a single session of therapy, while club owner Rebecca realises what she needs from dating (after a traumatic, publicly humiliating divorce) in just one instance of watching couples in a coffee shop. Ted Lasso almost exclusively leans on sudden epiphanies for all of its emotional development – a lazy choice that ultimately makes for jarring viewing.
Already, the second season of Ted Lasso has managed to top the slavering praise it acquired for its first. It has a Rotten Tomatoes critic rating of 99 per cent, with most reviews arguing it has built on what was good in season one, but made it better. Constantly praised for celebrating the best of human nature, for me this series shows nothing close to the reality of kindness and kinship at all. If Ted Lasso did what reviewers promised then it would be great. But all I saw was passable television that relies on hackneyed tropes to fool audiences into thinking their hearts are warmed, when really they have only been numbed.
Dr Stephen Nightingale
2 years ago
*deleted, re-edited, re-posted*
Last edited 2 years ago by Dr Stephen Nightingale
Tony Taylor
2 years ago
I know of a book review here in Australia a few years ago where an author sought the advice of another author about how best to approach the topic in question. When the book was written and published the advice-giving author gave a book a dismal review. They haven’t spoken since.
Richard Kuslan
2 years ago
My sense has always been that the review tells one more about the reviewer than the work reviewed.
Only a handful of reviewers shed light upon the work itself, and this by virtue of their heightened understanding, even profound insight, which in turn heightens one’s own enjoyment or edification by revealing what isn’t commonly seen or intuited.
Nicholas Rynn
2 years ago
Shriek is brilliant. I’ve watched it with grandchildren, nieces, nephews and their little friends. All have been spell bound even ifs it the fourth or fifth time of watching. It takes a Guardian critic to miss the essential point of the film, Kids Love It! As my children used to tell me Get a Life.
Nick M
2 years ago
You need to watch The Critical Drinker on youtube, he rips it out of films he doesn’t like.
Terence Fitch
2 years ago
The digitising of thought and creativity is a double edged sword. It’s democratic but also a kaleidoscope in fragments.
Matt M
2 years ago
This article is 22 paragraphs long! And the paragraphs are three times the length of those used by your better writers like Franklin, West and Chivers.
UnHerd: please remember that we pay for this service. This sort of thing is better suited to the Guardian or the other free sheets. Tight, well-argued and sub-edited stuff in the future please.
It is a joy to read 1000 well-chosen words. Nowadays, it also serves as a lead into the comments section – the best bit of any article. (If I ran UnHerd I would oblige my writers to engage BTL -as some already do). To engage a reader over 5000 words is impossible for all but the very best writers.
Btw I was being a bit tongue-in-cheek criticising this writer so vehemently because he says how much he values negative criticism in the article.
Disagree. The article sets out the main ideas – at which point, I start planning the brilliant comment I could add…. but as so often happens on Unherd, the piece develops both the argument and the counter positions. My point, trivial or superficial as it undoubtedly was, then goes unwritten. Unlike yours 🙂
Having made a couple of tiny movies myself and been eviscerated and celebrated by critics, your article is a beautiful cleansing of the personal palate and a joy to read, so thank you for that, but I would question your suggestion that critics have no power.
Recently I was asked to speak at a lockdown protest in Dublin. I was a little afraid of the inevitable canceling but I was also shamefully aware of the acquiescent silence from our nation’s artists so I agreed. The speech was embraced by some and rejected by others, both of which are valid. But a film critic from one of the major national newspapers used his Twitter feed – endorsed by his newspaper – to portray the thousands of people at the protest, (many of whom were families with young children), as far right rabble. Then he insisted that all state funding should be pulled from any future projects of the filmmaker who spoke.
This critic has interviewed me in the past. Written articles. Reviewed my work. He has my number in his phone. But he wasn’t at the protest. He met none of the people there. Didn’t watch the speech. Never spoke to me about any aspect of it.
Yet, backed by multi-millionaire bosses of a newspaper, he demanded that my work be defunded. Not my speech. Or my politics. But my work. And among the tiny coterie of critics that keeps this culture in a politically paralysed stranglehold, he was hailed as a hero for doing so.
When a protected critic is celebrated for cancelling any powerless artist on the grounds of disagreeing with a speech then the beauty of constructive criticism becomes just another exercise in destructively ugly power.
“Yet, backed by multi-millionaire bosses of a newspaper, he demanded that my work be defunded.”
Naturally he did – or those MSM multi-millionaire bosses would have defunded him. For the most part the MSM are sheer evil, and are colluding with the Ne-Marxist Left to destroy the middle Class led Democracies. You spoke as a Conservative voice, and so are the enemy of their system.
I think the outrage might have something to do with the fact that people watch in silos now. If Ted Lasso were on terrestrial TV in the past it would be loved by some viewers, liked by many, and disliked by some who watch it anyway as that’s what is on. Any criticism isn’t personal.
To watch Lasso now is to make a decision to watch it, you have to be an apple user (which is itself often tribal), then you have to sign up for the package, and since Apple+ isn’t full with content, Lasso might be the only reason to subscribe. Having made that decision you are literally invested. Criticism becomes personal.
It is probably largely economic.
The incestuous relationship between advertisers and the media and the fact that mainstream media is dying a slow death makes publications hyper sensitive to upsetting the advertisers themselves, their agencies, their lawyers, etc.
If you are a critic and you plan on thrashing the latest offering from Netflix or Sky or Marvel you better check with your Chief Financial Officer before you do that because you might be giving him or her a very big headache.
Great article. It’s hardly surprising, in our hypersensitive, outrage-driven world, that critics of any art form had better moderate their opinions–at least if they want to make a living from criticism.
“Smaller journals can be a little spicier, though: Becca Rothfield’s masterly evisceration of Sally Rooney’s “riskless and conciliatory” novels in The Point last year was a bracing antidote to Rooneymania.”
And I would add the ever-acerbic Sarah Ditum’s review of Rooney’s latest novel here on Unherd last week.
“Alan Pakula’s 1971 thriller Klute”
If I was inclined to hate this article (which I’m not), all would be forgiven for reminding us of Pakula’s masterpiece.
Excellent piece and some genuine belly laughs too, thank you. In my humble opinion, self-preservation is the more powerful force behind mediocrity and playing it safe. It was also quite ‘popular’ under Stalin.
One of the problems for critics is that they have to make a living.
In days gone by, once a critic had secured a berth at a national newspaper or magazine, they could pretty much write what they liked, without too much fear, and could live off their earnings as a critic.
Freed from the need to please, critics could be as honest – or as venomous – as they wished.
Now, if you want to make a living you need to be writing in dozens of different places and you are taking a huge risk if you savage a particular actor, movie, writer, book, restaurant – whatever it is you’re critiqueing – because a bad review, if taken badly, can seriously damage your career.
As a freelancer, it only takes one publicist to take your name off the roster for an interview junket, or to mention your name to an editor as persona non grata, and suddenly one of the handful of publications that take your stuff no longer does – it can seriously damage your income.
Thus savage reviews become mixed, ambivalent reviews become great, and good reviews become gushing.
I rarely bother reading film critics these days. Their judgements are not particularly interesting and certainly not to be relied on. The worst film I’ve seen in the last couple of years (and I’ve seen Cats) was The Souvenir. Yet the critics unanimously adored it. Many amateur reviewers on IMDb and elsewhere are more informative and perceptive.
There still seem to be plenty of forthright book critics, however.
My mum let me watch Klute when I was 12 (there’s a long story about that for another time), and I found it puzzling, but when I later watched it as an adult I found it boring. I loved The Parallax View both as a teenager and an adult. I watched All the President’s Men when I was 13 and loved it, but when I saw it as a grown up I thought it was pretty good but I realised Redford is a terrible actor.
I’m sure this article will ring true with anyone who’s ever reviewed anything in the public media. A lot of the outrage expended by third parties on behalf of poorly-reviewed authors can be seen as a kind of reverse logrolling, with the outraged wishing to be seen rising to the defence either of their friends or of well thought-of people in their own field in the hope of the favour being returned. Even in the tiny and recondite world of poetry, where I did most of my own reviewing work a few years back, a negative appraisal of the work of X would invariably attract furious responses from Y or Z. There are poets and editors I considered friends who simply stopped talking to me, far less offering commissions, after someone else they knew had been criticised, however vaguely or constructively. And I was far from being a Roger Ebert or Clive James, even in that closed, obscure world!
I struggle to believe that any rational person would take a blind bit of notice of anything most critics write/spout.
Ted Lasso is a fine fairytale fantasy. Uncomplicated in plot and theme. All about redemption through kindness.
Personally I love it, especially for the occasional pure football jokes – for example Ian Wright appearing as a pundit with the words: “I hate to say it but Tottenham are a top top team”. That episode released on the day Spurs went top of the table and Arsenal slumped to the bottom. And the “top top” angle, as football fans will know, relates to a snide remark by Alex Ferguson that Stephen Gerrard “isn’t a top top player”.
If Sarah Manavis didn’t like it, so be it. I’m puzzled that anyone would bother to berate her – as her review seemed to bear little relation to the show that the rest of us enjoy.
Good and timely article.
I am not sure which “sin” is worst: to have a critical opinion or to have an opinion at all – beyond the banal and subjective like/dislike dichotomy.
Probably the biggest “sin” is to have an opinion which you hold to be more than a matter of “free choice”. You, the critic, may like what you like, but don’t try to make ME feel less free to choose at will what to like.
UnHerd has an amazingly strict banned keyword filtering set, considering you’re supposed to be such an ‘antiWoke’ medium. I’m reposting this without the apparently offending word, because ‘approval’ is just another name for one of Dante’s infernal levels of limbo.
You forgot to mention Barry Norman, master of the subtly damning movie review for a couple of decades from when Film 74 burst onto our small screens.
Of course it is so much easier to post a reply to any article these days, and so the unimaginative, reflexive, ad hominem reaction looms large in every comments section. But the thing is, there aren’t that many daring movies and it is harder to find out what’s on since the demise of the local print media, which always had potted summaries of films that were on at the local screens so you could know what to go out and see.
There is however a much broader range of media, including many many online genres, and so discerning audiences are getting fragmented. Followers of niche music videos on YouTube were just treated to a killer takedown of the “Unison MIDI Chord Pack” by Tantacrul. Go watch it, it’s very entertaining.
Stephen,
I spent 4 very enjoyable years as a Producer/Director of Barry Norman’s Film Night – when he left the Beeb and joined Sky.
He was indeed the master of the subtly-damning review – but even a critic as redoubtable and long-established as Barry would sometimes have to pull his punches, due to the realities of the business. If we managed to secure a studio interview with a director or star of a film that he might otherwise have savaged, he would take a much gentler tone in his criticism or we’d not get the interview next time.
If we couldn’t get them into our studio then I would often do the junket interviews and sometimes would have a very friendly and positive interview with someone whose film Barry would then go on to maul in his review. It would always seem a little unfair to intercut those intvw soundbites with Barry’s criticism, as the interviewee would thus be denied a right-to-reply to the critcism. Nothing one could do about it as my interviews often predated his review by a week or so.
I once fell foul of a publicist for writing a one-line critique (for the Top 10 rundown so, although spoken by BN, not really part of his review) and she ensured I missed out on a few choice intvws as a result. It wasn’t even that bad a line – I wrote of a not very funny Jim Carey vehicle called “Me, Myself & Irene” the following: “Jim Carey plays good cop and bad cop in a film that’s not much cop”. Yet even a throwaway comment like that had a negative impact on what we were “given” as a show.
I was working for a broadcaster, so they kind of needed us to promote their films, but a freelancer has no such cover – as i referred to in my earlier comment down the page.
I think even Carey himself would get a belly laugh from, “Jim Carey plays good cop and bad cop in a film that’s not much cop.”
To me it’s about fairness. I’ve written reviews for the disability press and on one occasion when I found a comedy show a tad ho-hum it seemed only fair to acknowledge that my fellow audience members appeared to enjoy it far more than me – even while acknowledging that like me and like the performer on stage they were visually impaired so maybe somewhat partisan. As for Greil Marcus’s Dylan review, he could only get away with that rudeness because of his stature and the fact that his review would exist alongside other reviews or articles by him on Dylan.
My favourite demolition job is still Terry Eagleton’s magnificent takedown of The God Delusion in the London Review of Books.
Yes, absolutely wonderful. He completely demolishes Dawkins.
‘Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.’
‘He seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however supersized. He asks how this chap can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms.’
‘On the horrors that science and technology have wreaked on humanity, he is predictably silent. Yet the Apocalypse is far more likely to be the product of them than the work of religion. Swap you the Inquisition for chemical warfare.’
New owner takes over team hoping to wreck it or sell it – now, where have I heard that before? Oh, that’s right – Major League (which is great) and Any Given Sunday (which is slop, and right in the massively overrated wheelhouse) and Slap Shot (which is an all-time top 10 sports movie) and there are probably more. Did The Manageress have the same lead-in plot? I forget. Was Warren Clarke trying to sell the club?
I hope at least some of the criticism Sarah Manavis received for not falling in line with the deification of Ted Lasso had to do with the quality of her contrarian undergrad-writing-her-first-movie-review vibe. I’m in agreement with the author’s concerns about the dying art of the hatchet job. But my goodness, Sarah Manavis should be an emblem of the dying art of readable prose. She’s a right awful composer of sentences.
*deleted, re-edited, re-posted*
I know of a book review here in Australia a few years ago where an author sought the advice of another author about how best to approach the topic in question. When the book was written and published the advice-giving author gave a book a dismal review. They haven’t spoken since.
My sense has always been that the review tells one more about the reviewer than the work reviewed.
Only a handful of reviewers shed light upon the work itself, and this by virtue of their heightened understanding, even profound insight, which in turn heightens one’s own enjoyment or edification by revealing what isn’t commonly seen or intuited.
Shriek is brilliant. I’ve watched it with grandchildren, nieces, nephews and their little friends. All have been spell bound even ifs it the fourth or fifth time of watching. It takes a Guardian critic to miss the essential point of the film, Kids Love It! As my children used to tell me Get a Life.
You need to watch The Critical Drinker on youtube, he rips it out of films he doesn’t like.
The digitising of thought and creativity is a double edged sword. It’s democratic but also a kaleidoscope in fragments.
This article is 22 paragraphs long! And the paragraphs are three times the length of those used by your better writers like Franklin, West and Chivers.
UnHerd: please remember that we pay for this service. This sort of thing is better suited to the Guardian or the other free sheets. Tight, well-argued and sub-edited stuff in the future please.
Inclined to agree. Some interesting points but then it drags on way too long
It is a joy to read 1000 well-chosen words. Nowadays, it also serves as a lead into the comments section – the best bit of any article. (If I ran UnHerd I would oblige my writers to engage BTL -as some already do). To engage a reader over 5000 words is impossible for all but the very best writers.
Btw I was being a bit tongue-in-cheek criticising this writer so vehemently because he says how much he values negative criticism in the article.
Disagree. The article sets out the main ideas – at which point, I start planning the brilliant comment I could add…. but as so often happens on Unherd, the piece develops both the argument and the counter positions. My point, trivial or superficial as it undoubtedly was, then goes unwritten. Unlike yours 🙂
Keep it up, Unherd.
Touché!
You are a gentleman and a scholar.