Film Criticism in the Digital World is the name of the panel at 1:15 p.m. Sunday at the Maryland Film Festival (at the tent village across from the Charles Theatre). As a member of the panel, along with City Paper's Brett McCabe, Salon's Andrew O'Heir and the Village Voice's Aaron Hillis (who also edits GreenCine.com), I'll be prepared to discuss questions I've fielded at similar gatherings. Have blogs and Web sites democratized or debased the craft of movie reviewing? Is there any new model to support good criticism in print or at least make it easier to access amid the blizzard of opinion on the Internet?
But for me, movie criticism in the digital world can't be separated from moviegoing in the digital world. How we talk about movies and how we see movies are inextricably intertwined. I came to write about movies because of my early love for the art form. And that love, I realize now, was all tied up with print, celluloid and movies on TV. Soon, all three corners of what looked like an eternal triangle may be gone - and their contents poured into a computer.
In the pre-multiplex times when I grew up, my main source of connection with the movies came from the Hollywood classics that appeared chopped up in syndicated packages on independent TV stations. My Bible was my older brother's well-thumbed copy of Stephen H. Scheuer's paperback Movies on TV, which listed films alphabetically, provided rosters of actors and directors, summarized plots, analyzed strengths and weaknesses, and applied a four-star rating system.
It was different from the grab bag of the Internet Movie Database (which is erratic even as a source of information). Having a book that provided all that information, and applied a common standard to movies rather than the IMDB's user polls, allowed youngsters and teenagers to develop their own sense of movie history. Alternately agreeing with and rebelling against Movies on TV, I began to look forward to movies made by dependably great directors (the W's were especially strong: William Wellman, Billy Wilder, William Wyler) or starring exciting performers like Ingrid Bergman and James Cagney. In my adolescence, the sighting of a great movie on some station's late-show schedule, whether The Lives of a Bengal Lancer or Invasion of the Body Snatchers, swept from class to class and school to school.
