Read Harlan Ellison's Watching for Free Online Page B

whatever the goony-birds are currently using to feather their vitae ) is ultimately hateful and false.
     
    So the problem, in my view, is bringing into being a cadre of film critics and film scholars whose pronouncements are based not on academic need, cynical disrespect for the art form, or hayseed arrogant ignorance, but on background, knowledge, sophistication and—most of all—affection.
     
    It is in such spirit that Hoppity has written what you find in this book.
     
     
     
PART THREE:
In Which The Critic Attempts To Escape The Gas Chamber By Explaining His Motives, Not Raising His Voice In Anger Though Insulting Everyone In Sight, And By Explaining How He Came To This Occupation
    The inescapable, core problem with writing critical comment about films is that the commentator is really given no option.
     
    If the review is positive, if the film is something special that one wishes to inveigle the reader into actually going to see, literally conning the potential filmgoer into spending money through the seduction of words, one is limited. The word-pictures can only do so much. The restrictions are many and truly fearsome. The critic dare not give away the great scenes, dare not reveal the punch of the surprise ending or expose the killer; the critic may not hint at, or paraphrase, the memorable lines that everyone talks about interminably, at risk of robbing the movie-lover of the frisson of joyful discovery. It's as mean an act as telling the reader of a murder mystery who the culprit is, ten pages before s/he finishes the book.
     
    The critic can only go huzzah and huzzah so many times before it becomes white noise. The critic is limited in vocabulary, because beyond a certain point it becomes dangerous and boring, and then dangerously counterproductive. Dangerous, because nothing can live up to such panegyrics; boring, because what can one say after one says don't miss it?
     
    So the options are removed. And what one is left with is the negative, or killer, review. One can be infinitely more entertaining when savaging the unworthy, the cupidic, the inept, the dishonest. Like Spaceballs .
     
    One can unleash the stream of liquid fire and chew a path of invective through the failed art with a candycane marker of didactic dirge at every gravesite. Make the stake of licorice, and one can drive it into an endless number of vampire hearts with relative impunity.
     
    But even that choice is no choice; for very soon, the short memory of the reader comes to expect savagery and fulmination. Forgotten are all the palliating equivocations, all the positive comments, all the rave reviews. Only the violence retains the color of passion in a reader's memory. And no matter how deserved the evisceration of the unworthy movie, it becomes suspect. The critic is perceived as just meanspirited; bitterness for the sake of cleverness.
     
    It's not that it's easier to write bad reviews, it's simply that there is so much more bad stuff than good with which the commentator must deal. That wearying truth notwithstanding, the critic is perforce manacled by the rigors of the game, as well as by the insatiable appetites of the readership.
     
    Most people only read film reviews to see if they agree with the commentator, anyhow. And how does one win that pot?
     
    There are smart critics and dopey critics. Pauline Kael and Molly Haskell and most of the time David Denby, in my view, are the models one tries to approach for quality and common sense, for important insights and the placing of a film in its historical context. I suppose Siskel and Ebert are the best of the populist reviewers, though I think the ceaseless demands of cobbling up artificial rancor between them for the delectation of a tv viewership that can be roused from torpor only by brouhaha, has made their duologues cranky and tiring. George Kirgo on CBS was dedicated and wise, but he rapidly grew so disenchanted with what he had to pass judgment on, that when contract