| Movie Review | The Journal of American History, 96.3

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| Movie Review | The Journal of American History, 96.3 | The History Cooperative

Movie Review

For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism. Dir. by Gerald Peary. Prod. by Amy Geller. Central Productions and WGBH, 2008. 83 mins. (http://www.fortheloveofmovies.net)

In the very first moments of For the Love of Movies, a documentary film about the vagaries of the profession of film reviewing over the last one hundred years, a title asserts that "today, film criticism is a profession under siege" and mentions that many reviewers have lost their jobs. The screen image then cuts to reminiscences of an early moviegoing experience by film geek par excellence Harry Knowles, whose highly impressionistic Web site of commentary on popular culture (aintitcoolnews.com) is visited daily by millions of young fans and has even caused Knowles to be courted by movie studios in their quest for the audience demographic he represents. If there is a thematic connection here—perhaps the success of fanboy bloggers such as Knowles might explain something about the decline of an older version of writerly film criticism—the film does not make it at this point, and explicitly addresses the impact of the World Wide Web and youth culture only at the very end. If there is an ambiguity here about whether it is film criticism that is under siege or a particular print-based brand of criticism that newer media venues are supplanting, the film prefers not to explore it and ultimately wishes it away through a benign—even cheerful—acceptance of all modes of critical attention to film (print and electronic alike). This means that if the opening title appears to present the decline of (some version) of film criticism as regrettable, the course of the film neither expands on that regrettable situation nor gestures toward a change in the way things are currently done. The film seems fractured in that it announces a problem and then wishes it away, thereby making no solution seem necessary.

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