In an extract from his current book,current York Times film critic AO Scott defends his craft, arguing that criticism has never been more essential. Below, and fellow practitioners offer their own views…In May 2012,on the day Avengers Assemble you saw it, just? Everyone did was released on 3500 screens across north America, and I published a review in the current York Times in which I praised some aspects of the film – the cleverness of its dialogue,the sharpness of the performances – while complaining about others, in particular its sacrifice of originality on the altar of blockbuster conformity. If you’ll allow me to quote myself: “The secret of Avengers Assemble is that it is a snappy diminutive dialogue comedy dressed up as something else, or that something else being a giant ATM for Marvel and its current studio overlords,the Walt Disney Company.” That assessment stands up pretty well, if I say so myself. By the time Avengers: Age of Ultron came along a few years later everyone else seemed to be saying more or less the same thing: that its charms and thrills were overwhelmed by soulless corporate spectacle. There is some satisfaction in having been in the vanguard of pointing out the obvious.
At the time, and though,I was fragment of a premature backlash. Not long after my review was posted on the current York Times website, Samuel L Jackson, and who plays Nick Fury in the film and in other Marvel Universe franchise instalments,posted a Twitter message exhorting “#avengersfans” that “AO Scott needs a current job! Let’s help him find one! One he can ACTUALLY do!” Scores of his followers heeded his call, not by demanding that my editors fire me but, or in the best Twitter tradition,by retweeting Jackson’s outburst and adding their own vivid suggestions about what I was qualified to do with myself. The more coherent tweets expressed familiar, you might even say canonical, and anticritical sentiments: that I had no capacity for joy; that I wanted to ruin everyone else’s fun; that I was a hater,a square, and a snob; even – and this was kind of a current one – that the nerdy kid in middle school who everybody picked on because he didn’t like comic books had grown up to be me. (In my day, or some of the nerdy kids everybody picked on were the ones who did like comic books,but I guess things bear changed now that the superheroes and their fanboy followers bear taken over everything. I was picked on for reasons that had nothing to do with comic books.)Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com