The culture of independent film criticism has totally gone down the drain and this seems to come with the territory of the consumer age that we are now living in.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
In this age of consumerism film criticism all over the world - in America first but also in Europe - has become something that caters for the movie industry instead of being a counterbalance.
It's becoming increasingly harder and harder; there's no such thing as independent film anymore. There aren't any, they don't exist. In the old days you could go and get a certain amount of the budget with foreign sales, now everybody wants a marketable angle.
The quality of mainstream cinema has changed. A lot of independent voices feel they can leave everything behind and make independent films.
An often-repeated assertion in the body of film criticism I have written is the assertion that movies do not just mirror the culture of any given time; they also create it.
I mean no film is beyond criticism, but I think we've made a very modest movie.
We live in a youth-obsessed, aesthetically obsessed culture. That is no more evident than in the film industry.
I'll tell you, I think that the Internet has provided an enormous boost to film criticism by giving people an opportunity to self publish or to find sites that are friendly.
Sometimes it occurs to me that the job of a serious cultural critic mostly consists in telling the generality of people that their opinions - on films, on books, on all manner of widgets, gadgets and even the latest electronic fidgets - simply aren't up to scratch.
Marketing has supplanted story as the primary force behind the worthiness of making a film, and that's a very sad thing. It's film only as a function of consumerism rather than as an important component of our culture, and that's everywhere around the world.
I hope we're all kind of influencing each other now to keep the quality up on those things. They seem to be getting better and better and better as there's not only sort of a film geek audience, there's also a general interest in the overall film consuming population.