This summer, the major studios decided press screenings weren’t all that — they bypassed newspapers critics in favor of popular review: weekend box office numbers. The recent Los Angeles Times poll suggested that today’s kids prefer peer analysis to highly trained professional analysis. We’ve suggested that today’s critics are out-of-touch with the real world.
So what role should film (music, book, architecture, etc) critics play in the real world? In response to a question from colleague Patrick Goldstein, there is this: