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From: Hamilton.ES@XEROX.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.movies
Subject: Re: Critics
Message-ID: <12692@sri-arpa.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 21-Aug-84 22:54:20 EDT
Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.12692
Posted: Tue Aug 21 22:54:20 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 23-Aug-84 02:08:11 EDT
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From:  Bruce Hamilton 

Michael Ventura, of the LA Weekly, is light-years beyond all others.  He
is both impassioned and articulate; and I even agree with him much of
the time.  Ventura walks a dangerous line toward becoming too preachy
and emotionally involved with the films and filmmakers he writes on, but
his prose is so fine, that I can't take him to task.

Does anybody know what happened to Myron Meisel, who used to write for
the LA Reader a few years ago?  I often disagreed with him, but his
reviews were always tremendously informative -- worth more than most
film courses, I suspect.

For a "mass market" reviewer, David Ansen in Newsweek is excellent at
conveying to me a sense of a film in a few sentences.  Jack Kroll I
think much less of.

I'll lay you odds Kroll is 20 or 30 years older than Ansen.  It seems to
me that awfully many of the over-50 (or maybe I should say over-60)
generation of critics invariably affect a curious naivete-cum-pomposity
which I find absolutely MADDENNING!  Anybody else read Edwin Tatnall
Canby in Audio?  Whenever I read one of his columns, I think I'd like to
take a large pair of boxing gloves and beat the @#$% out of him.

--Bruce