ON FILM More Pitt, fewer indie finds in Toronto

By Philip Martin (Contact)

Brad Pitt, cast as a personal trainer in Burn After Reading, will be holding forth for the press during the Toronto International Film Festival.

LITTLE ROCK — Barring unforeseen airline difficulties, by the time you read this I’ll have been at the Toronto International Film Festival for a couple of days. This is the first time I’ll be there by myself - in the eight times I’ve been to the festival I was accompanied by MovieStyle editor Karen Martin, who in addition tobeing my boss is my wife and without whom I’d no doubt be living in a van by the river.

She’s not going because of economic reasons - the price of jet fuel is high - and because we have a couple of new puppies that we aren’t quite ready to board. And because the folks in the film festival press office won’t approve a second media credential because, Iguess, we’re from Arkansas instead of New York or California.

Without going to inside baseball on you guys, let me just explain that while it is possible to cover the festival and even get into press screenings without a credential, it is neither easy nor fun. There’s a lot of standing in line involvedand an uncredentialed journalist isn’t likely to get into any screenings of the buzzed-about movies. For six of the last eight years, Karen has had to work very hard - and negotiate with studio publicity flacks - to put together a viable festival schedule.

There was one year when they gave us two credentials and another year when they promised us two butreneged when we showed up to claim them - that year she got one and I was left with a handful of the dreaded “voucher tickets” that get you in if there’s any room after the credentialed press files in.

So when the festival press office once again (and without explanation) denied our request for a second credential, we pretty much decided we’d skip this year’s festival. After all, a lot of newspapers have done away with their film critics, and while Toronto is still the most important festival for our purposes - most of the movies we see in Toronto eventually open in Arkansas theaters - we’re getting more and more local screenings of mainstream movies, the sort that were hardly ever screened in our market a few years ago. We constantly have to weigh costs against potential benefits,especially when we’re spending other people’s money.

(Plus I’m not even convinced that the best way to write about movies is an opening day review; were I king I might decree that reviews not run until a week or so after a film has opened - criticism should be less evaluative and more discursive. The opening day review is a convention that people have gotten used to like the old movie audiences got used to Technicolor and CinemaScope, but it’s by no means the only way to write about the subject. Given the time, space and psychic energy I’d write about old movies every week.)

In the end, the decision that I should go to Toronto this year was predicated by some opportunities offered by thestudios. So my trip will be a little different than in the past; I’ll be doing more interviews and less investigative moviegoing. I’ll probably see fewer odd little movies and more mainstream ones. Last year I talked to Todd Haynes; this year it’ll be more George Clooney and Brad Pitt.

That’s a compromise, but it’s all right - for most of us, the movies are more about George Clooney and Brad Pitt than Todd Haynes anyway. And this isn’t exactly a tough gig; sToronto’s a nice town and - aside from our difficulties with the press office - the festival is well-run and, if you’ve a credential, pretty easy to manage.

I hope this isn’t the last Toronto International Film Festival I cover, but I understand there are no guarantees. It is a luxury to spend time with a newspaper, let alone consider the significance of arrays of flashing light and sound.

My feeling is that newspapers go astray when they desert their core constituency, that mythical cadre of “people like us” who want more depth and more analysis - more thought - than television and other media typically provide. It is a mistake to reduce criticism to snark and cynicism, to pretend that the reviewer’s performance matters more than the quality of his consideration.

Where the Internet has an advantage is in its bottomlessness, its capacity to hold more of what we’ve taken to calling “content” - more words and more ideas and possibly more insight than the limited print review format can contain. There are advantages to writing for cyberspace - the ability to instantly publish, a potentially worldwide audience, theunfettered excitement of being able to address whatever topic in whatever style you choose - but good luck trying to find someone to fairly pay you for those efforts.

A lot of great writing and thinking appear online - but so do bad writing and thinking. To compete with online sources, newspapers ought to try to increase their ratio of good writing and thinking, not replace critics with bullet points and graphics of upturned or downturned thumbs - or eliminate critics altogether. To do so cedes territory newspapers could reasonably defend, for this is terrain where newspapers have strengths.

A newspaper can provide a reader assurance that the writer is not a crank or a liar or a shill. Readers will have to judge the quality of the work for themselves, but there’s a presumption (not always correct) that a professional critic employed by a newspaper knows something about his subject and has at his disposal resources an amateur blogger may not.

A newspaper can provide a writer with a forum and an infrastructure, a little traveling moneyhere and there and at least the presumption of legitimacy.

Sure, it’s cheaper to fill the space with wire copy, with reviews piped in from Chicago or New York, but there’s also an advantage in having a consistent local voice writing about movies in the context of what’s happening in the community, especially in an era when it’s easy to discover the critical consensus on a given movie. People who read reviews already have a good idea as to whether they want to spend their money to see the movie - they’ve already read Roger Ebert or A.O. Scott online. They’re looking for more, not less.

Good criticism isn’t about delivering verdicts but discovering what movies mean, how they fit in some larger story about the way we live now. I don’t think that’s unimportant work, but I don’t kid myself that it’s a growth industry. I’m back in Toronto. For now.

E-mail:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

MovieStyle, Pages 35, 40 on 09/05/2008