By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Accounting for taste: hearing VOICES old and new
Over at his indieWIRE blog, New York writer Anthony Kaufman, “wherein I rant about all things film and film industry unfit to publish in any official capacity,” publishes a reply to a recent dis of another writer new to his turf: “Luke Y Thompson—the critic we lambasted in my previous blog about the Village Voice[-]New Times merger—has seen his public flaying. Admittedly, I feel a little bad for the guy now, and I have had several conversations about one of my points: that New York papers should have New York-based critics…. My main problem with Luke… isn’t that he’s based in Hollywood, but it’s that he doesn’t reflect a “Village Voice” or New York state of mind….” Writes Thompson: “Wow, I have never had such a vocal reaction to anything I’ve written, ever, anywhere else. I must be doing something right at last… Your complaints about me seem to boil down to the fact that I don’t have the same sacred cows you do. It’s easy to find art house movies I’ve disliked and mainstream movies I’ve liked—it would be equally easy to pick and choose indie movies I’ve championed (my [top] film of 2001 was the still-undistributed Tomorrow Night) and mainstream movies I’ve disliked (Gladiator, for a big one). If you want a critic who agrees with you all the time, I’m sorry to say you’re never going to find one. That isn’t the point of criticism anyway. Anthony—if I feel like it, maybe I’ll find your top ten list and pick it apart sometime. But right now I’m on vacation.”