Old MCN Blogs
David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Thursday, October 5th, 2006 - 2 Comments »
Be Sociable, Share!

Village Voice Critical Slams: Lim, Atkinson Out

If you’ve been reading the Village Voice lately, perhaps you’ve noticed that the film review section for New York City’s alternative weekly is much the same as the film review section for Los Angeles’ alternative weekly. Ever since the New Times company bought the Voice, there’s been a whole lot of sameness — bad news for everyone interested in arthouse film.
Writer Anthony Kaufman over at IFC confirms that there’s more bad news

This week, the new Voice editor got rid of two more film section staffers: editor Dennis Lim and critic Michael Atkinson and announced the hiring of Nathan Lee, who’s written for the New York Times. J. Hoberman remains, yet the Voice’s film sections offers hardly any local local voices. For past few months, most of the criticism has come from New Times’ freelancers, scattered across the country, or from reprints of reviews by LA Weekly’s Ella Taylor and Scott Foundas. Taylor and Foundas are top knotch writers, but every movie deserves more than one review.

I’ve already heard executive from a small distribution company complain about the doubling-up. “The arthouse market market is review-driven,” he said. “We have limited numbers of prints and a limited advertising budget–we can’t always afford to open a film in both New York and LA on the same date.”

“If we open the film in LA, and we get killed in the LA Weekly (review), that’s it–we already know what the review will be in the Village Voice three weeks later: the same damn thing. What’s the use of buying an ad in the print edition? We’ll take our chances and buy bigger ads in Time Out New York or New York magazine. Who knows what their critics will say, but at least the movie will have a chance.”

Be Sociable, Share!

2 Comments »

2 Responses to “Village Voice Critical Slams: Lim, Atkinson Out”

  1. LYT says:
    October 6, 2006 at 1:33 am

    most of the criticism has come from New Times’ freelancers, scattered across the country
    Just to correct that impression slightly…New Times/VVM’s Robert Wilonsky, Bill Gallo, Jim Ridley, and Rob Nelson are all salaried staff writers at their respective papers.
    Melissa Levine and I are the main freelancers, and we’re both in California.

  2. Justine_FilmFatale says:
    October 6, 2006 at 9:53 am

    Thank you for clarifying the employment status of these writers. I do hope the New Times staffers manage to retain their jobs when so many better writers and editors have been replaced by cheap, inferior freelance labor.
    Your comment doesn’t change the fact that the Village Voice film section–already weakened by its reliance on reprints, non-New York writers, and freelance contributors–has been gutted by the dismissals of Dennis Lim and Mike Atkinson.

Quote Unquotesee all »

It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon