“Ebert’s theory of cinema in effect amounts to little more than “I liked this, I didn’t like that.” Or, perhaps, “This happened, and I liked it. Then this happened, and I didn’t like it.””
Right, that’s what his readers expect of him. In fact, your heavy-handed and pretentious diatribe about the “responsibility of the critic” aside, the entire job of the film critic (or the critic of any popular media) is to assess something, give an opinion of it, and back up that opinion with some examples about what the reviewer liked or disliked about it.
“This is cataloguing, not criticism, and while it may lend itself to the fast-food style of movie reviewing that assigns stars and a thumbs up or down, it abdicates entirely the role and responsibility of the critic, which is to discern what the object of his criticism is, what it says about itself and its medium, and what it says, also, about we who are witnessing it and the society that created it.”
Oh spare me. Do you seriously expect someone to watch the latest meatheaded summer blockbuster action film or Julia Roberts romantic comedy and explain “what it says about itself and its medium [and] we who are witnessing it and the society that created it”? I’m sorry to inform you that not every movie is Apocalypse Now or Citizen Kane, and in fact very few movies have anything meaningful to say. For that matter, would you expect the average newspaper reader to be at all interested in some long-winded exposition about the symbolism and societal meaning of a movie that they’re going to forget about a week after watching? A movie critic is not an academic. There is a place for the kind of in-depth analysis you seek, but it’s not the pages of the Chicago Sun-Times, it’s a masters thesis in a liberal arts discipline.
