Yesterday I held forth briefly on public radio's movie reviewers. Today's Slate has an excellent piece by Jacob Weisberg called "Uncritical Critics" on the same general (although non-radio) topic, a response to the Warner Bros. opening of "The Avengers" movie without the usual free pre-release reviewer screening. Here's some quotes, with my reactions:

Reviewers... have a stake in keeping up the pretense that most films are worth reviewing. Were they to acknowledge that 95% of what comes out of Hollywood is eyewash <1>, there wouldn't be much left for most of them to do.

You might argue that movies aren't so bad nowadays. But that would only prove that you haven't spent much time at the multiplex this summer. [list of the summer's film titles] It's not necessary to see these films to know how dismal they are, because they are reiterations of other bad films. To be sure, there were plenty of crummy genre films in the golden age of cinema. And good ones still break through from time to time. But it would be seriously perverse to maintain that mainstream film is a robust popular art form.

Even relatively successful independent films have no distribution beyond big cities, and if you want to see foreign films nowadays, you have to go to festivals. Most newspaper arts editors, not to mention TV and radio producers, understandably want their critics to write about movies advertised in their pages, movies that also happen to be the only ones average people are likely to see. The worst hucksters are the reviewers who spend their weekends on previewing junkets in New York and Los Angeles. They fly first class, stay at the Four Seasons, and get $100 a day for incidentals. In return, they provide the blurbs quoted in advance newspaper ads ("An ending that will knock your socks off"--Tucson Gazette). The junketeers deliver these squibs, which seldom appear in actual reviews, to the studio publicists. In some cases, publicists write the blurbs themselves and find "critics" to accept attribution.

Typically, [movie reviewers] fell in love with movies when movies were better and are trying not to notice that their love object has shriveled into hagdom. They're not overtly corrupt, but their standards are in a condition of collapse. They appraise poor films as good and fair films as great.

I have two theories about why movie critics are so uncritical--one aesthetic, the other economic. The aesthetic explanation is that critics see so many bad movies that their taste deteriorates. The economic explanation is that movie reviewers are really part of the movie industry.

In all but a few places, a reviewer who consistently pans blockbusters is likely to run into trouble with his superiors. Movie ads are a major source of revenue for papers and magazines and TV stations, and editors and publishers don't want some "elitist" reviewer threatening that money. Most critics can tell you stories about the pressure on them to be upbeat and populist.

A couple of years ago, Susan Sontag argued in an article in the "New York Times Magazine" that the decline of film quality is a demand-driven problem. What's killing cinema as an art form is the demise of the audience with a taste for serious and challenging films. If she's right, there may not be much reviewers can do. But it would be nice to see them rage a little against the degradation of the medium they're supposed to love. One way to protest would be to follow the "crank" critics in acknowledging that movies such as "Deep Impact" and "Small Soldiers" don't require evaluation. A newspaper that wants to serve its readers well can provide a paragraph-long capsule and a Zagat-style reader rating instead. Critics should address the larger question of why Hollywood thinks so little of today's film audience. And if Warner Bros. doesn't want "The Avengers" reviewed, reviewers should be only too happy to oblige.

Final note on the feature film, from another review in Slate by David Edelstein:

And there's something reassuring about the fact that 'The Avengers' is so rotten: proof yet again that people with piles of money can hire wizard production designers but can't fake class... As the eccentric master villain who controls the weather, even Sean Connery is flat-out terrible, acting high on the hog. To think Connery once found the Bond films so far beneath him! When he sputters lines like "Time to die!" one imagines Dr. No, Goldfinger, and Blofeld snickering in the wings.