Are all critics phonies?

Thanks for the insights. Yeah, I guess I sound pretty "worked up," but my blood pressure is pretty normal.

Stupified, addled, enervated and anaesthetized by TV and the Web, we've lost the ability to be "worked up" over anything, at least worked up to the point where we do anything about it. And I think the media powers-that-be understand this. Screens -- be they TV or computer or Blackberry or cell phone -- are the new opium of the people. On one hand, mass media is (I use the singular because mass media is a monolith) the adversary of the powerful -- it is the court gossip. On the other hand, it is the enabler and collaborator, part of the "bread and circuses" which keep the people pacified, distracted and dumbed down, leaving the spiders and snakes free to do their dirty work. If it weren't for television and the Web's deliberate isolation and alienation of individuals from each other, their pandering to self-gratififcation, hence their destruction of the sense of civic engagement, popular response to, for example, the economic meltdown would be far less passive; there really would be mobs in the streets, like there are now in Europe, where commercial media hasn't infiltrated and metastasized to the degree it has here (give it time).

Everything you say is dead on. The old media tell themselves their decline is due to changing technology. They're only half-right. The decline is also due to the fact that we just don't like them -- for their arrogance, as you say -- but have had no choice but to "take it" (remember Peter Finch in Network). Now, we no longer have to take it.

By the way, I guess I shouldn't indict critics as a class. With all the stuff being pushed at us -- midst all the hype we're subject to -- they help us avoid wasting our time and money. And some do take care: Pauline Kael (alas, long gone) Berardinelli, The New Yorker.... You're right -- sometimes, like with Borat and No Country for Old Men, they all get it wrong. But our issue isn't so much that they get it wrong (or that we get it wrong), but their lack of care. In their privileged position you'd think these jokers at the top would have a higher sense of responsibility, a more rigorous integrity. But they just don't seem to give a *beep* beyond what will get them by. And I guess that's what gets me "worked up".

As for the amateur reviews, some are truly stunning, as you say, but most are pretty bad. I think what we get with amateur reviews is, in effect, "word of mouth," which ain't such a bad medium.

Uh oh, there I went again. ;)

It seems obvious Ebert was writing his comments on this film sometime after seeing the movie - I have run into that many times (especially in books and magazine articles published before the advent of videotapes) where a "major" critic or historian completely gets many major plot points wrong in a film. This movie wasn't that easy to track down in America until the last few years, perhaps Ebert hadn't seen the movie in years and was recalling from "memory".

Maybe you ne parlez pas français, mais vous avez quite correctly rendered the lines. And your point on the General André de... changing his mood on the spot is quite interesting.