Tuesday, June 21, 2022

So long Joe ... so long me?

I haven't been keeping up regularly with the KCRW film reviews of Joe Morgenstern, whose reviews appear in print for the Wall Street Journal. The audio form of those reviews are one of the least frequently visited podcasts on my Stitcher app. Although I dearly love this stalwart critic and I sometimes read my own reviews with his voice in my head reading them -- to see if they sound anything like his exceptional version of the craft -- the fact is, most of the time I haven't seen the movie he's reviewed, and if I have, it's only three minutes worth of content. When I'm putting on a podcast to do some chore or to accompany some form of commute, I usually want something in longer form so I can just set it and forget it.

Unfortunately, that means I only just now saw an April 30th piece called "Swan song for now," which I hurriedly put on as soon as I grasped the potential meaning of that title.

True enough, Morgenstern has stepped away from film criticism. 

It's a sad day. Or, it was a sad day seven weeks ago. 

In truth, I thought Morgenstern was more likely to die than to retire. He turns 90 in August, and though he hasn't lost a step in either his writing or his performance of his own words in his on-air reviews, many people have been retired for 25 years by the time they're 90, and many others have been dead for at least ten. 

The saddest part, I think, is that Morgenstern doesn't appear to be quitting -- "for now," he teases us -- because he can't do it anymore. It's not even because he doesn't want to do it anymore. It's because he doesn't recognize the version of the movies he sees today as they slip away from their once-central role in the culture.

And maybe only a little bit because he can't gladly adapt to this new-fangled method of watching movies at home through screener links ... which is more evidence, to him, that movies are no longer the thing that called him to this profession so many years ago.

I hope the podcast doesn't disappear from my app anytime soon, though I don't think it will. I can still go back and listen to all the reviews I neglected over the years ... even the ones for movies I haven't seen.

Morgenstern's retirement comes along at an interesting crossroads for me as well.

I have lately found the task of continuing to feed movie reviews to my site, ReelGood, to be perfunctory at best, arduous at worst. Not that we have tons of devoted readers awaiting each bit of new content, but I feel an obligation to keep posting one or two new reviews a week, to keep up what is increasingly a facade: the notion that the website is a vital entity powered by energetic critics and other film lovers. I do have a couple others who review for me, less frequently than I'd like, but I really need more, and I need those more to be more diverse -- at the moment, we're three privileged white men talking about the latest in movies.

I've known I need to bring in additional writers for the entire two years I've been running the site, a gig I picked up when the former editor got jack of it in a way I'm feeling all too keenly now. But when you are feeling a certain lethargy for the thing you are doing, you also feel a certain lethargy to make it any better. It's sort of easier to keep rolling along with the status quo than try to sell someone what you sort of think is a lie: that now is the time to try to increase the profile of a film review website. 

One issue is that I don't feel like I can really offer them much. I can't pay them, of course, so all I'm really offering is a chance for them to see their work in print, and maybe the occasional advanced screening or screener link, though those have decreased in quantity as well. 

The other is, what really is the future of movie reviews? And who is going to be its shepherd?

Increasingly, it doesn't feel like me. And that's perfectly fine. I would love nothing more than to hand over these reins to a young go-getter, preferably someone who is very different from me demographically, and stay on in a sort of senior film critic role, who writes only when he's really inspired to do so. 

But in order to find this person, first I have to do the legwork, posting in job spaces that are not very familiar to me. Then I have to find a person whose writing is good and who strikes me as a potential heir. And then I have to convince them this is a brand worth preserving and growing in a climate where cinematic attendance is dropping precipitously, and the center of our culture is television more than movies -- though television also faces its own challenges with its mind-boggling number of options and its difficulty in focusing around a single transportive program the whole culture can share. 

Complicating this moment in time is that I have to renew the site's domain, and it's not as simple as charging another year to my credit card. (So yes, I am losing money on this non-profit-generating enterprise as well.) 

The former editor I mentioned earlier had the site linked to his ABN, which stands for Australian Business Number. All Australian businesses must have one, even if that "business" does not generate any profit. I imagine they assume anyone who has an ABN is trying to make money, but that would be an incorrect assumption.

Anyway, when he dropped all things ReelGood he also saw no reason to keep his ABN afloat, and it has lapsed. The site that hosts our domain has recognized this and has sent me emails saying that the ABN needs to be renewed or transferred to a new registrant, and that the latter process could require some kind of bill of sale or letter on company letterhead that legitimizes it and proves that I'm not attaching the site to some rogue business that's going to turn it into a kiddie porn site or something. 

Ha ... as if ReelGood has "company letterhead."

When I first heard about this I thought it might be the thing that breaks me. Not that this is hard as such, but it does require my brain to work things out that are unfamiliar to me, and when I've got so much other house admin to wrangle with, children's school and playdate-related logistics to coordinate, and an upcoming U.S. trip to plan that contains a long-delayed memorial for my mother, who died in 2020, it just feels like it could be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Bye bye ReelGood, bye bye my ability to still describe myself as a professional film critic. 

I was seriously mulling this over. What if I just let this site die? When I agreed to take it on from the former editor, I came to it with the knowledge that I wanted to keep the brand alive to hand on to the next person, doing my duty to maintain it as a permanent entity -- whatever that means in this day and age. But it wasn't because he necessarily seemed to demand it. Sure, he'd prefer if the thing he created didn't disappear from the world. But more than anything, it was clear that he just wanted -- needed -- to get out. Whatever else happened after that point was somebody else's problem.

Well, that's not going to happen. Not yet.

Instead of getting a new ABN -- something that is probably easy but felt incredibly hard to my little brain -- I'm going to be able to use the existing ABN for the ReelGood Film Festival, which operates as a slightly different entity under the same name (and does actually generate profit, fancy that, though its organizers are hanging on by their fingernails as well, and didn't actually hold a festival in 2022 in anticipation of coming back stronger in 2023). 

Then in discussions with the tech staff at the domain hosting site, I found out that the type of domain I have -- I can't even be bothered to remember the term they used -- means that a more informal sort of change of registrant can occur on the site itself, without further documentary evidence like bills of sales or involving company letterheads.

I haven't done that yet, but I still have about 45 more days before the domain expires.

I'm hanging on. For at least a little while longer.

And if I ever have to ask myself why -- why I'm paying something like $150 a year, and maybe twice that considering that I am also paying for a podcast hosting site that I no longer use -- the answer is simple:

I still need to be a critic.

Sure, there's the fringe benefit of continuing to go to movies for free with my critics card, which costs me only $75 per year and returns probably four times that value. But the reality is, they might not even notice if ReelGood disappeared and might continue to renew my membership.

No, it's that I still need to be able to call myself a critic, and I still need it to be true.

You could argue that I stopped being able to call myself a professional film critic when I wrote my last paid review more than ten years ago. Truth is, I could never support myself on the $20 per review I made back then. Believe me, I tried in the year 2001, and it was a financial disaster. 

But the changing face of film criticism inevitably means that we redefine what it means to be a professional critic, and in reality, I can just drop the word "professional" and still be fine with it. Nowadays, so few critics make money doing what they do -- unless they have a outlet that still pays them, or they have a Substack, or they really know how to monetize their blog -- that we all understand we can call each other critics just by appearing in print for some organization that has some minimum level of reputability. 

Heck, I won't deny someone who wants to call themselves a critic even if they just write for their own blog. I'm inclusive like that, even if it does tend to diminish my own accomplishments, my own exclusive right to that particular title.

And the reality is, I still need this. Some part of my soul needs to define itself as a film critic to complete the professional picture of myself. It's the thing that keeps me from being just an IT guy who specializes in a program schools use to pay their creditors and do their attendance. And while I like that job quite a bit, and am good at it, I still need the words "film critic" to feature prominently in my obituary one day.

I also can't discount the possibility that I'll get the love back.

If we look at this blog, we know it goes through peaks and valleys. I'm in a bit of a valley right now. I actually have about three posts I want to write, two of which are actually the posts for my recurring series, but I just haven't found the time to pull up to the desk and write them. 

But that could just be because of all I have going on, the so many things that keep life from feeling like it will ever be simple again, and inevitably dull passions such as this one.

I have to remember that at the start of this year, I was writing so much, and subsequently interfacing so much with movies, that it's no exaggeration to say that I sometimes had six or seven posts already written and in the can, just waiting for a free day to be published. 

When that time comes again, I don't want to have already quit. 

Joe Morgenstern likely wasn't always "feeling it" through all the decades of his long career. But he always got it back. And when he finally, indisputably, determined he wasn't going to get it back, he was 89 years old, a reasonable time to stop doing anything in life that doesn't give you absolute joy.

And even he left the door open to the possibility of a return in some fashion.

Film critics. You can't kill us until you actually kill us. 

I'll try to remember that the next time I think of hanging it up. 

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