Film & TV Criticism

Posted by Maximum Fun on 12th April 2006

Last week, I taped an interview for this week with Philip Lopate, editor of the Library of America’s Anthology of American Film Criticism, a hefty and wonderful book. The Anthology is the first to seriously consider film writing in the canon of critical writing, and it does a great job.

It’s considered by The Atlantic this month (although you have to be a subscriber to read the whole article). You can also check out Lopate’s great interview on WNYC’s “The Leonard Lopate Show,” the host of which is Philip Lopate’s brother (though Philip seems to enjoy calling him “Lenny” on the show). It’s streaming or downloadable.

Meanwhile, over at the Museum of TV & Radio’s blog, Blog Potato, one of the curators asks why there’s never been a television critic whose stature could reasonably be compared to Pauline Kael, the late New Yorker critic. It’s a great question, and with the emergence the past five years or so of television as a much more artistic medium, I think now’s the time to be asking it.

Anyhoo, keep your eyese peeled for my Lopate interview, he was a cool guy. A little skeptical of me, I think, but he gets points for mentioning that before he got on the horn, he was sitting in his hotel room watching “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider,” a film which he described as being mostly about Angelina Jolie’s lips.