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Recently in Salon Arts & Entertainment

Music Review
Sharps & flats
DJ Raymond Roker's bleak and claustrophobic "Altered States of Drum & Bass" crushes the warm beats of hip-hop and strangles the gasping voice of house.
By Michelle Goldberg
[08/18/99]

Television
Basketball diary
Showtime's sorry drama "The Hoop Life" and its young writer want to dramatize the sporting life, but on the court or off, reality is always far more interesting than fiction.
By Robert Wilonsky
[08/18/99]

Movie Review
"Illuminata"
In John Turturro's ambitious and arresting American tragicomedy, the actor-director invents himself an artistic tradition.
By Andrew O'Hehir
[08/17/99]

Music
Here comes a Nazarene ... looks good in a magazine
On "Juxtapose," the Bristol MC negotiates the tension between B-boy roots and raw, tender soul.
By Michelle Goldberg
[08/17/99]

Music Review
Sharps & flats
Wynton Marsalis was born with a silver trumpet in his mouth. Maybe that's why his jazz compositions are so stiffly academic.
By Seth Mnookin
[08/17/99]

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"If I'm sick, I don't ask a plumber for advice," says the hero of Neal Stephenson's novel "Cryptonomicon" as he dares to tell an academic that perhaps some background in technology makes one better qualified to have an opinion on technical matters. But the background that good film critics bring to their jobs -- a thorough knowledge of movie history (including the experience of having seen many different types of movies from many different eras), an ability to place movies in a social context and some instinct for how that context affects what we see and how we see it -- is often the very thing that readers (and sometimes even their own editors) cite as proof that critics are snobbish, out of touch or impossible to please. No one would hire anybody without any knowledge of dance or classical music to write about those subjects. But that's often the case with movie critics, who all too often have been plucked from another section of their newspaper.

The reasons are easy to understand. When we were kids, movies were often a relief from the approved culture our teachers or parents told us we were supposed to be enjoying. And they are so big and strike us so viscerally and so immediately that we tend to think we don't need anyone to tell us how we feel about them. That's the reality behind the joke about how everybody has two jobs, a regular one and movie critic.

We don't need critics to tell us how we feel, or how to feel. But bouncing your own reactions off of a critic's can sometimes help you explain why you feel the way you do about movies. Critics have long been the only independent voice standing between moviegoers and the millions of dollars (today, hundreds of millions) studios use to promote movies. Like any advertisers out to push their product, studio publicists campaign to control public perception; that's one of the reasons for the current emphasis on the business side of movies, the blurring of the line between journalism and publicity. Movie journalism has become more and more dictated by hype.

It's essential to keep a sense of excitement about movies, a willingness to surrender to them and even to be overwhelmed. But many people seem to think that the natural maturating of taste is proof of a loss of innocence, of corruption and jadedness. A few weeks ago a colleague of mine at a daily paper told me he was stopped by a staffer who said, "You hated 'The Haunting'? Well, my 11-year-old daughter saw it and said it was one of the best movies she ever saw!"

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