Movie Critics Research Articles

After the Deluge: Russian Ark and the Abuses of History

July/August 2006 Historically Speaking 25 After the Deluge: Russian Ark and the Abuses of History* Pamela Kachurin and Ernest A. Zitser The critical and commercial success of Russian Ark (2002), Aleksandr Sokurov's most recent effort in historical docudrama, necessitates a thoughtful response from anyone seriously interested in Russian history, and most especially from American Slavic studies professionals . After all, any movie that features cameos by Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Pushkin, Nicholas II, and Alexandra, and that enlists the Russophobic Marquis de Custine as the official tour guide to 300 years of history and more than thirty rooms of the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, simply cries out for a discussion of its historical and ideological implications. Our goal in this self-avowedly polemical piece is to open up a critical discussion about Sokurov's film, which we see as a significant milestone in the ongoing attempt to define Russian national identity vis-à-vis the West. Russian Ark is undoubtedly a technological tour de force—a single , uninterrupted 90-minute shot, featuring paintings and lavish period costumes from the Hermitage Museum , mellifluous music by the Mariinskii Theater Orchestra, and a cast of nearly a thousand extras. This stunning visual spectacle can easily blind audiences to the film's troubling political and ideological messages. The gist of these messages is contained in the film's title, which suggests that after the deluge of the 20th century, it is a Russian ark (the Hermitage) that remains afloat on the waters of time to carry on the mission of restoring Culture to a world chastised by the wrath of God. Although this reading of the film may seem a bit farfetched, it is an interpretation that echoes the bombast of Sokurov's open letter to American audiences, which appeared on the Landmark Theatres' Web site soon after the release of the film in the U.S.1 Sokurov told Americans that the time has again come for people to build arks and that there must be no delay, and that the Russians have already built their Ark, but not just for themselves— they will take all with them, they will save all, because neither Rembrandt, nor El A longer version of this essay originally appeared in NewsNet: News of theAmericanAssociationfortheAdvancement of Slavic Studies 43, no. 4 (2003): 17-22. Greco, nor Stasov, nor Raphael, nor Guarenghi nor Rastrelli will allow an ark such as this to disappear or people to die. Those that will be together with them . . . will definitely go to heaven. But as the tone of the letter makes clear, Sokurov is certain that his voice will fall on deaf ears. For according to Sokurov, it is neither Americans' ignoAleksandr Sokurov leading a rehearsal in the Hermitage. The Russian Ark, December 23, 2001 . Photo by Alexander Belenkiy. ranee of Russian history nor their supposed youthful "wish" to lead "world civilization" that prevents them from seeing the point of the movie. It is, rather, "their own hardheartedness." Sokurov believes that Americans audiences are simply unredeemable cultural philistines. And Russian Ark is his rod of chastisement. Sokurov's controversial political agenda is built into the very structure of the film. His use of the single, continuous shot—arguably the main reason why American movie critics urged audiences to go see Russian Ark—is a technological achievement that is inseparable from the movie's ideological content. It is Sokurov's attempt to realize Andrei Tarkovskii's (his teacher's) vision of the inherent equation between "real time" and "reel time.": Although Sokurov's movie flits through three centuries in an hour and a half of reel time, it aims to tap into and to illuminate the deeper, real history of modern Russia. The documentary quality of the hand-held camera presents a narrative of Russian history in which the tsars are doomed by forces beyond their control. So, for example, the breathtaking scene in which the ball-goers descend the Jordan Staircase of the Winter Palace into oblivion —lined up row by row, like in some kind of Russian historical iconostasis—masterfully evokes the tragic fate of the gloriously dressed and doomed passengers of the Titanic. However, the sheer cinematic...

Pay for Play: Sponsored Recommendations in Information Gatekeepers

This article studies the inclusion of sponsored results in recommendations, observed in many information gatekeepers including Internet search engines, travel experts, credit raters, radio deejays, and movie critics, which are an essential entry point for many information search and decision making tasks. We develop and analyze a tractable model in which consumers may prefer or dislike the use of sponsored results in the recommendations, merchants' value for sponsorship increases with the gatekeeper's user base, and when there are negative externalities among merchants competing for consumers' attention. The optimal strategy strikes a balance between sponsorship revenues from merchants and user-based revenues. The gatekeeper's profit maximizing choice of sponsored results will, in general, deviate from the ideal level for users (which may be none, all or some, depending on the gatekeeper's technological quality and other factors). Competition among gatekeepers will cause them to make sponsorship more exclusive, which may either increase or decrease the deviation. The gatekeeper may employ sponsored recommendations even when doing so is detrimental to users, or may not present enough sponsored results even when these improve the quality of recommendations. Product innovations or better domain expertise give the gatekeeper greater flexibility in using sponsored results. Innovation by one gatekeeper has positive effect on consumer surplus as long as it does not create substantial imbalance or monopoly power. Consumer interest might be hurt if gatekeepers coordinate in setting the mix of sponsored results.

THE INFLUENCE OF EXPERT REVIEWS ON CONSUMER DEMAND FOR EXPERIENCE GOODS: A CASE STUDY OF MOVIE CRITICS*

An inherent problem in measuring the influence of expert reviews on the demand for experience goods is that a correlation between good reviews and high demand may be spurious, induced by an underlying correlation with unobservable quality signals. Using the timing of the reviews by two popular movie critics, Siskel and Ebert, relative to opening weekend box office revenue, we apply a difference-in-differences approach to circumvent the problem of spurious correlation. After purging the spurious correlation, the measured influence effect is smaller though still detectable. Positive reviews have a particularly large influence on the demand for dramas and narrowly-released movies.

Controlling Conflicts of Interest: What can the Securities and Exchange Commission Learn from Movie Critics?

Much attention is being focused on the conflicts of interest of many research analysts' who recommend stocks for investors. These research analysts work for financial institutions that also have investment banking departments. As a result, these analysts have faced great pressure to write positive research reports about companies with which their employers have current or prospective investment banking business. Unfortunately this pressure has resulted in analysts giving biased recommendations in favor of these companies, harming investors who relied on these recommendations. In response to this bias, the Securities and Exchange Commission, other regulatory organizations, and the courts have recently imposed a number of rules and regulations on research analysts. These reforms are targeted at reducing and publicly disclosing analysts' conflict of interests. To test whether these reforms are likely to be successful in reducing analysts' bias, this Article empirically examines the behavior of another group of professionals - movie critics - who are in a situation with many parallels to research analysts. Many prominent movie critics now regularly review movies that are distributed by subsidiaries of the critics' parent companies. Despite these parallels, this Article finds no systematic bias in these critics' movie reviews. This lack of bias can be attributed to significant differences between the organizational structure and financial incentives facing movie critics and those facing research analysts. Because many of the recent reforms targeted at research analysts will make their organizational structure and financial incentives more like those of movie critics, this Article provides empirical support for the conclusion that such reforms will reduce research analysts' bias. However, other of the reforms, such as those mandating public disclosure of the analysts' conflicts of interest, may be unnecessary or even harmful to investors.

Electre-like clustering from a pairwise fuzzy proximity index

In this paper, we propose an Electre-like approach for clustering judges from their L -valued pairwise proximities in preference judgements. The approach is based on the extraction of L -valued null kernels from a pairwise L -valued proximity index. A practical application will concern the clustering of movie critics.

Recommendation or Evaluation? Task Sensitivity in Information Source Selection

Ironically, when consumers turn to an information source to assist in decision making, they are faced with the added responsibility of having to make a decision about the information source itself. A normative model is presented that shows that consumer assessment of an information source should include both the task for which an information source is sought and the appropriate probability of success for the task. A key distinction between tasks is whether or not the consumer knows the agents' (or prospective agents') ratings of the alternative in question at the time of his or her assessment of the information source. A series of experiments is presented that examines consumer assessment of the diagnosticity of one type of information source, consumer agents (e.g., movie critics and stock analysts) across the three common tasks of seeking recommendations, seeking evaluations, and choosing between agents who have provided conflicting advice. Results show that consumers frequently select inferior agents for providing recommendations and choose product alternatives that should be avoided because of a failure to recognize when a task calls for a conditional rather than overall assessment of agent prior performance. A final study attempts to isolate the reasons for these shortcomings by examining the process underlying consumer diagnosticity assessment of information sources. Implications and future research to address and improve consumer assessment of information sources across tasks are discussed.

Film reviews and the public's perceptions of stereotypes: Movie critics' discourse about the siege

This paper investigates the public discourse surrounding the representation of cultural and ethnic groups in U.S. entertainment media by examining movie reviews of a specific film. It examines the types of arguments and support that popular film critics used in their evaluations of the 1998 action film The Siege. The film was publicly criticized by activist groups before its release and reviewers found it necessary to address the issue of whether the film contained stereotypes or could contribute to prejudicial understandings in their evaluations of the film. Three types of arguments that consistently appeared in the reviews’ evaluations of the film are described and explored: the film's relationship to real‐world events, the intentions of the film's creators, and the constraints of the genre. Implications of the consistent use of these criteria for audiences’ decisions to see the film, their evaluations of the film, and their understanding of the role of the media in maintaining or challenging racism and ethnocentrism are discussed.

It's only a movie!: films and critics in American culture

What are movies? Once derided as senseless entertainment, they have gradually assumed a place among the arts. Raymond Haberski traces the trajectory of this evolution throughout the twentieth century, from nickelodeon amusements to the age of the financial blockbuster. Haberski begins by looking at the barriers to film's acceptance as an art form, including the Chicago Motion Picture Commission hearings of 1918-1920, one of the most revealing confrontations over the use of censorship in the motion picture industry. He then examines how movies overcame the stigma attached to popular entertainment through such watershed events as the creation of the Museum of Modern Art's Film Library in the 1920s and battles between movie critics Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris in the 1960s. Kael and Sarris's arguments heralded a golden age of criticism, and Haberski focuses on the roles of Kael, Sarris, James Agee, Roger Ebert, and others, in the creation of cinephilia. Described by Susan Sontag as born of the conviction that cinema was an art unlike any other, this love of cinema centered on coffee houses, universities, art theaters, film festivals, and, of course, foreign films. The lively debates over the place of movies in American culture began to wane in the 1970s, and in provocative and insightful prose Haberski places the blame on the loss of cultural authority and on the increasing irrelevance of the meaning of art. He concludes with a persuasive call for the re-emergence of a middle ground between art and entertainment, more complex, ambiguous, and vexing - something worth thought.

Multinomial logit random effects models

This article presents a general approach for logit random effects modelling of clustered ordinal and nominal responses. We review multinomial logit random effects models in a unified form as multivariate generalized linear mixed models. Maximum likelihood estimation utilizes adaptive Gauss-Hermite quadrature within a quasi-Newton maximization algorithm. For cases in which this is computationally infeasible, we generalize a Monte Carlo EM algorithm. We also generalize a pseudo-likelihood approach that is simpler but provides poorer approximations for the likelihood. Besides the usual normality structure for random effects, we also present a semi-parametric approach treating the random effects in a non-parametric manner. An example comparing reviews of movie critics uses adjacent-categories logit models and a related baseline-category logit model.

Internet Recommendation Systems

Several online firms, including Yahoo!, Amazon.com , and Movie Critic, recommend documents and products to consumers. Typically, the recommendations are based on content and/or collaborative filtering methods. The authors examine the merits of these methods, suggest that preference models used in marketing offer good alternatives, and describe a Bayesian preference model that allows statistical integration of five types of information useful for making recommendations: a person's expressed preferences, preferences of other consumers, expert evaluations, item characteristics, and individual characteristics. The proposed method accounts for not only preference heterogeneity across users but also unobserved product heterogeneity by introducing the interaction of unobserved product attributes with customer characteristics. The authors describe estimation by means of Markov chain Monte Carlo methods and use the model with a large data set to recommend movies either when collaborative filtering methods are viable alternatives or when no recommendations can be made by these methods.

Godzilla from a Zoological Perspective

The 1998 TriStar movie Godzilla proved to be a major blockbuster, although not the financial success that was initially anticipated and movie critics have been rather unforgiving. Apart from a radically different external morphology compared to the classic Japanese movie monster, the new Godzilla character apparently was made different from the old version on a number of key points to make him more biologically probable. However, calculations show that his limbs and limb muscles must have been severely undersized to move his huge bulk around at even a leisurely pace, and most other biological problems with the old Godzilla, e.g., growth rates and reptilian physiology at such a massive size, have remained unaltered. The old Godzilla was actually the more plausible from a biomechanical point of view.

Relationships among Ratings of Motion Pictures by Viewers and Six Professional Movie Critics

Moderate to high correlations (.43 to .73) were found among the ratings of 568 motion pictures by viewers as indicated in Consumer Reports and by six professional movie critics, (a) Mick Martin and Marsha Porter, (b) Leonard Maltin, (c) Steven H. Scheuer, (d) Roger Ebert, (e) TV Guide, and (f) the Editors of Consumer Guide and Jay A. Brown. All six critics showed good agreement in their evaluations of 41.4% of the films. At least five critics showed good agreement for 66.0% of the movies, and at least four critics showed good agreement for 91.9% of the films. However, the critics showed little or no consensus for the remaining 8.1% of the movies. Viewers agreed most often with those critics who (like themselves) tended to evaluate movies highly.

Reliability of Ratings of Movies by Professional Movie Critics

The ratings and narrative reviews for 3,144 motion pictures in Video Movie Guide 1989, by Mick Martin and Marsha Porter, were compared with those for the same movies in TV Movies and Video Guide, by Leonard Maltin. The correlation between these ratings was .67. The mean difference between these ratings was .55 points (stars) on a scale that ranged from zero stars to four stars. The critics' evaluations, as indicated by these ratings and reviews, differed markedly for approximately 6.3% of the 3,144 movies, but they showed good or acceptable agreement for the remaining 93.7% of the films. The critics' evaluations showed sufficient agreement to be of substantial value to viewers of movies. Critics showed the highest agreement for westerns.

Wild Time in Tours

For the past five years an energetic group of young Frenchmen, with financial support from the government, have organized an increasingly popular and successful short-film festival in the pleasantly provincial city of Tours, a three-hour drive from Paris. Unlike the summertime feature-film festivals which devote a great deal of time to marginal if agreeable frippery and folderol, Tours is strictly for film-makers, critics, and a sprinkling of concerned producers. Here, lodged together in the suitably named Hotel de l'Univers, 150 young directors and film critics from some 20 countries meet; they exchange ideas and methods for attacking film problems during three congenial, intensive days, while all manner of shorts are being screened from ten in the morning through midnight in two of the local theaters. Most of the showings-top prices $4-are sold out to the townsfolk. This year's festival was marked by plenty of hullabaloo in the best French tradition of vocal manifestations of displeasure to art. Audience reaction had been relatively peaceful during the first two days except for occasional good-natured sniping from the Cahiers-Cinema 60-Positif gangs (these are the leading French intellectual film publications) in the first three orchestra rows during pretentious or religious films (French movie critics are resolutely anti-clerical). But on the afternoon of the last day, A Dancer's World, by Peter Glushanok, made a few years back for U.S. television, hit the well-fed, well-wined Sunday provincial audience quite wrong. Not understanding what Martha Graham was saying, they could only see a strangely got-up woman speaking in a clearly mannered way. Some hoots went up, then loud unkind laughter. As the dancers appeared on the screen in a style thoroughly alien-modern dance has never caught on in France-the laughter got very loud, and the jibes mounted. The critics-most of whom, despite their unfamiliarity with the style of dance, saw the merit of the film-began shouting for quiet and exchanging insults with the local townsfolk.

G. B. S. The Movie Critic

Research Article| April 01 1957 G. B. S. The Movie Critic Donald P. Costello Donald P. Costello Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar The Quarterly of Film Radio and Television (1957) 11 (3): 256–275. https://doi.org/10.2307/1209745 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Donald P. Costello; G. B. S. The Movie Critic. The Quarterly of Film Radio and Television 1 April 1957; 11 (3): 256–275. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/1209745 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentFilm Quarterly Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1956/1957 The Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

"He's on Parole"

The words Probation and Parole are perhaps two of the most abused and most misunderstood words in the language at the present time. They are mistreated by persons in all classes of society even by those who should know better. Newspaper writers are as a rule rather exact in their use of words but they are the most serious offenders in using the words, probation and parole, synonymously. The New York Herald Tribune printed an editorial on this subject on April 26, 1936. The editorial was entitled PROBATION IS NOT PAROLE and was in reply to critics of the Division of Parole in the Executive Department of the State of New York, who mistakenly believed that John Fiorenza, the murderer of Mrs. Nancy Titterson was on parole at the time this murder was committed. This editorial was unusually clear and convincing and the writer appeared to be very well informed, but even he made two errors of fact. In a recent review of a moving picture, GIRLS ON PROBATION, October 20, 1938, Kate Cameron, the movie critic of the New York Daily News used the words, probation and parole, all through the review as if these words were synonymous. The purpose of this article is to make clear the difference between probation and parole, to inform the reader of the functioning of the various parole and probation departments in New York State, and more especially in New York City, and to say a few words in defense of the State Division of Parole of the Executive Department, State of New York, which is blamed for most of the probation and parole failures in this state.