And what of the movie critic?

In a recent essay, The Wall Street Journal’s Joe Morgenstern brushed off reports that critics, especially movie critics, are losing their influence. Meanwhile, Entertainment Weekly founder and blog-touting web theorist Jeff Jarvis isn’t so sure.

This sounds awfully familiar. A few years ago, Variety Editor Peter Bart launched a cranky tirade against critics and was pretty firmly put down by Salon’s Charles Taylor. But Morgenstern can’t quite mount as convincing a defense as Taylor did, and Jarvis’ focus on the impact of the web makes increasingly good sense.

Essentially, Morgenstern’s argument comes down two points: 1) Professional critics offer better quality, presumably in both writing ability and film expertise, and 2) Professional critics, by virtue of being able (and required) to see lots and lots of movies, serve as filters for the vast swaths of barely-seen cinema circulating on festival circuits and by hand-delivered screeners.

Neither of these arguments, however, is entirely convincing. Oh sure, critics writing for major publications offer a guarantee of some basic competence with words and a generally decent knowledge of the film industry. But a noted publication does not a great critic make. Also, as I’ve mentioned before, there’s a disturbing tendency amongst editors to confuse feature writing, reporting, and criticism, giving us a dispiriting number of "critics" who’re really just reporters assigned to the film review beat. Big publications promise a functional minimum and not much else.

Blogs, on the other hand, vary wildly in their quality; there’s great stuff out there and, no doubt, lots of not so great stuff. But the mediocre stuff is easily avoided, and the great stuff is usually pretty easy to spot once you’ve found it. Really, anyone who thinks that blogs can’t produce great criticism just need to spend a few weeks read The Cinetrix or Filmbrain, to name just a few.

What’s more, blog critics are unhindered by style sheets and editorial guidelines, uninfluenced by ad departments and board room higher-ups pushing, even if subtly, for more marketable opinions and accessible writing. Blog articles can be long, short, erudite, crass, personal or any combination of the above. Bloggers can use links and other multimedia, can update their pieces and continue the conversations they start with other writers. Look at the dust up over The New World between Kehr and Seitz. That never could’ve happened in the expensive, carefully screened pages of a major print publication. Bloggers, by virtue of being produced at essentially no cost, are free to experiment in a way that mainstream writers are not.

And as for critics being a filter, I’m still not convinced. The swarming, mass-nature of the net pretty much takes care of that. Call it the Glenn Reynolds effect, but a hundred part time film bloggers will probably be as effective, maybe more so, than a few full time critics—and the net has the advantage of consensus that a single critic just can’t produce.

So what will become of criticism? Well, I think that Jarvis is right, that the biggest metro areas will keep their critics while most smaller locales will syndicate the big guys. But does that mean, as Charles Taylor suggested, that criticism will be streamlined, made "corporate"? Not at all. It means that, because of the net, criticism will become more diffuse. There will be more peoplewriting it, and, because it will be done for fun in a low-risk environment, it may flourish in ways we could never imagine in the print world, especially with regards to interplay between critics. Slate’s best feature, as all movie fans know, is the yearly Movie Club roundtable, where film critics spend a week bantering and trading barbs about the previous year’s best and worst pictures. On the net, that doesn’t have to be a once a year feature. The fracas can continue all year round, and everyone can join in.

Will we still need professional critics? Of course. Our culture demands arbiters of taste in every field, and for a certain segment of society, only a branded critic will do. But that’s a relatively small group, the urban cultural elite. Most folks are fine just looking at a star rating or skimming a headline.

Critics often explain their work as a conversation—in this article, Morgenstern calls his writing “a dialog with [his] readers.” But for years, it’s been more like a lecture than a chat, with readers as attentive students listening in. The web may prune a large number of regional critics from the professional ranks, but my guess is that in the end, the net will prove fertile ground for those who have long engaged in what Dana Stevens once called “the great urban sport of movie conversation.” And even if if that sport turns out to be, as Goeff Pevere wrote, “essentially… the one-way transmission of intransigent opinions to other film critics, who are not interested in others' opinions,” I still say game on!