Roxanne Tellier: IRL – Tweets and Shaming

If you are very lucky, you have never, and will never, be in a situation where a group of ordinary people suddenly turn into an angry mob. It’s like the flip of a switch. In a heartbeat, centuries of evolution dissolve, and the hive mind kicks in. Whether you are part of the mob, the object of the mob’s outrage, or are simply caught up in the emotional frenzy, the mob mentality overrules the civilized mind and transforms perfectly ordinary people into raging, club swinging Neanderthals with a single purpose – destruction.

Geoff Pevere: The Critic as Artist – Creating Contemporary Criticism

The late movie critic Robin Wood once wrote a fabulously cogent and highly pissed dismissal of the very idea of guilty pleasures. His point was this: if you liked something, and if you could assemble a reasonable argument in defines of it – which is to say if you could make a case for your pleasure – there was absolutely no guilt involved.

Geoff Pevere: The Consummate Critic’s Criteria for Criticism

A number of years ago, I was witness to an altercation that rattled me to the bones. It happened after a preview screening of Carlito’s Way. I was walking out with a filmmaker buddy of mine, and we were chewing over what we thought had worked and not worked in the movie. In the flow of exiting people, I ran into someone I did regular movie discussions with on CBC Radio, and he was as big a Brian de Palma fan as anyone short of the man’s mother.