Local Film Critic Tears Slate a New One

Mr. Cranky has nothing on local freelance film critic N.P. Thompson, famous for casting a critical eye on the cinema on his website Movies into Film and also for slamming local alt-weekly film critics:

An editor, an editor of a newspaper, one might suppose, has certain obligations to his readers. One of those obligations isn’t to suppress the voice of a writer whom the editor himself apparently cannot get enough of. In the case of The Stranger, hasn’t the predictably contrarian, Hitchens-esque reverse outrage of Dan Savage, Charles Mudede, and Sean Nelson run its course? Wouldn’t new writers, writers less beholden to the same-old posturing, infuse new life into the operation? Ah, but you see, that would be upsetting the hipster status quo: those professional “outsiders” have grown so accustomed to a certain style of living, to a level of prestige that they pretend to disdain. A genuine outsider would (possibly) expose the “brand” as a canard. Seattle’s craven, neo-illiberal “alternative” press has too much at stake ever to let that happen, but that’s just between me and you and everyone we know.

Recently, Thompson set his sights a little higher, approaching Slate for the opportunity to write for them. They rejected him, prompting one of the most entertaining screeds we've read in months. An excerpt:

As Slate will sometimes publish a book review or commentary by Armond White or Stanley Crouch, one gathers that toothlessness in a writer isn't always a condition of employment. How then to account for the uniform awfulness of Slate's film section since Edelstein's departure? How then to account for the myopically prejudicial "old boys' club" atmosphere that deems who will and who won't have "room" in an online publication that's updated daily? (And is losing money anyway.)

Meghan O'Rourke gives the impression that living in a Manhattan or Brooklyn neighborhood (preferably Brooklyn, and the more gentrified, the better) is pretty much the lone criterion of worth, and that if one lives outside the bubble, then she isn't going to read what a writer submits, nor will she even consider looking at a writer's clips, and beyond that, neither she nor Bryan Curtis will have the slightest interest in making a new discovery. What we have at Slate are editors hell-bent on preserving the shittiest, shallowest aspects of the status quo by slamming a door on anyone capable of upstaging their friends and neighbors, or their lovers.

And after Meghan has dodged reading your piece, sent you an absent-minded rejection letter that gives her entire show away, she will, in a week's time or so, have her assistant Blake Wilson send a second rejection letter in which he announces that the piece you've submitted "isn't write for Slate." That's w-r-i-t-e when he means r-i-g-h-t.

Thompson's email is already spreading like wildfire throughout the blogosphere (and you know something's big when the word "blogosphere" is invoked). You can read the entire thing on FishBowlNY, though I Heart Seattle first tipped us off.