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November 05, 2005

Cricketal mass: a Dave Kehr parody site?

There's a new film cricket blog which appears to be a satire of the critical corpus of Manhattan freelancer Dave Kehr.

From the "About Me" section of DaveKehr.com, on his 1970s origins: "These were days when you could provoke a passionate argument at a party over whether a so-called hack like Hitchcock was worthy of even being mentioned in the same breath with an obvious, transcendent genius... like Fred Zinnemann or George Stevens... or, much less, vaunted European masters like Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini, both of whom in my adolescent hubris I found to be bloated and basically worthless (an opinion I will stand by today, with a few carefully chosen exceptions...)" Further down the CV, "A few weeks after my hiring, cooler heads at the [Chicago] Tribune prevailed – “What!! We’ve just fired the guy who goes on national television and plugs the paper every week!” – and Gene [Siskel] was re-instated [sic] as a sort of senior critic, who submitted bizarre, tortuously written capsule reviews to the Tribune under the rubric “Siskel’s Flick Picks.” (One result of that: I can never hear the word “flick” applied to a movie without cringing.) ... Once "Kehr" relocated to New York, the blogger writes, "[At the New York Daily News] a Murdoch protégé, known as The Beaver for her indecorous way of straddling a chair in her fashionably short skirst [sic], took over the department, and before any of the out-of-town eggheads new what had happened, we were being asked to cover the adventures of the Spice Girls and worse... I was delivered from my pain when the latest stubby fingered troll to occupy the features editor office called me in one morning and announced... that I “didn’t fit it around here.” ... I immediately made my way from the News’s offices on West 34th Street to the castle of the New York Times on West 43rd, where I have remained somewhat insecurely ever since as a freelancer, first writing the weekly interview column “At the Movies” and a lot of fourth string reviews... I eventually backed away from fourth string reviewing, mainly because the movies – a flood of fifth-rate American independent films – were so appalling and the Times freelance review rates were so dispiritingly low. My New York Times connection now is “Critic’s Choice: New DVDs,” a thousand word column... It’s the best gig I’ve had in a long time, because it allows me to cover the waterfront, ignoring new films... allowing me to concentrate on library titles, foreign imports and the genuine indies that going direct to DVD." [Whomever's compiling the site demonstrates a rich knowledge of Kehr's history, if not necessarily his (semi)famously stilted writing style.] [The illo comes from Steve Erickson's 2001 Senses of Cinema interview with Mr. Kehr.]

Posted by pride at November 5, 2005 12:03 AM

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