How did I miss this the first time around? It's very possible I didn't, but 1998 seems so long ago I find myself startled that the web even existed then, though I know for a fact I was freebasing it with all my might. It's

Alex Ross and David Denby on Movies Today,

and it goes something like this:

Dear Alex:

You seem to have taken my New Yorker article a little personally. But that, I suppose, is my fault—the result of indulging in generational typing. I played the generational card not because I was trying to get your goat—or anyone's goat&#8212but only because I kept having the same experience over and over. I would be talking to someone around 30, complaining about the thinness and mediocrity of the movie scene in the '90s, and I would be overcome by the sense that the other person had no idea what I was referring to. As I ranted, or mourned, or just mildly and softly groaned, my friend would grin at me as if I had turned into a fossil before his very eyes&#8212not exactly the most pleasant experience, I can tell you.

and like this:

Dear David,

Your diagnosis of younger filmgoers is still too dire. I simply don't buy some of your anecdotes—the notion that no one in a Harvard film class has heard of Katharine Hepburn, or Scorsese's idea that college kids haven't heard of Fellini. What's going to happen if a professor stands up in front of a college class and asks, "Do you know who Katharine Hepburn is?" There will be an embarrassed, amused, "ironic" silence, even if everyone in the room knows exactly who Hepburn is. And everyone does.

And Slate explains,

This dialogue grows out of an article in the April 6 issue of The New Yorker deploring the state of movies today. Denby argues that studios prefer cheap irony to real emotion and that young moviegoers don't care about seeing good movies—they prefer mass-market schlock to complex films such as L.A. Confidential. Alex Ross demurs.

It's all really good. Too bad we can only read Tuesday and Thursday, as in all these old Slate exchanges. I remember when we had to pay too, but we don't have to now! I want my Slate TV, yes, even from 1998 when everything was worse or possibly better!

Media Watch [Women's Freedom Network, March/April 1998]

Categories: A_Ross, Denby, Movies