I hit a late night screening of Heckler here at AFI Dallas last night. The film is a documentary by Michael Addis (Poor White Trash) about comedian and actor Jamie Kennedy (Son of the Mask, Malibu's Most Wanted). The film starts out talking about people who heckle comedians at live comedy shows, before diverging into an exploration of various critics who have slammed Kennedy's films. Kennedy talks to a few critics about their reviews, reading their eviscerations of his work out loud to them and gauging their reactions both to hearing their own words and seeing the effect their writing has on him as a person.

I'll have a full review of the film up shortly (it was actually very funny and insightful, for the most part), but I want to talk a bit about the film here. One of the points raised in both the film and in the post-show Q&A, ran jointly by Addis and Film Threat's Mark Bell (pictured, above), who got into a bit of a heated kerfuffle with Addis at the Q&A for the film's AFI Los Angeles screening, was whether critics should hold comedies to the same standard as more highbrow films. Kennedy, dialed into the Q&A over Addis's cell phone, noted that Bell had called Malibu's Most Wanted an "easy target," and wondered why Bell and other critics hold comedies to a different standard than a film like, say, There Will be Blood.

The Hollywood Reporter has an interesting piece up on the disappearing space in print publications for reviews of independent films. The loss of print film critics in numerous outlets, coupled with the increasing number of independent films being released each year, is making it more of a challenge for indie films to get reviews of their films in print pubs. Online critics have taken up some of the slack -- we here at Cinematical still review as many indies as we can, in addition to the more mainstream fare, but there's still a perception out there among some that an online review carries less weight than a review printed on paper.

The article has some interesting dueling quotes; THINKfilm's Mark Urman notes, "We're not at a point where Internet writers have the credibility of established media with proven records and editors." Hollywood Elsewhere's Jeff Wells begs to differ, saying in part, "... there are maybe eight or 10 online critics who genuinely matter and are, in the parlance of the trade, 'conversation starters.' Due respect, but insisting that review quotes are still about print critics is generational hubris."

For those who care, a flap has developed over whether or not film critics are actually needed. The string of events goes something like this: 1) Since January, several studios have opted not to screen certain movies (something like 17 titles in all) for the press, and said movies have mostly gone on to box office gold; 2) Longtime, established, intelligent critics like Jami Bernard and Michael Wilmington have lost their jobs; and 3) Despite crushing reviews, The Da Vinci Code went on to make a small fortune.

As a film critic, I'm obviously biased in this argument, but here's what I think. Firstly, those 17 movies that were not screened for the press will have a shelf life of about a year. After they make their run on DVD, airplanes and cable, they'll gather dust and disappear into the mists of time (all except Ultraviolet, which I will cherish as one of the year's great guilty pleasures). Secondly, the reason Bernard and Wilmington lost their jobs is not because they were not needed; it's because the internet (no offense intended) is killing the newspaper business. Newspapers can't afford to keep "frivolous" staff members around when it can't pay the bills, and this has happened to many of my colleagues (myself included) over the past several years.