Posted on 02/20/2017 9:20:57 AM PST by EveningStar
Richard Schickel, the longtime film critic for Time magazine who also wrote 37 books, mostly on film, and directed a number of documentaries on film subjects, died on Saturday in Los Angeles of complications from a series of strokes, his family told the Los Angeles Times. He was 84.
“He was one of the fathers of American film criticism,” his daughter, writer Erika Schickel, told the Times. “He had a singular voice. When he wrote or spoke, he had an old-fashioned way of turning a phrase. He was blunt and succinct both on the page and in life.”
He wrote and/or directed more than 30 documentaries, mostly for television.
(Excerpt) Read more at variety.com ...
ping
RIP.
It’s interesting to look up a copy of Time from, say, the 60’s and compare it to the magazine of today. The quality of the writing, the language used and the overall tone was so much better then. I’m not even referring to the political bent but just the overall presentation of ideas. I saw this begin to slip in the 80’s which is when I let my subscription lapse.
How much influence could some old geezer who wrote entertainment critiques for a forgotten rag only seen anymore by people whose phones run out of charge in doctor’s waiting rooms really have had?
Fake news.
(Not fake that the guy croaked, but fake that it matters outside of his family)
We were avid Time readers in the 1960's and I appreciated Schnickel's analysis.
Then I went to college, then married and resumed with my own Time subscription in the mid 1970s.
In less than a year, my wife and I were so disgusted that we cancelled. The magazine had become political indoctrination.
We would have called it "Fake Magazine" had the term existed.
There was nothing for us in the MSM until 1988 when Limbaugh took over talk radio.
Looking at the headline on this thread I realized it’s been decades since the words “influential” and “Time Magazine” have been used in the same sentence.
He was very influential on other film critics and American film culture (he made many documentary films about individual directors).
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