Mitchell

I use this space to vent about the various pathologies of the New York Times pretty regularly, but I’ll say this for that particular: in the post-Janet “Titanic is the movie of the year” Maslin era, they’ve had some very good film criticism. One of the big reasons for this was Elvis Mitchell, and I’ve been wondering what happened to him. Well, I’ve found the gossipy story. I don’t know if anyone else cares, but here it is.

It appears, in the last few weeks, that they’ve settled on the LA Times’ Manohla Dargis to replace him, and she’s excellent as well–perhaps even as good as Mitchell. And I think A.O. Scott was clearly the right choice for chief critic. Still, I’ll miss Mitchell’s writing, and I hope he comes back to a regular critic gig somewhere at some point so I can continue to read him.