----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Let me barge in for just a moment on Denis [aka Dennis] Seguin, who is being discussed a lot here while, I suspect, he is busy watching films at Cannes and not party to this. Dennis was a student of mine (too many years back for me to comfortably remember). I remember still that even as a very young and eager undergraduate he was a committed viewer and reviewer of film, and that he had begun to do this in high school. His analysis at the time left something out that I wanted in--a criticism that was more than just taste--and later I read him in some Toronto newspapers and felt the same. But I can affirm that he is devoted to film, that he is deeply involved with it in all of himself; and there is little enough of that kind of passion in this age of quick fixes, spotty "commitments," spurious engagements, slaphappy opinionating about what isn't worth saying in the first place. I believe Dennis is trying to grow beyond that, and it strikes me as both encouraging and wonderful that after all these years he's still at it. I would be interested to know, from members of the list who care to say, just who IS a great film critic in their eyes, these days. I don't mean "student," or "commentator," I mean *critic.* Surely not Siskel and Ebert. In Toronto, where Dennis did a lot of his learning, the models he had to follow in the professional press were hacks who wrote the review either (a) strictly from the press kit, or (b) with an overdramatized "personal" voice so as to intimate an experience of filmmaking they did not have. Dear Dennis/Denis: Please look harder and longer at film, and even say a little less; but good for you for looking, and keeping looking. Don't stop.