Another One
After nearly 22 years of reviewing films for the Charlotte Observer, Lawrence Toppman has been taken off the beat and will concentrate on the barely existing Charlotte theater scene and start an arts column of some kind. “Except for the Orlando Sentinel‘s Roger Moore and another guy in Miami, I was the last critic at a daily paper in the Southeast reviewing as often as I did,” Toppman wrote last Friday. To supplement his reduced income Toppman will now do occasional deliveries and pick up sandwiches and coffee for the remaining staffers at lunch hour…kidding! But not that much.
I’ve met Lawrence Toppman, actually been interviewed by him, and I’m sure that he is extremely dejected to have been relieved of his duties as movie reviewer. However, as a long-time Charlotte resident and an Artist, I can say that there is enough going on in the arts here to keep Lawrence busy and that the theater scene is lot more lively than you might think. Charlotte is, after all, one of the fastest growing cities in the country and a lot more cosmopolitan than those outside of the region might guess.
This is actually not bad news, including for Toppman himself. Toppman was originally a theater critic who never had anything to write about because Charlotte didn’t have a theater scene, so they switched him over to movies. He’s always been snobby and antagonistic with the readers of the Observer (I remember him famously panning Grease when it was rereleased in the late ’90s, just to piss off generations of fans), and it’s always been obvious from his writing that truly celebrating movies – that means small ones AND big ones – was not something he did or wanted to do.
Interesting take on things, mtgilchrist… when I met Lawrence in the late-90′s he told me that being a film critic was a long time dream of his and that he considered it to be “the best job in the world.”
I’ve been a fan, and a friend, of Larry Toppman for the better part of two decades. He was one of my inspirations as a critic. He has a rare gift for metaphor and imagery. This is a sad day for American criticism.
This one hits close to home. I’ve met Toppman several times (we attend the same press screenings), and he is the reason I have all the opportunities that I do today. He got me set up with studio publicists for press screenings and the like, so I owe a lot to him.
My hats off to him.
The staff of the Charlotte Observer and the Raleigh News & Observer have been merged. This was pretty much going to happen since there’s no need to have the same guys reviewing the same movies. They can now have 2 part timers doing the job of 2 full timers. Ever dollar counts as the chain owners nurse their billions of dollar in debt from a stupid buying spree.
I came of age as a moviegoer and review-reader in Charlotte during his early days (starting in the late ’80s) and before I ever became a critic myself I remember regularly being exasperated by his reviews, which have increasingly took mainstream movies to task while celebrating smaller movie just because they’re smaller. I respect his talents as a writer but think that if you are writing for a mainstream paper and your job is to cover “everything,” as he did, then you have to be more receptive to a real everything than just the “everything” that you like. Ironically, the paper itself offered little support of smaller films – which is why though I disagree with it, I understand his predilection, and which is also why it’s taken until just the last few years for there to be enough screens that people can see something that’s opening on less than a thousand or 2,000 screens. (Punch-Drunk Love never played Charlotte, for God’s sake!) Having spent a significant amount of time with a number of Charlotte’s old-timers (or at least folks who have been around as long as he has), I heard enough about his background and read enough of his writing to justify that assessment, and I’m sorry to see that the Observer will henceforth be buying reviews from elsewhere since it was a dream of mine to write for the Observer in that capacity one day. But there’s no doubt that the folks who want to read him will be able to find his work in whatever sphere he writes, whether you’re a fan of his or respect his writing while really disliking his opinions and approach.
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