Criticism
Critics of Carney find him to be both elitist and obscurant, as he often champions films and filmmakers that the mainstream film critics (and even fellow "elitists") have never even heard of. The stridency of his essays and opinions have caused some to call him a fanatic; others find him annoying, cloying, and childish, particularly when he throws around words like "idiot" to describe his fellow scholars, critics, and film professionals. Additionally, Carney has recently come under fire due to a blog posting he made on a Boston University website. His blog is critical of his graduate students at the school's College of Communication. Carney states: "The school ends up with an awful lot of third-rate grad. students... they have virtually NO artistic curiosity or intellectual passion. If they had, they wouldn't have ended up here because they would have been admitted to, and given scholarships at, better schools."
Some are quick to point out that Carney is the self-described expert on the work of Cassavetes, and that he has a tendency to dismiss other opinions on the matter in toto. Noted critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, himself a target of some of Carney's attacks, noted that in Carney's book Cassavetes on Cassavetes, Carney does not list his sources, "setting up obstacles to other researchers that are so formidable that he effectively seems to be staking a territorial claim and announcing ‘No Trespassing' to other scholars."
Read more about this topic: Ray Carney
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