Gone are the days

While Googling research for my Ronald Neame obit today. I found this piece I did for the Houston Press back in 2000 as a curtain-raiser for an Alec Guinness retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. (One of the films in the series: Neame's The Horse's Mouth, in which Guinness played an aggressively iconoclastic and frequently insufferable artist modeled after poet Dylan Thomas.) And I found myself feeling more than a little melancholy. Because, really, can you imagine any newspaper, alternative weekly or mainstream daily, giving me, or any other critic, this much space today, just ten years later, for a story about a movie retrospective at a museum?