Is this town big enough for the both of us?

My love-hate relationship with The New York Times naturally means more than few read-throughs of Dave Kehr's film writing. But one man has done a far closer read of Kehr's recently begun blog, going so far as to suggest that Kehr's online canon could be--gasp!--the work of some critical doppelganger?

As Movie City Indie's Ray Pride explains:

There's a new film cricket blog which appears to be a satire of the critical corpus of Manhattan freelancer Dave Kehr. From the "About Me" section of DaveKehr.com ... (f)urther down the CV, "A few weeks after my hiring, cooler heads at the [Chicago] Tribune prevailed – “What!! We’ve just fired the guy who goes on national television and plugs the paper every week!” – and Gene [Siskel] was re-instated [sic] as a sort of senior critic, who submitted bizarre, tortuously written capsule reviews to the Tribune under the rubric “Siskel’s Flick Picks.” (One result of that: I can never hear the word “flick” applied to a movie without cringing.) ...

Once "Kehr" relocated to New York, the blogger writes, "[At the New York Daily News] a Murdoch protégé, known as The Beaver for her indecorous way of straddling a chair in her fashionably short skirst [sic], took over the department, and before any of the out-of-town eggheads new what had happened, we were being asked to cover the adventures of the Spice Girls and worse... I was delivered from my pain when the latest stubby fingered troll to occupy the features editor office called me in one morning and announced... that I “didn’t fit it [sic] around here.”

Best of all are pseudo-Kehr's reasons for eschewing "fourth-string reviewing" after moving to The NYT: "(T)he movies -- a flood of fifth-rate American independent films -- were so appalling and the Times freelance review rates were so dispiritingly low."

All right, all right--so Pride acknowledges that sure, it is Kehr's blog, but still: Who can make any guess at the source of such a stream-of-consciousness ramble, or make any sense of why Kehr throw a cheap shot in his employer's direction? Oh, OK. I guess I can. Of course, that does not mean you should not read Kehr, especially for all the PR smashing, the all-star comments sections and the references to New York films that time forgot but could not erase.

Coming soon nevertheless: The Reeler's Guess-How-Long-Until-The-NYT-Pulls-The-Plug-on-DaveKehr.com pool. Get your dates in now!