Duncan Shepherd

Duncan Shepherd, a longtime film critic, wrote a weekly column for the alternative weekly the San Diego Reader from 1972 until November 2010. Shepherd's pithy, incisive, and (in later years) very often negative reviews have sparked strong reactions from readers. Shepherd attended Columbia University ("a school chosen solely for the number of proximate movie theaters in New York City", according to the critic) and received a Master's degree from the University of California, San Diego. His thesis, entitled "Scratching the surface: a speculation into the importance of the image in a movie and the neglect of the image in movie criticism", was published in 1974. At UCSD he took film classes from Manny Farber (Negative Space), a noted film critic and painter. Shepherd, in fact, was a "sounding board" for a 1971 Farber essay on director Raoul Walsh ("He Used to Be a Big Shot"),) Nor does he much appreciate digital video, which he typically finds blurry and fuzzy. The then state of the art digital video found in George Lucas's Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, for example, is "somewhat overcast, monotoned, seemingly covered in a sort of pinkish complected skin, like an unboiled wiener." In a September 1996 response to critics of his star ratings, Shepherd asserted that readers too often misunderstand his intent ("The context is everything"). A one star rating does not mean "terrible" and a two star rating, he suggests, is "a bit more cordial than the back of a hand."