“S.F. Chronicle” movie critic jeers at paper as he departs

San Francisco Chronicle movie critic Wesley Morris has quit the Hearst-owned newspaper after sending a farewell note to the paper’s staff in which he criticized the paper’s management in words that were every bit as withering as any that have appeared in his reviews. The paper, he wrote, “seems resistant to evolution, unwilling to change when the times and the vivid cultural complexion of this city demand that the newspaper do so. Truly talented people are being squandered in anonymous functionary roles…. What good is having a slew of young-thinking, energetic or veteran journalists on your staff, if no one knows how to harness their youth, energy and experience without squelching them?” Morris’s last review for the Chronicle, a blast at Kevin Smith‘s Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, appeared on Friday. The movie, he wrote, “is 10th-grade juvenilia scribbled in the back of a history book. Its profound lack of ambition is as much its point as the movie’s cosmetic ugliness.”