Movie Critic Critic

For reasons really unknown to me, I've seen a lot more movies over the last year or so than I usually do. Most are "indies," not because I'm necessarily snooty that way, not necessarily, but because those lately have had the best stories and performances. One interesting thing about many of them has been the absolutely wondrous performances of the kids in them--"Spanglish," "An Unfinished Life," "Millions," "Dear Frankie," "About a Boy," and the best movie in millenia, "In America." You find yourself hoping against hope that these kids stay away from Haim-ism, which mutated into Ryderism, or its latest variation, Lohanism.

But look at that list again. These were all good movies beyond their kid stars. I put my money where my mouth is by getting the DVDs, which, yes, have been rewatched. Yet, if you judge by the bulk of the critics' takes on them, the first two especially, you would never have gone to the theater to see the great performances, much less decide you want them on hand for repeated viewing. The same would be true of the almost childless last year's Best Picture, "Crash," still being trashed by LA critics.

I've bitched about movie critics for years, going back to Ebert's mindless refusal to credit Redford as any more than a pretty face in the 80s. But I think we've reached a critical mass on critical badness (or is it madness?) with all the sites and sources for movie reviewing now, and it's got to be having an impact. You can see it. Look at what happened to "An Unfinished Life" and another gem this year, "The Ice Harvest," done in at the box office in great part by the jaundiced, self-impressed rantings of the folks aggregated at Rottentomatoes.com.

It's not that misguided or flatly stupid reviews or reviewers are new. It's that we've had the "Animal House" effect in action, you know, where something really good and new is produced, something people aren't used to but really like, and every third-rate wannabe copies them, to worse effect almost always, and tainting the whole enterprise. That's what this explosion of critics has done in the aftermath of the success of Siskel and Ebert. They adopt "the tone" and apply it badly, sometimes making it clear that they either didn't see the actual movie or just really didn't understand it, which is, of course, the movie's fault. And, unfortunately for the movie business, so much of a movie's success depends on its reception in NY, LA, and DC, where reside some of the worst specimens. I've read that "Crash" marketers deliberately underplayed their roll-out in those cities to avoid the predictable and cynical word vomit of the reviewers there to allow word-of-mouth and sanity to overcome the verbal stench.

I don't know what we do about it, probably nothing. You can learn to offset the idiocy if you work at it, to see through the lunatics, but who wants all that trouble when ticket costs are so high? One promising angle comes from the multiple roll-out formats that some producers and distributors are moving toward, theater-DVD-cell phone-etc. all at once. This may "flash" works through the system before our "guardians" can protect us. But, when Hollywood is worried about its continuity, it should spend some time focusing on the idiot reviewers themselves, doing scorecards (for instance, trashed movies that win Best Picture), challenging directly, and so on. There are too many of them now, doing too bad a job, threatening the future "An Unfinished Life" or "The Ice Harvest." That will hurt us all, and those losers should never have that kind of power.