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Criticizing the Critics (continued)
6. Contrarian Syndrome -- Jim Emerson, Scanners.com Too damned often, critics like to fight the flow by throwing up roadblocks, opinions absolutely contrary to what all my peeps think. Makes them feel like they matter, strutting their smarts and film trivia. Shouldn't it be in the job description that if a critic sees a movie with 300 wildly applauding folks, it's against the rules to write as if that doesn't count? Like one fan wrote to a nit-picking critic: "If you do not like 'The Dark Knight' ... you should be fired because you do not speak for the people." Remember "Crash"? (That's a stretch, since it came out way back in 2004, but, for the sake of discussion, pretend.) A collection of sermonettes about race in Los Angeles, "Crash" assured us that, yes, bigotry was bad, but down deep, people were good, and if only everyone could just get along, this nasty problem would go away. The flick took home three frakkin' Oscars, and nobody had a bad word for it ... except a clutch of critics who just had to put flies in its oh so soothing ointment. When you killjoys slammed "Crash" as a simpleminded, heavy-handed liberal fantasy, you really brought us down from a righteous high -- and we resented you for it. Don't lay that old hoo-hah on me about being responsible for "placing" movies and defining "cultural significance" and providing "informed" analysis. You may feel like you're handing out gifts by explaining how wrong we are to prefer "Transformers" to "No Country for Old Men," but, trust me, you're just serving up spinach to people who crave Whoppers. 7. Lack of Fluency in Entertainment-Speak Legend has it that, back in the Dark Ages, a lot of critics couldn't write in universal Entertainment-Speak, the cynical, crack-wise lingo that jazzes up most of today's pop culture talk. Seems that some of the old-school types bragged on something called a "writing style": a personal, super-idiosyncratic way of expressing what they thought and felt. Check this out: Geezers you've never heard of -- like James Agee, Andrew Sarris or Pauline Kael -- apparently had such distinctive "voices" that you could always tell one from the other. People actually read them even if they didn't agree with them, because they got off on their style -- like some American Idol or Celebrity Dancer. And talk about long-winded! These anachronisms thought nothing of using up reams of old media space to spin out complicated arguments for or against a flick. But that was then. These days, who has the time or patience to watch some Great Writer-wannabe work the language for more than 400 words? Wired folk thrive on cross-platform conformity in movie criticism. Glued to our computers and TVs, we feel all warm and fuzzy when critic-types speak our language, echo our gut reactions. Whether choosing the prez or a movie reviewer, the guy you'd want to have a beer with always wins. Come to think on it, why waste money on hiring reviewers for every single newspaper or Web site? Just buttonhole a couple of the coolest Entertainment-Speakers from Buzzdrool.com and syndicate them out. 8. Cinema 101 Syndrome Some critics are frustrated teachers, looking for a captive class. They claim we need them because they're more educated, more informed, about movies -- as if we care. They go all gaga about "the sensual and aesthetic joys of movies -- the interplay of light and shadow, composition, movement, faces, color, sound, music, language, acting"! Is this dude trippin' or what? If we wanted a teacher, we'd go to college. What you film reviewers need to know is how to answer a puzzled fan like this one: "I see where 'Tropic Thunder' knocked 'The Dark Knight' into second place at the week's box office. So now is 'Tropic Thunder' the greatest film of all time?" Don't riff on films nobody remembers; anything before "Star Wars" -- the director's cut, that is -- falls under prehistory. Do I really need to know about previous Hollywood send-ups to get my jollies from "Tropic Thunder"? Why drag in some obscure German guy named Fritz Lang ("Metropolis," "The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse"... sorry) you claim did moral ambiguity a thousand times better than Christopher Nolan (the guy who helmed Heath Ledger's two-hour obit). When Salon.com's Stephanie Zacharek dragged in Alfred Hitchcock to beat up on "The Dark Knight," one reader rightly complained, "I'm going to get more from reviews that describe a movie's merits (or lack thereof) within the four corners of a film itself, rather than by reference to other films by other directors and performances by other actors in other films to which I have no ready access. In this review, for example, references to how Hitchcock would have done it better, or perhaps how Hitchcock would have done it RIGHT, don't mean much for me. It's not a Hitchcock movie. Why are we talking about Hitchcock?" Fangirl's right on! Every critic should make her rant his rule of thumb (no pun intended)! 9. Awards Perversity Come year's end, most movie critics go bonkers with Ten Best Lists bulging with films no one's ever heard of or had a chance (or inclination) to see. Most of you don't even count boffo box-office as proof positive of the year's best, the movies we voted for with our hard-earned bucks. Take, for example, last year's Academy Awards nominees, films the majority of moviegoers couldn't have cared less about -- downers like "No Country for Old Men" and "There Will Be Blood" (what was that about?) and "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" and "Away From Her." Where were our faves -- "Spider-Man 3," "Transformers," "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End" or "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix"? Time reviewer Richard Corliss, tongue fully in cheek (we think), fesses up: "We critics may give these awards to the winners, but we give them for ourselves. In fact, we're essentially passing notes to one another, admiring our connoisseurship at the risk of ignoring the vast audience that sees movies and the smaller one that reads us." And getting smaller by the second. 10. Naming Names Time to share our hit list of the worst offenders when it comes to critical sins we're sick of. For a smile, Google up some of the mavericks who persist in producing smart, sophisticated, idiosyncratic, sometimes elegant writing about movies: David Ansen, Manohla Dargis, David Edelstein, Jim Emerson, Robert Horton, Richard T. Jameson , Dave Kehr, Kim Morgan, A.O. Scott, David Thomson. Warning: Exposure to these relics and misfits may result in inability to stomach the likes of Buzzdrool.com. What camp do you fall into? Do critics matter? Write us at heymsn@microsoft.com
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