18 result(s) tagged “Critics”

Much has been written over the past 18 months about the death/irrelevance of film criticism in print media, as newspapers scaled back their movie coverage and Premiere stopped publishing a print edition.

The refrain has been that movie critics are out-of-touch and elitist, that they don’t reflect the values and tastes of audiences, etc., etc.

While that might appear true when Bangkok Dangerous tops the box office (as it did the first weekend in September), the truth is a little more complicated. Numerous (mostly unscientific) studies have found a correlation between box-office performance and critical reception.

Don’t read a cause-and-effect relationship into this and claim that audiences follow critics — that criticism matters because it affects audience behavior. Instead, let’s just note that audience behavior and critical reception often hook up.

For instance, the top movie at the box office this weekend was the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading (also our Box Office Power Rankings champion), followed by Tyler Perry’s The Family That Preys, the decades-late Pacino/De Niro thriller Righteous Kill, and The Women. Check those opening movies’ Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic scores, and you’ll see a pattern. Whether you’re looking at gross or two measures of critical evaluation, they follow the exact same order. Freaky.

Continue reading for the methodology and the week’s full rankings.

So it was written, and I agreed.

On the other hand ... .

For what it’s worth, the following sentence made me stop taking seriously Lauren Wissot’s initial piece, and that puts me among the author’s detractors:

“For example, a few weeks back I had fantastic afternoon sex with a hot bodybuilder — the tryst ending badly afterwards when we got into a heated debate over John Barrymore and Marlene Dietrich (who he feels are both vastly overrated).”

The problem here is a simple one of construction: The emphasis is in the wrong place. The nature of the sex isn’t relevant — fantastic, afternoon, or the hotness of the bodybuilder — yet it dominates not just the sentence but the paragraph and the whole damned essay. What’s important is treated structurally as an afterthought and is consequently lost.

The sentence could have easily been made more effective, and more appropriate to the piece:

“A recent tryst with a bodybuilder ended badly when we got into a heated debate over John Barrymore and Marlene Dietrich (who he feels are both vastly overrated).”

We all write bum sentences (and pieces) now and again, but this one by Wissot is pretty egregiously (and unnecessarily) self-involved. And this comes from someone who would know.

Yesterday, I noted that Disaster Movie and Babylon A.D. — which both opened on August 29 — had a horrific combined Rotten Tomatoes score of 4. (As of this writing, it’s up to 5. Somebody’s apparently feeling generous.) Metacritic total: 41.

That got me thinking: Might this be the worst pair of movies ever to debut on the same day?

So I’m on the lookout for a more spectacularly awful pairing. Barring that, what same-release-day two-fer comes closest to this unholy duo?

Help me out in the comments.

I’m late to the party as usual, but this bellyache looks like it’s going to stick around for a while: Paid movie critics are a dying breed! The horror! The horror!

I can’t get worked up too much.

In the past week, two major movie writers on the Web, Matt Zoller Seitz of The House Next Door and Raymond Young of Flickhead, hung up their stinky blogging shoes. Tim Lucas smells a trend and admits:

“I took a silent vow that I would discontinue this blog if he didn’t come out of his nine-hour surgery alive.”

So in the spirit of the week ... .

(An experiment in theft [or fair use] and editing as part of Lazy Eye Theatre’s Bizarro Blog-a-thon.

In the spirit of the character and the blog-a-thon: Bons Erutluc am so proud that me wrote every word!)

Sunshine and Groundhog Day have a lot in common. In each, we see things we’ve seen before, over and over again. But in Sunshine, this doesn’t describe the plot of the film, but the movie itself.*

Brevity is the soul of wit, that motherfucker Shakespeare once wrote, and even though he’s wrong, I’ll keep this short.

RogerEbert.com editor Jim Emerson has created the Contrarianism Blog-a-thon. (He chooses to capitalize the last “T” for some reason; I shall not.)

Emerson’s get-together is fun enough, but it doesn’t provide much practical guidance. Being contrary these days is hard work. In this Web-democratized age when every possible opinion already has its champion, how the hell can one be a contrarian? On the other hand, how can one not be a contrarian? After all, whatever you think, you’re fighting against all those who have a different perspective.

I will enlighten you on how to be a conventional contrarian.

While it’s worth debating the aims and functions of criticism, there’s a larger issue that’s rarely discussed: ethics in entertainment journalism. Critics have a credibility problem, and I think it’s the primary source of their diminished stature these days.

We rarely take a Faulkner sentence and examine it in isolation. We generally don’t inspect a song’s introduction, or chorus, or bridge, without even dealing with the context of the whole. We don’t study the corner of a painting, pretending that there’s nothing beyond it.

Maybe we should.

Matt Zoller Seitz beat me to the punch in citing what appears to be a trend in online movie writing:

“[I]n recent years — particularly in the last six months, for some reason — there’s been an exponential growth in Internet-based writing that dares to talk about what movies are actually made of: shots and cuts.”

While holding his nose, Daniel Neman dares not call that which offends by its proper name. Instead, he dubs it a “flatulence joke.”

And he is not amused. After counting 100 movies with — say it together — fart jokes since 1989, Neman writes disapprovingly in the Richmond Times-Dispatch:

“Do you know how a joke is never funny the second time you hear it? Imagine that sensation extended into triple digits.”

Movie studios have been struck with the brilliant realization that predictably bad reviews for self-evident shit such as The Benchwarmers can be silenced by not showing the movie to critics!

Here’s another blinding insight: Movies that aren’t released at all never get bad reviews! (Sorry. Wishful thinking on my part.)

The 2006 trend of studios withholding movies from the media has led to some debate about the role of movie reviewers in the world. Some have pronounced that film critics are becoming irrelevant.

In an aimless, nearly endless essay (more than 3,000 words), Wagstaff brings up some fascinating questions in what mostly functions as a personal remembrance of the circumstances of watching movies.

The apparent thesis (which is presented past the 1,000-word mark) is more a statement of intent, but it’s provocative:

“Most film criticism is rightly focused on the movie itself. The purpose of this essay is to clear a little spot of ground for the circumstances that surround watching a movie, the things that affect so strongly how we see it.”

“Let’s pretend for a minute that Airport ’75 is an excellent film that achieves greatness. I contend that it would ... be a horrible film to show as an in-flight movie on an airplane. ... [C]ircumstances matter.”

Filmbrain raises an essential issue:

“I have noticed a trend in the film blogosphere of critics who, while talented writers, are so damn clinical in their criticism that I find myself wondering if they actually enjoy film.”Yet at the same time, I feel that even openly subjective critics are less than willing to go all the way — to admit that their reaction is purely emotional ... .”

The post is cast as the eternal battle between “objective” and “subjective” criticism, but I think the above excerpt states the conflict more accurately. Because criticism is by its nature subjective, the question becomes to what degree we allow our emotional reactions, particularly those that might be unique and rooted in personal context, to seep into our criticism, and to what degree we acknowledge them.

In the magazine Cinema Scope, David Bordwell demonstrates how a lack of specific examples undermines a potentially intriguing argument.

Vanity Fair’s James Walcott revealed himself to be both puzzlingly moronic and a fine wit in separate posts last month. In dissing in-depth readings of The Sopranos’ recent in-coma movie, he wrote:

“Dream sequences are a curse on series TV, equal in their artsy-kitschy intrusiveness to ghostly visitations from deleted characters, and perhaps even worse than dream sequences are dream-sequence interpretations, which compels [sic] talented critics to smack at every symbol that pops up from the watery unconscious with wooden paddles.”

But in another recent post (on V for Vendetta), he offers this gem:

“I’m going to monitor myself at future movie screenings to ensure that my responses are age-appropriate and befitting of my status, income level, and cultural sophistication.”

Metacritic offers a nuanced perspective on what critics thought of a particular book, movie, or album. Unlike Rotten Tomatoes — which casts reviews merely as “fresh” or “rotten” — Metacritic measures the level of enthusiasm or hatred.

If movie critics chose Oscar nominations, then, here are two possibilities of what they might look like.

Blogger Anthony Kaufman makes an astute observation about the divided critical reaction to Paul Haggis’ Oscar-nominated Crash: “According to the top-ten lists available, not a single critic who resides in New York or Los Angeles placed Crash in their top five. ... So the vast majority of Crash fans come from everywhere in between.” Kaufman concludes that this is a function of the movie being simple and unsophisticated.

The New York Review of Books has an excellent piece in its July 15 issue on the nature of criticism. It deals specifically with Dale Peck’s already notorious Hatchet Jobs — which, of course, I haven’t read — and concerns itself primarily with the role of the critic. The author’s conclusion is that Peck is too busy “punishing” the authors he’s slamming to effectively “judge” them, and that Peck needs to offer an alternative to the books he loathes to be a good critic.