Critic Bashing
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Big Magilla
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Reads like something written by someone who actually likes film critics and criticism (or at least well-crafted reviews), but has decided to adopt the voice of the fanboy critic-bashers out there in rottentomatoes-land (the Dark Knight mafia, as it were) either in an attempt to parody them, or to get them to leave approving comments on the piece.
I stopped at #2: anybody who ascribes to the thesis that older films should be ignored has no right to call themself either a film critic or even a film buff.
"...it is the weak who are cruel, and...gentleness is only to be expected from the strong." - Leo Reston
"Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable." - Jodie Foster
"Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable." - Jodie Foster
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OscarGuy
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I stopped reading into the #3...it smells of sour grapes to me. It suggests that film cannot be considered art like literature or other "classical" media. And they also seem to ignore that many critics DO like the superhero flicks, just not nearly as much as the idiotss seeing the movies 20 times at the movies.
And this article doesn't just bash film critics, but it also bashes cineastes and anyone who happens to feel movies like No Country, There Will Be Blood, Diving Bell and Away from Her were terrific movies (and some of those people who liked Spider-Man 3, etc, also happened to like some of those movies...)
And this article doesn't just bash film critics, but it also bashes cineastes and anyone who happens to feel movies like No Country, There Will Be Blood, Diving Bell and Away from Her were terrific movies (and some of those people who liked Spider-Man 3, etc, also happened to like some of those movies...)
Wesley Lovell
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both." - Benjamin Franklin
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both." - Benjamin Franklin
Tongue-in-cheek, ignorrant bashing, or speaking for the people? I have no damn clue really.
Criticizing the Critics
Tired of professional film critics? Isn't every opinion valid? Wellll ...
By Kathleen Murphy
Special to MSN Movies
Editor's note: Names have been cleverly changed to protect, well, our butts. Kind of like Dylan's "Desolation Row."
You know who we're hatin' on here. Film critics. That oh-so-special species mostly sighted at press screenings, film festivals, and panels on "The Death of Cinemah."
From coast to coast, certain critic types stand out: There's Jabba the Hutt, a barely ambulatory IMDb who's watched every movie ever made while nesting in his mom's basement. And Ichabod Crane, that juiceless, gray beanpole poised to club a harmless piece of escapism to death with some smarter-than-thou diatribe.
And who can forget monkish little Gollum, painfully conflicted about whether he loves or hates the flickers. Am I, he stews, slumming in a low-rent medium when I could be swanning about with genuine intelligentsia, reviewing the great American novel or dissecting Broadway's latest extravaganza?
These guys don't review movies for real people like you and me. They do it for their own selves -- and some highfalutin, probably long-dead niche audience with nothing better to do than think about "ahhhhht." Those of us who have lives, high-speed browsers and can't spare the time? We'd rather hit the blogosphere, where my opinion is as good as anyone else's -- and if you don't like it, you can IM uncensored, spontaneous brain-spew.
Critics are Them. Bloggers R Us.
Here are 10 things about you "professional" film critics that really frost our patooties:
1. Dream Job
You get to see movies for free. You get paid to watch movies. You work part-time and get a full-time salary. You enjoy a private screening of "The Dark Knight" weeks before my buds and I queue up to pay big bucks at the multiplex. And then some of you have the nerve to badmouth Batman and the Joker! Show some love for the folks who keep you in lattes and DVDs.
2. Geezer Syndrome
A lot of you have been writing about movies since the beginning of time, blathering on about blasts from the past and filmmakers no twentysomething ever heard -- or wants to hear -- of. Stodgy magazines and old-school newspapers give you Methuselahs permanent homes, as though they were still cutting-edge instead of way behind the curve.
Oughtta be an age limit that kicks in when a reviewer hits 30 (see "Logan's Run"). After that, how in touch can a graybeard be with the mass quantities of cool new stuff streaming into the fast-action world of popular culture? When dotard brains can't stand up to heavy-duty media bombardment, geezer critics hunker down in prehistoric, analog notions about what makes a megahit.
Haven't you ever heard of the fierce urgency of NOW?
Geezers mostly mumble to themselves these digital days, cuz print's fast going the way of T. rex. You need to know we're the demographic to die for -- fanboys and himbos romping through our teens and early 20s! And if you can't tell us what we need to know in a blurb or a capsule or an up-or-down thumb, our attention wanders at warp speed.
3. No Respect for Comic-Book and Superhero Movies
Obsessed with movies older than dirt, weird flicks from Burkina Faso and oddball releases that grossed $2.98, too many reviewers have the gall to look down their noses at the super-black, ultra-kinetic, freak-filled universe of the graphic novel.
And a lot of these highbrows are soooo in the dark when it comes to superheroes -- not to mention pirates of the Caribbean. Hunks and mutants and Transformers rock, especially when they throw bloody fits that crush whole cities and populations.
Get with the program, guys. Superhero flicks deliver fanboy fantasies, where freaks and geeks get off on breaking things and having a smash-palace good time -- while saving the world, of course. When real life keeps everything tight and tame, hooking up with Hellboy or the Hulk gives you the chance to fly your freak flag -- without having to pay for breakage.
But uptight dweebs and geezers can't feel the juice. A couple of you even nit-picked "The Dark Knight," droning on about "incoherent action sequences" and "pretentious" storytelling. What rock do you people live under?
Everybody knows "The Dark Knight" is the greatest movie ever made. Contrarian critics totally missed the way this flick broke brand new ground, showing all that deep and scary stuff about Batman and the Joker being two sides of the same coin. And all the supersized explosions and car chases? Gravy, man, just gravy.
Betcha "Watchmen" will go right over geezer heads.
You reviewers whine that it's hard to take superheroes seriously, carping that Super-, Spider- and Iron-men aren't pumped up with complexity of character and moral choice, just super-strength and -powers. Chill out, guys: Wolverine's got angst, Hulk's a raging id, Hellboy's wrestling with commitment issues and what about Iron Man's long, hard road to redemption?
Not everybody has to go up Brokeback Mountain or into some country that's not for old men to get all sad and soulful. I mean, Batman's parents got murdered, his girl's blown to smithereens, and now the Joker's all up in his face with, "You complete me." How heavy is that?
4. Lighten Up
You gotta realize you aren't writing about Shakespeare or Picasso here -- just consumer reports on what lots and lots of regular folk use to kill time over the weekend. Some of you write so dead-serious it's like you think someone's grading you, or civilization as we know it hangs on your every word.
Writer Clive James, happy to live without long-faced movie critics, hits the nail on the head: "You already knew that your friend who's so funny about the 'Star Wars' tradition of frightful hairstyles for women ... is much less boring than your other friend who can tell you how science fiction movies mirror the dynamics of American imperialism." Now that's what I'm talkin' about!
Write blog-breezy, throw in some jokes, sprinkle lots of puns and pop culture references around. What we want are snark and zingers and yuks in film reviews, not head-scratching insights about what's the most recent nail in the coffin of Cinemah. Good on Entertainment Weekly for coming up with the idea to bold blurb-worthy sentences in their page-long reviews, so that just a quick glance gives you the gist.
And can't reviewers get a little more creative about those cute little symbols you use to rank movies -- five spliffs for super stoner movies? Two Manolo Blahniks for a so-so chick flick? That thumb thing is so yesterday.
5. Snobbery
Don't get all up in our faces with wordy, ivory-tower gibberish that's just so much noise to real moviegoers. Who wants to pore over that elitist jabber when slang-and-snark pleb talk spreads over the Internet like instant kudzu?
Why waste my time showing off how much you know about the film's director or what genre it's in and how it measures up to the last 40-something examples of that genre or how the movie fits into the grand scheme of things cinematic?
What we want is a consumer reporter, dig? Someone who can give us the buzz, the pitch, the scoop, the high sign that will get us up off the couch and into the multiplex.
Mostly we don't pay much attention to you anyway -- we already pretty much know what's hot and what's not, from ad raves and RottenTomatoes.com blurbs and "Entertainment Tonight" reports. Jacked directly into the action, we don't need snobby critics for middlemen.
Apologizing for his preference for Cinemah over popcorn movies, highbrow New York Times critic A.O. Scott actually had the nads to claim that he's doing us a favor by sharing the "pleasure, wonder and surprise we associate with art."
Don't bother beaming us up, Scotty. What we crave is consensus, write-ups that mirror the majority, the movie tastes of the teens and proles who rule the box office.
6. Contrarian Syndrome
Strike a hipster pose
And admire your reflection
Just be sure you're facing
In an opposite direction!
-- 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.
Criticizing the Critics
Tired of professional film critics? Isn't every opinion valid? Wellll ...
By Kathleen Murphy
Special to MSN Movies
Editor's note: Names have been cleverly changed to protect, well, our butts. Kind of like Dylan's "Desolation Row."
You know who we're hatin' on here. Film critics. That oh-so-special species mostly sighted at press screenings, film festivals, and panels on "The Death of Cinemah."
From coast to coast, certain critic types stand out: There's Jabba the Hutt, a barely ambulatory IMDb who's watched every movie ever made while nesting in his mom's basement. And Ichabod Crane, that juiceless, gray beanpole poised to club a harmless piece of escapism to death with some smarter-than-thou diatribe.
And who can forget monkish little Gollum, painfully conflicted about whether he loves or hates the flickers. Am I, he stews, slumming in a low-rent medium when I could be swanning about with genuine intelligentsia, reviewing the great American novel or dissecting Broadway's latest extravaganza?
These guys don't review movies for real people like you and me. They do it for their own selves -- and some highfalutin, probably long-dead niche audience with nothing better to do than think about "ahhhhht." Those of us who have lives, high-speed browsers and can't spare the time? We'd rather hit the blogosphere, where my opinion is as good as anyone else's -- and if you don't like it, you can IM uncensored, spontaneous brain-spew.
Critics are Them. Bloggers R Us.
Here are 10 things about you "professional" film critics that really frost our patooties:
1. Dream Job
You get to see movies for free. You get paid to watch movies. You work part-time and get a full-time salary. You enjoy a private screening of "The Dark Knight" weeks before my buds and I queue up to pay big bucks at the multiplex. And then some of you have the nerve to badmouth Batman and the Joker! Show some love for the folks who keep you in lattes and DVDs.
2. Geezer Syndrome
A lot of you have been writing about movies since the beginning of time, blathering on about blasts from the past and filmmakers no twentysomething ever heard -- or wants to hear -- of. Stodgy magazines and old-school newspapers give you Methuselahs permanent homes, as though they were still cutting-edge instead of way behind the curve.
Oughtta be an age limit that kicks in when a reviewer hits 30 (see "Logan's Run"). After that, how in touch can a graybeard be with the mass quantities of cool new stuff streaming into the fast-action world of popular culture? When dotard brains can't stand up to heavy-duty media bombardment, geezer critics hunker down in prehistoric, analog notions about what makes a megahit.
Haven't you ever heard of the fierce urgency of NOW?
Geezers mostly mumble to themselves these digital days, cuz print's fast going the way of T. rex. You need to know we're the demographic to die for -- fanboys and himbos romping through our teens and early 20s! And if you can't tell us what we need to know in a blurb or a capsule or an up-or-down thumb, our attention wanders at warp speed.
3. No Respect for Comic-Book and Superhero Movies
Obsessed with movies older than dirt, weird flicks from Burkina Faso and oddball releases that grossed $2.98, too many reviewers have the gall to look down their noses at the super-black, ultra-kinetic, freak-filled universe of the graphic novel.
And a lot of these highbrows are soooo in the dark when it comes to superheroes -- not to mention pirates of the Caribbean. Hunks and mutants and Transformers rock, especially when they throw bloody fits that crush whole cities and populations.
Get with the program, guys. Superhero flicks deliver fanboy fantasies, where freaks and geeks get off on breaking things and having a smash-palace good time -- while saving the world, of course. When real life keeps everything tight and tame, hooking up with Hellboy or the Hulk gives you the chance to fly your freak flag -- without having to pay for breakage.
But uptight dweebs and geezers can't feel the juice. A couple of you even nit-picked "The Dark Knight," droning on about "incoherent action sequences" and "pretentious" storytelling. What rock do you people live under?
Everybody knows "The Dark Knight" is the greatest movie ever made. Contrarian critics totally missed the way this flick broke brand new ground, showing all that deep and scary stuff about Batman and the Joker being two sides of the same coin. And all the supersized explosions and car chases? Gravy, man, just gravy.
Betcha "Watchmen" will go right over geezer heads.
You reviewers whine that it's hard to take superheroes seriously, carping that Super-, Spider- and Iron-men aren't pumped up with complexity of character and moral choice, just super-strength and -powers. Chill out, guys: Wolverine's got angst, Hulk's a raging id, Hellboy's wrestling with commitment issues and what about Iron Man's long, hard road to redemption?
Not everybody has to go up Brokeback Mountain or into some country that's not for old men to get all sad and soulful. I mean, Batman's parents got murdered, his girl's blown to smithereens, and now the Joker's all up in his face with, "You complete me." How heavy is that?
4. Lighten Up
You gotta realize you aren't writing about Shakespeare or Picasso here -- just consumer reports on what lots and lots of regular folk use to kill time over the weekend. Some of you write so dead-serious it's like you think someone's grading you, or civilization as we know it hangs on your every word.
Writer Clive James, happy to live without long-faced movie critics, hits the nail on the head: "You already knew that your friend who's so funny about the 'Star Wars' tradition of frightful hairstyles for women ... is much less boring than your other friend who can tell you how science fiction movies mirror the dynamics of American imperialism." Now that's what I'm talkin' about!
Write blog-breezy, throw in some jokes, sprinkle lots of puns and pop culture references around. What we want are snark and zingers and yuks in film reviews, not head-scratching insights about what's the most recent nail in the coffin of Cinemah. Good on Entertainment Weekly for coming up with the idea to bold blurb-worthy sentences in their page-long reviews, so that just a quick glance gives you the gist.
And can't reviewers get a little more creative about those cute little symbols you use to rank movies -- five spliffs for super stoner movies? Two Manolo Blahniks for a so-so chick flick? That thumb thing is so yesterday.
5. Snobbery
Don't get all up in our faces with wordy, ivory-tower gibberish that's just so much noise to real moviegoers. Who wants to pore over that elitist jabber when slang-and-snark pleb talk spreads over the Internet like instant kudzu?
Why waste my time showing off how much you know about the film's director or what genre it's in and how it measures up to the last 40-something examples of that genre or how the movie fits into the grand scheme of things cinematic?
What we want is a consumer reporter, dig? Someone who can give us the buzz, the pitch, the scoop, the high sign that will get us up off the couch and into the multiplex.
Mostly we don't pay much attention to you anyway -- we already pretty much know what's hot and what's not, from ad raves and RottenTomatoes.com blurbs and "Entertainment Tonight" reports. Jacked directly into the action, we don't need snobby critics for middlemen.
Apologizing for his preference for Cinemah over popcorn movies, highbrow New York Times critic A.O. Scott actually had the nads to claim that he's doing us a favor by sharing the "pleasure, wonder and surprise we associate with art."
Don't bother beaming us up, Scotty. What we crave is consensus, write-ups that mirror the majority, the movie tastes of the teens and proles who rule the box office.
6. Contrarian Syndrome
Strike a hipster pose
And admire your reflection
Just be sure you're facing
In an opposite direction!
-- 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.
"It's the least most of us can do, but less of us will do more."