Ahh, with what joy we all criticize critics for being critical.
Personally, I’m old enough to remember gloomy Sundays in Massachusetts when there was nothing to due in my town but either get stoned or watch Siskel and Ebert. Since I liked keeping my head clear, I skipped the former and chose the latter.
Back in the late 70’s, back on PBS, they rocked. They had something to say, and changed movies as we know them for about a decade. When Hollywood realized these two wouldn’t go away, they bought them. Disney, that is. It was then that slowly Ebert started liking everything, and it’s my view why Siskel got sick and died. I think he hated watching his fat friend stuff himself on Hollywood bonbons and lose even more of this edge.
It’s not that Ebert has lost all credibility, but the show has. If you need genunine reviews, go to:
www.metacritic.com
This site tabulates and links all reviews to all new movies. Then, it gives them a score from 1-100 based on the perceived scores of said reviews. The cool thing is that you can either:
1. Find out it’s score and just go on that and know NOTHING about the movie except for it’s title and tagline.
2. Or you can find what a favorite reviewer or two thought of it. For instance, the Wall Street Journal is typically vicious. If they seem positive, and their score is at the bottom, then go see it.
Regrettably, even THIS site is suspicious sometimes. It highly rates MULHOLLAND DRIVE (like a 92 out of 100), then, mysteriously, it’s score feel to 76 or so a week later. I love Lynch, but Mull was no 92. 79 or so at best.
As a screenwriter I find it distressing that there comes a time where the young must discover cliches for themselves. It’s their right. When I was a kid, KISS was new and older brothers and cousins looked at me like I was nuts. (They did this with QUEEN and even ELTON JOHN.) They thought all this music sucked because they had already had their helping of cliches before I was old enough to know it, and they had already moved on.
I have this friend with a 12 year old daughter. She only wants to see new, new, new!!! Old movie?!? Forget it! New!
I think most movie goers aren’t really so different. They don’t want to hear a critic telling them that Bette Davis acts better from her grave then Meg Ryan does with a coach. They don’t care.
Moviegoers want to discover something new, and will settle for crap and blame critics for being fools-- ANYTHING- just to get a NEW movie they can say they’ve seen and YOU haven’t.
So be kind to the critics. There are a few good ones still out there. Appreciate that only about 10 movies come out a year that are as good or better than the ten best movies of the year before, and so forth. The rest of the movies are dreck, they really are.
If you had to see everything at the movies, like or it not, you’d probably overfeed yourself or die of some disease.
Two cents..