An argument for weekly film criticism (sort of).

First, kudos to anyone still practicing the art out of nothing more than pure love for cinema, especially those writers working for small papers in small cities like Des Moines, Charlottesville, Daytona, and Oklahoma City. Regardless of what I may think of your writing, opinions, or taste in movies, the fact that you remain in the face of massive consolidation, pounding out hundreds of words week after week about a medium that seems to be falling ever further out of public favor bespeaks of some kind of passion in the face of irrelevance that’s worth honoring.

It’s this quote referring to the box office success of Fantastic Four in the face of bad reviews from the head production boob at Fox that has me in such a momentarily gracious mood:

"When you have a weekend like this, you've got to question, what is the relevance of reviewers to viewers at large," said Fox production prexy Hutch Parker. "I don't think reviewers are writing for the viewing audience anymore. I think they're writing for each other."

As much as it boils my blood to watch some tit who pays three secretaries to piece together his strangled cries of industry-speak into intelligibility criticize people who make their living off of words, I’d be disingenuous if I didn’t note that there’s more than a little truth to this. I took a brief spin through the “pull quotes” of from compiled Fantastic Four reviews on Metacritic.com and pulled these assessments:

“The really good superhero movies, like Superman, SpiderMan 2 and Batman Begins, leave Fantastic Four so far behind that the movie should almost be ashamed to show itself in the same theaters.” – Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

“Directing seems an unduly elegant term for what Hollywood hack du jour Tim Story (Barbershop, Taxi) does here -- the action scenes are so choppily constructed that their excitement disappears faster than the Invisible Woman.” – Scott Foundas, LA Weekly

“There's nothing remotely fantastic about this Fantastic Four. – Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer

Like the examples quoted by robbiefreeling, this isn’t criticism; this is hackery, plain and simple. And gleeful hackery at that which is even more distasteful, and readers can smell it, even if only on a subconscious level. Of course, I write from a luxurious position that allows me to write as much as I like (within reason) and consider the worth of each phrase over the course of weeks, a far different scenario than the limited space and time afforded those who write about movies for a real “living.” It’s a lofty perch, and it’s hard to say with absolute certainty that I wouldn’t fall into similar traps if I were put in their shoes for a few weeks.

However, something about these quotations reeks of an underlying exhaustion—exhaustion with movies, and exhaustion with writing about them. I’m sure Fantastic Four is awful, and that there’s a distinct possibility that all those who enter the theater are in for a solid 100 minutes worth of mental maiming, so where’s the outrage? Instead of soapbox rallying or impassioned pleas, you trot out laundry lists that sound like talking points memos distributed in secret film writer society e-mails. No wonder no one listens—you’ve allowed yourselves to become little more than faceless automatons who string quotable phrases together, 500 words at a time. And if you can’t use bad movies as a staging ground for playing around and teasing out your own visions of cinematic utopia, how can we expect you to handle the work of a filmmaker who’s trying to do the same?

Plain and simple: weekly film criticism is necessary, and every time a film writer goes up to bat in front of an audience, he or she owes it to the medium and their audience to make a statement about cinema. An added positive step involves bringing a sense of a writer’s very real, personal relationship with the medium to the fore. Imagine if each article was part of a larger dialogue about that writer’s feelings about movies and where they’re headed. Imagine that each week was the latest chapter in an ongoing wrestling match where ideas reappeared, expanded, shifted, changed, and most importantly (thank you eshman) initial judgments were refuted from time to time. That would be something worth reading.

Maybe I’m an optimist, but I think it’s possible to raise the discourse without retreating to the ivory tower and while working within the limitations that will always exist in the weekly reviewing game. It’s the necessary first step towards rebuilding a meaningful film culture.