Critics: Which Movies Get Childhood Right?

Posted on June 29, 2015 at 11:09 pm

Thanks to Sam Adams and Indiewire for including me in their survey of critics about our favorite movies from the perspective of a child. Here was my answer:

“To Kill a Mockingbird” somehow captures the voice of the novel in allowing us to see the story through the eyes of a child but with the understanding of the now-adult Scout who provides the narration. It is almost as though the camera is at a child’s eye level, as we, along with Scout, have a growing appreciation of what her father is doing and what kind of a man he is. Even the music expresses the wonder of children for whom so much of they see is equally new and intriguing, but who also take so much still for granted.

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Critics Write About Our First Encounters with Star Wars

Posted on April 23, 2015 at 9:22 am

The latest Criticwire survey asks for our first encounters with “Star Wars.” I had a lot of fun writing about mine:

A long, long time ago in a galaxy far away, or at least that’s how it seems now, my then boyfriend and I finished the bar exam, following three years of law school and six weeks of intensive cramming and even more intensive panicking, and walked outside, blinking in the sunlight we barely recognized. Dazed, we barely made it to the theater for the prize we had promised ourselves all summer. We were going to see “Star Wars.” We loved it. The hologram message from the princess with the awful hair. The bar. The garbage compactor. The droids. Obi-Wan. The wookiee. To go from listing the elements of a negotiable instrument and the factors required for a temporary restraining order and the exemptions to the hearsay rule to Jedi and the Death Star was such an overwhelming experience that we decided to sit through it again. (I did say it was a long time ago.)

We were lucky enough to see them as they came out, to be shocked by the revelations, to suffer for more than a year while Han was frozen, wondering how he could escape. We still love them. The original trilogy, anyway. Unadulterated by later tweaks, please. Han shot first and we are okay with that. Can’t wait for the next one.

Fans should check out the terrific A Galaxy Not So Far Away: Writers and Artists on Twenty-five Years of Star Wars for more stories about the impact of the “Star Wars” saga.

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Bad Movies Inspire Great Critics: Mortdecai

Posted on January 24, 2015 at 3:35 pm

Johnny Depp’s “Mortdecai” is sure of a place of dishonor on the end of the year worst lists. Business Insider and Huffington Post have some choice quotes from some of the movie’s best bad reviews, and I’ve found some good ones, too, including:

David Edelstein, New York Magazine

Having combed Roget’s Thesaurus in vain for a suitable adjective to describe the Johnny Depp comedy Mortdecai, I’m forced to say it’s just … bad…Depp is very, very bad. Watching his first scene, a bad echo of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, I thought he’d finally moved from emulating late (insane) Brando to late, slumming Peter Sellers and would spend the rest of movie swapping out wigs and accents. It quickly became clear that his bad, gap-toothed Terry-Thomas imitation (with extra eyebrow action) would be all she wrote. The badness settled over the audience like nuclear ash.

Rafer Guzman, Newsday

Depp’s grating, bug-eyed performance in this strenuously unfunny film may go down as a kind of psychotic break in his overacting career.

Robbie Collin, Daily Telegraph

It’s hard to think of a way in which the experience of watching the new Johnny Depp film could be any worse, unless you returned home afterwards to discover that Depp himself had popped round while you were out and set fire to your house. This is comfortably the actor’s worst film since Alice in Wonderland, and even dedicated fans will find their hearts shrivelling up like week-old party balloons at its all-pervading air of clenched desperation.

Steven Holden, The New York Times

hat a frantically dull spectacle this vanity project is.

Guy Lodge, Variety

onger on frippery than quippery: There’s a fatal shortage of zingers to supplement its exhausting zaniness.

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Critic Critiques — Has the Internet Been Good or Bad for Movie Criticism?

Posted on January 14, 2015 at 3:46 pm

Until a few years ago, the movie critics you read were determined by geography. There were a few critics in national publications, like Pauline Kael in the New Yorker and the critics for Time and Newsweek. If you lived in Chicago, you got to read Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, but if you did not, you read the critic in your local paper. The internet made it possible to read any critic you liked. And it made it possible for anyone to be a critic. I started putting my movie reviews online in 1995 and did not start getting paid for it until five years later.

This democratization of movie criticism has been both good and bad. The worst part has been the result of overall budget-slashing at news organizations across the board. Film critics are among the first to go. A documentary called “For the Love of Movies” was a sad elegy to the era of the professional movie critic.

Director David Cronenberg is especially critical of aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. He said

Even now if you go to Rotten Tomatoes, you have critics and then you have ‘Top Critics’, and what that really means is that there are legitimate critics who have actually paid their dues and worked hard and are in a legitimate website connected perhaps with a newspaper or perhaps not. Then there are all these other people who just say they’re critics and you read their writing and they can’t write, or they can write and their writing reveals that they’re quite stupid and ignorant. … Some voices have emerged that are actually quite good who never would have emerged before, so that’s the upside of that. But I think it means that it’s diluted the effective critics.

It is clear to me that the best part of this access to technology by both critics and filmgoers (and thus the dissolving of the distinction between them) has been the range of new voices. My friend Sonny Bunch wrote for the Washington Post:

there is some use in examining the way that the movies themselves help us order our existence. The movie screen may not be a mirror for society. But it can be a roadmap for understanding and navigating it. And the non-expert may sometimes, even often, be better equipped to help us travel that path than the expert.

When Movies Turn the Tables on Critics

Posted on October 27, 2014 at 8:00 am

Thanks again to Criticwire for including me in their survey about how movie critics feel about the way that critics themselves are portrayed in movies. Sometimes filmmakers take a bit of revenge on those of us who judge them and the critics surveyed had a lot of fun re-turning the tables by critiquing the critique. Most of us mentioned Anton Ego (love that name), voiced by Peter O’Toole in “Ratatouille.”

But I was the only one to mention my favorite:

Peter O’Toole’s critic is the highlight of “Ratatouille,” and in many ways the ultimate movie portrayal of a critic. We all know what it feels like to review so much junk that you begin to believe you have lost your capacity to be surprised by greatness. Those reminders that we can still be thrilled are what keep us going. The critic who hates everything is a popular target in movies like “Arsenic and Old Lace,” which has Cary Grant as surely the handsomest critic ever on screen. The most acid-tongued was George Sauders’ Addison DeWitt in “All About Eve.” The comeuppance scene where he out-Eves Eve herself is a masterpiece. “Is it possible, even conceivable, that you’ve confused me with that gang of backward children you play tricks on, that you have the same contempt for me as you have for them?”

My least favorite movie portrayal of a critic is probably Bob Hope in “Critic’s Choice.” He reviews his own wife’s play, for goodness’ sake! On the other hand, the onscreen critic I love best has a similar ethical lapse, but I can’t help loving the movie, one of my very favorites. That is David Niven in “Please Don’t Eat the Daisies,” as a character inspired by real-life theater critic Walter Kerr, based on his wife Jean Kerr’s wonderfully witty book of essays. Niven plays a character who, like Kerr, is a teacher turned critic. His devastating review of a play produced by his closest friend has a hilarious take-down of the musical star delectably played by Janis Paige. Her response (with photographers in tow) is magnificent. And, even in a light comedy co-starring Doris Day, Spring Byington, and Jack Weston, there is a very astute exploration of some of the genuine conflicts critics face. This critic gives that portrayal and that movie four stars.

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