[Dixielandjazz] The Mind of a Critic.

[Steve Barbone]

A little off topic, but a parallel to the critics (including you and me) of
OKOM, jazz, music, or anything else. What is fascinating, to me at least,
about this lengthy mea culpa by a professional movie critic is that after
all is said and done, why does he do it?  "we don¹t go to the movies for
fun. Or for money. We do it for you."

Puleeeze, give us a break.

Aaaarragh . . . critics? "We don't need no stinkin" critics.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone


Avast, Me Critics! Ye Kill the Fun: Critics and the Masses Disagree About
Film Choices. 

NY TIMES - By A. O. SCOTT - July 18, 2006

Let¹s start with a few numbers. At Rottentomatoes.com, a Web site that
quantifies movie reviews on a 100-point scale, the aggregate score for
³Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man¹s Chest² stands at a sodden 54.
Metacritic.com, a similar site, crunches the critical prose of the nation¹s
reviewers and comes up with a numerical grade of 52 out of 100. Even in an
era of rampant grade inflation, that¹s a solid F.

Meanwhile, over at boxofficemojo.com, where the daily grosses are tabulated,
the second installment in the ³Pirates² series, which opened on July 7,
plunders onward, trailing broken records in its wake. Its $136 million
first-weekend take was the highest three-day tally in history, building on a
best-ever $55 million on that Friday, and it is cruising into blockbuster
territory at a furious clip. As of this writing, a mere 10 days into its
run, the movie has brought in $258.2 million, a hit by any measure.

All of which makes ³Dead Man¹s Chest² a fascinating sequel ‹ not to ³Curse
of the Black Pearl,² which inaugurated the franchise three years ago, but to
³The Da Vinci Code.² Way back in the early days of the Hollywood summer ‹
the third week in May, to be precise ‹ America¹s finest critics trooped into
screening rooms in Cannes, Los Angeles, New York and points between, saw Ron
Howard¹s adaptation of Dan Brown¹s best seller, and emerged in a fit of
collective grouchiness. The movie promptly pocketed some of the biggest
opening-weekend grosses in the history of its studio, Sony.

For the second time this summer, then, my colleagues and I must face a
frequently ‹ and not always politely ‹ asked question: What is wrong with
you people? I will, for now, suppress the impulse to turn the question on
the moviegoing public, which persists in paying good money to see bad movies
that I see free. I don¹t for a minute believe that financial success
contradicts negative critical judgment; $500 million from now, ³Dead Man¹s
Chest² will still be, in my estimation, occasionally amusing, frequently
tedious and entirely too long. But the discrepancy between what critics
think and how the public behaves is of perennial interest because it throws
into relief some basic questions about taste, economics and the nature of
popular entertainment, as well as the more vexing issue of what, exactly,
critics are for.

Are we out of touch with the audience? Why do we go sniffing after art where
everyone else is looking for fun, and spoiling everybody¹s fun when it
doesn¹t live up to our notion or art? What gives us the right to yell ³bomb²
outside a crowded theater? Variations on these questions arrive regularly in
our e-mail in-boxes, and also constitute a major theme in the comments
sections of film blogs and Web sites. Online, everyone is a critic, which is
as it should be: professional prerogatives aside, a critic is really just
anyone who thinks out loud about something he or she cares about, and gets
into arguments with fellow enthusiasts. But it would be silly to pretend
that those professional prerogatives don¹t exist, and that they don¹t foster
a degree of resentment. Entitled elites, self-regarding experts, bearers of
intellectual or institutional authority, misfits who get to see a movie
before anybody else and then take it upon themselves to give away the
ending: such people are easy targets of populist anger. Just who do we think
we are?

There is no easy answer to this question. Film criticism ‹ at least as
practiced in the general-interest daily and weekly press ‹ has never been a
specialist pursuit. Movies, more than any other art form, are understood to
be common cultural property, something everyone can enjoy, which makes any
claim of expertise suspect. Therefore, a certain estrangement between us and
them ‹ or me and you, to put it plainly ‹ has been built into the enterprise
from the start.

The current schism is in some ways nothing new: go back and read reviews in
The New York Times of ³Top Gun,² ³Crocodile Dundee² and ³The Karate Kid Part
II² to see how some of my predecessors dealt with three of the top-earning
movies 20 years ago. (The Australian with the big knife was treated more
kindly than the flyboy or the high-kicker, by the way.) And the divide
between critic and public may also be temporary. Last year, during the Great
Box-Office Slump of 2005, we all seemed happy to shrug together at the
mediocrity of the big studio offerings.

No more. Whatever the slump might have portended for the movie industry, it
appears to be over for the moment, and the critics have resumed their
customary role of scapegoat. The modern blockbuster ‹ the movie that
millions of people line up to see more or less simultaneously, on the first
convenient showing on the opening weekend ‹ can be seen as the fulfillment
of the democratic ideal the movies were born to fulfill. To stand outside
that happy communal experience and, worse, to regard it with skepticism or
with scorn, is to be a crank, a malcontent, a snob.

So we¹re damned if we don¹t. And sometimes, also, if we do. When our
breathless praise garlands advertisements for movies the public greets with
a shrug, we look like suckers or shills. But these accusations would stick
only if the job of the critic were to reflect, predict or influence the
public taste. 

That, however, is the job of the Hollywood studios, in particular of their
marketing and publicity departments, and it is the professional duty of
critics to be out of touch with ‹ to be independent of ‹ their concerns.
These companies spend tens of millions of dollars to persuade you that the
opening of a movie is a public event, a cultural experience you will want to
be part of. The campaign of persuasion starts weeks or months ‹ or, in the
case of multisequel cash cows, years ‹ before the tickets go on sale, with
the goal of making their purchase a foregone conclusion by the time the
first reviews appear. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn¹t, but the
judgment of critics almost never makes the difference between failure and
success, at least for mass-release, big-budget movies like ³Dead Man¹s
Chest² or ³The Da Vinci Code.²

So why review them? Why not let the market do its work, let the audience
have its fun and occupy ourselves with the arcana ‹ the art ‹ we critics
ostensibly prefer? The obvious answer is that art, or at least the kind of
pleasure, wonder and surprise we associate with art, often pops out of
commerce, and we want to be around to celebrate when it does and to complain
when it doesn¹t. But the deeper answer is that our love of movies is
sometimes expressed as a mistrust of the people who make and sell them, and
even of the people who see them. We take entertainment very seriously, which
is to say that we don¹t go to the movies for fun. Or for money. We do it for
you.