|
Here are 5 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.
Seriously, who does like movie critics?
For epic movies such as Lord of the Rings, nobody even cares what the critics think. I think they even gave the trilogy a "c"
  |
 |
Linear Mode
