Untitled

- critics - have they lost the plot? -

How do you choose to watch a film? Trailers? Stars? Tombola?

The most effective form of movie promotion is word of mouth. All the hype and hoopla affects the movie's opening weekend and not a lot else - after that word of mouth takes over.

But you'd think that we'd rely on critics - rather than studio hype - to make that opening weekend, wouldn't you? Well, we don't. Even the mighty Barry Norman ruefully points out that, when anyone has looked into it, the only box office he affects are for foreign films. For better or worse, we just don't trust critics.

Further, there is there is much in-fighting among critics themselves, a huge disparity between US and UK critical tastes, and, most crucially, between them and that of the public.

Take last year's critical darling, LA Confidential. Rarely has there been such agreement among the pen scribblers - it came top of Premiere magazine's critics' 100 films of the year in the US. 15 out of a possible 16 gave it top marks, and the other was only 1 point down. All this, despite highly respected scriptwriter guru William Goldman, in the same magazine, describing the film as "confusing... it has a terrible ending... and it's phoney" (part of a superb and devastating analysis that runs ribbons round any review). And well, well - at the box office - not a lot of action.

That top 100 makes for interesting analysis. Could someone please explain how something as structurally flawed as Boogie Nights got to no3, and something as perfect as Grosse Pointe Blank no30? How Chasing Amy at 4, or Wag The Dog at 8 were both rubbished by UK critics? How the excruciating In & Out was at 20, while the clever, funny and unusual A Life Less Ordinary sunk at a pitiful 97, below even Batman & Robin, for goodness sake?! (In case you were wondering by the way, The Postman came bottom, below Speed 2 and The Saint. Not many would argue those, I feel).

One critic can be easily dismissed - Richard Scheikel of Time Magazine's first word on the awfulness of Titanic proved to be the drop in the vast ocean that it was, critically (in the US poll, no 6) and of course commercially. But can 16 of them really be wrong?

Hmm. You get a feeling that, although critics are the first to bemoan censorship which tells the public what they can watch and what they can't, many try pull the same trick. The public, you see, are uneducated. The only reason they liked Titanic and The Full Monty is because they don't know any better. And if only they'd all been to film school and watched The Seventh Seal, they'd realise how awful these crass pretenders actually were.

In this country, things are perhaps a little better - we have a powerful tabloid press, with more mainstream tastes. The problem there is that they have to pander to their readers a bit too much.

Back to William Goldman yet again, quoted more often than anyone else in the business. "No-one knows anything". Certainly not critics. I'm with his analysis of the 5 Best Picture Oscar nominations, where he has to point out to us all again that screenplay means structure, not dialogue. He thus cited Titanic as film of the year. Funny that a writer has a greater sense of what the public wants - and what makes a film really work - than a critic. And the man who said "nobody knows anything" seems to know more than anyone else...

- home - news - recent additions - site index -