Film Reviewers Versus The Public

I found A.O. Scott's article on the criticism of negative film revewiers by a lemming-like public both interesting and frustrating. Frustrating not because of Scott, but because of the topic itself. This has turned into a yearly debate. Summer movies come out. Reviewers talk about how shitty they are. The public doesn't care. The movies make millions, viewers talk about annoying reviewers are, and reviewers are doomed to irrelevancy.

You know what? I don't care. Reviewers serve a useful purpose in the world. Some of us actually care about film. Some of us don't think that a worthwhile movie experience is having your brain rotted away with total crap. Some of us think that the Pirates of the Caribbean films are a grotesque waste of money, and that includes the first one, a film mysteriously on imdb's top 250 films of all time and which shows that even big movie fans are often idiots.

Of course there was a time when film reviewers and the moviegoing public were on the same page. This was in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when movies such as The Graduate and Love Story were both critically lauded and popular. It's not the reviewers who have they changed. Sometimes it's literally the same people. What's changed are both the movies and the audience. Spielberg and Lucas deserve a lot of the blame for the movies. By turning the movie going experience into mindless popcorn crap, they dumbed down the movies for decades. Younger people blame Bruckheimer and Bay for this but they are just following in the footsteps of their elders. Because people like mindless entertainment in a way they didn't even during the Great Depression (why this is I don't know), people's expectations for a movie is to entertain them with a bunch of explosions and car chases without having to think or feel, even for a minute. During the Christmas season the supposedly Oscar-worthy movies come out and moviegoers might see one of those but grudingly.

Hell, even the readers of the New York Times, certainly a highly educated set, are still rating the Pirates of the Caribbean movie as their #4 most popular movie.

So what is a reviewer to do. Tell the public to fuck off. Those few of us who still care about film will read them. Don't worry what the general public thinks. I'm sure they want to be read by more people and have their opinions taken seriously. Hell, I want that for this blog. But just keep doing your job and ignore the public if they are going to ignore you.