Everything Wrong with Modern Film Criticism

I've debated if I should post what I'm about to say.  I think that reviewing other reviews is often a dangerous road to go down.  Whether you're the person behind the work that's being critiqued or just an interested party, there's rarely any good that can come from providing a dissection of other people's reviews.

But for the past week I've been annoyed by a trend that popped up in the reviews for my friends' movie Devil's Due.  Critics didn't receive it terribly well, though that's not unusual for a found-footage horror film.  As much as I liked it and hoped it would be well-received, I wasn't completely blindsided by the fact that critics made a meal of it.

But what did get under my skin is that I saw a number of reviews where it was clear that the reviewer didn't even give the film a chance.  When several paragraphs of a review focus not so much on the specifics of the film, but rather the reviewer's fatigue with found-footage, I think we have a problem.  I think when you're hired to review a specific movie, the focus should be reviewing the movie - not using the film as an excuse to get into your specific issues with a genre.

And the more I thought about this, the more I realized that my issues with these reviews were just scratching the surface of what was wrong with the way films today are examined.  But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's start off by looking at statements like this one from Todd Gilchrist of The Wrap:

Generally speaking, I have no problem suspending disbelief in order to enjoy found-footage horror – of course there’s no good reason for them to film all of the time. But “Devil’s Due” distinguishes itself, much to its detriment, by making a huge show of the characters’ reasoning, and then packaging their entirely self-sustaining “home movies” in between recordings of a police interrogation of one of the survivors. 

And the fact that the police don’t seem to believe the suspect, despite what is very obviously a mountain of footage evidencing their innocence, suggests that they didn’t find, or see, the material we’re watching. So how exactly can you have a found footage movie, if no one finds it?

Unlike The Blair Witch Project, Devil's Due makes no claims that the footage we are seeing is an assembled documentary.  It merely uses the technique of telling the story through cameras that capture the action.  It's an approach that was used rather effectively in Chronicle, and it's apparent from the first time the film cuts to the perspective of a supermarket security camera that we aren't going to be wedded to Zach's own camera.

And yet Gilchrist wasn't the only reviewer who got hung up on this non-issue.  FlickFilosopher.com spent half their review digging into this:

This is the problem: A found-footage movie is supposedly more than merely a film for our putative enjoyment. It’s supposed to be a document, an artifact, of the world it’s set in. If the found footage is from one source — say, the memory card from the videocam some idiot used to record an investigation into a witch legend, or a monster attack, or, ahem, his own honeymoon — then, sure, this one tape was literally “found.” But when the “found-footage” consists of material edited together from multiple sources in ways that fail all plausibility tests, then something is badly wrong. 

I mean, look: I can buy that Samantha McCall (Allison Miller: 17 Again), a newlywed young woman still in school who doesn’t even want to be pregnant yet and had taken responsible steps to prevent it, might have gotten knocked up by Old Scratch in some crazy evil candlelit rite in the basement of a nightclub in Santo Domingo. What I cannot figure out, for the life of me, is this: Who assembled this footage? It cannot be her husband, Zach (Zach Gilford: The Last Stand, Post Grad), the dude with the video-documenting fetish, because as the film opens, we’re seeing police-interview video of him covered in blood being asked to explain just what happened — which we know he won’t be able to do because what cop or lawyer or jury is gonna believe “it wasn’t me it was Satan”? (And we know it was Satan responsible for whatever we’re about to watch in flashback, because the title tells us so.) 

But even if we could concoct a scenario in which he is exonerated and goes on to do some editing, huge chunks of the film consist of footage from cameras Satan’s minions secrete in the McCall house and other material that he doesn’t have access to and, in other cases, is probably not even aware of. The only other possible explanation is that the minions of Satan did some editing (using Lucifer’s supernatural powers to find the other footage), but why? They’re doing all their demonic babymaking in secret: they’d hardly assemble in one handy place all the evidence against them that reveals their diabolical plan. 

And then we have Mountain Xpress harping on the same point:

We are supposed to believe that it was cobbled together (by whom, I have no clue) from home video footage and security cameras. Banana oil. It's just a jumble of shaky, wobbly images that couldn't possibly be what they're claimed to be. Granted, the whole found-footage premise is played out and pointless, but you could at least pretend this footage (including footage that's stolen by the satanists part-way through the proceedings) could be real. 

Need I remind you the film never "claims" to be an actual documentary?

Even the New York Times got in on the act:

Though apparently pieced together from a variety of sources — including supermarket and police interview tapes — the film never reveals who did the piecing.

Screenrant:

This film and so many others in the genre seem to have abandoned the idea that this footage must conceivably be found at some point. Switching perspective to cameras that no one is ever going to find is a cheat, pure and simple.)

A "cheat?" Really?

And CraveOnline:

That element of the found footage genre – y'know, that the footage was actually found – is now completely absent, as evidenced in a film like Matt Bettinelli-Olpin's and Tyler Gillet's Devil's Due. The shaky-cam, low-watt filmmaking is now less an indicator of the would-be snuff film aesthetic that was once a highlight of these movies, and has been reduced to mere affect, style, and an easily mocked formula. In Devil's Due, perspective switches rapidly from the camcorder-happy protagonist, occasional security camera footage, and even numerous shots from mysterious hidden cameras insides the protagonists home (hidden cameras placed by… who could it be??). In such a case, you, as a viewer, can only begin asking the most inappropriate questions about who found all this footage, and why they are assembling it for us. 

I mean....

Riddle me this, Batman. When is a plothole not a plothole? When it's completely invented by the reviewer.  Is it fair for a critic to build a box, then flunk the film for not fitting into it when the film itself explicitly avoids that box?  That's really dirty pool.

Look, I'm not saying everyone should have loved Devil's Due, but I'd have a lot more respect for a negative review that seems to hate it for fair reasons. The Wrap's review also had this gem of an unfair attack:

Suffice it to say casting one of the stars of “Friday Night Lights” in a main role and hiring hugely recognizable character actor Sam Anderson (“Lost,” “WKRP”) further undermines any sense that this is real, much less believable. 

We're 15 years from the time of The Blair Witch Project, which was probably the last time you could effectively dupe an audience into believing that a found-footage movie was an actual documentary.  Part-and-parcel of that showmanship tends to be that filmmakers cast unfamiliar faces to further the pretense this actually happened.

The problem with that is that a lot of found-footage films suffer for exactly the result you'd expect when you cast a lot of untested talent - weak performances.  A genre with the potential for the greatest level of intimacy is then hobbled by showcasing inadequate interpreters for the drama.  This (and the Paranormal Activity series) is a major studio release.  Is there any portion of the audience that would buy a ticket to this expecting it's any more real than Jack Ryan?  It's not like anyone flipped out because Captain Kirk wasn't Captain Kirk, but rather a CIA analyst.

I'd point out that it's not too uncommon for found footage actors to end up in studio films soon after.  Even if the whole film marketing is predicated on fooling the audience into thinking this is all "real," that shelf life is pretty short when a year later, the leads are staring on a CW series or popping up in rom-coms.  Two stars of 2012's Project X ended up in rather high profile projects within a year of that film's release.  Alexis Knapp turned up in Pitch Perfect and Miles Teller starred in The Spectacular Now.

But for that matter, found footage has long been making use of known actors.  Let's look back six years to Cloverfield.  Lizzy Caplan was four years removed from a very visible part in Mean Girls, to say nothing of numerous TV roles in that time.  Odette Yustman and T.J. Miller had also each done a TV series and Mike Vogel and Jessica Lucas had even more extensive TV resumes.   The aforementioned Chronicle also made use of familiar talent.

So the idea that found footage must star complete unknowns hasn't existed for a long time.  Why is this still considered a valid attack on any film in this genre?

Also, it takes a special kind of balls to call out a film for being derivative while using a review gimmick explicitly stolen from another reviewer.

I miss Roger Ebert. He always judged a film by weighing what it accomplished against what it set out to achieve.  It was this approach that lead to an infamous argument with Gene Siskel over the fact Ebert gave Benji The Hunted a "thumbs up" on the same show where he gave Full Metal Jacket a "thumbs down."

Modern film criticism is in sad shape, and to some extent, I trace a lot of this back to Red Letter Media's original 70-minute video deconstruction of The Phantom Menace.  I think there's one very astute and absolutely brilliant insight in there.  At one point, the reviewer challenges Star Wars fans to describe franchise characters without referencing their occupation or their clothing.  As you might expect, those questioned are able to give very in-depth answers when describing Han Solo or C-3PO.  When the topic turns to prequel characters, they start grasping at straws.  It's a brilliant indictment of how thin the prequel characters often are, done in a very clever way.

Unfortunately, in my opinion, the lesson too many took from Red Letter Media (and I include RLM himself in this indictment) is that what made the review awesome was that it had enough material to fill 70 minutes.  Thus it beget an even longer autopsy of Attack of the Clones in which the "flaws" felt more like fanboy whining and failed to be dissected in a manner half as amusing as in the original video.

But the agenda seemed to have shifted from giving interesting lessons about drama to providing a comprehensive checklist of every perceived "sin" of the prequels, no matter how small. This is the theory behind those incredibly annoying "Everything Wrong With..." videos that frequently take potshots at major films.  There they list everything they think is a sin, no matter how pedantic.  Sometimes they identify valid plotting and character issues - but those fair points are often listed alongside minor continuity errors and gaffes.

Quality of criticism appears to be less valued than quantity of criticism.  After all, the more things you find "wrong" with a film, and the more words you can generate in tearing it down, the more objectively worse it must be, right?  Give me a succinct Roger Ebert deconstruction any day over a review that takes longer to read or watch than a full episode of Siskel & Ebert.

(I fully realize the irony of taking such a stand in what has to be one of my longer posts of late.  Hopefully you find the multiple quotes from the Devil's Due reviews relevant.  I felt it was important to illustrate just how frequently the critics employed what I considered to be an irrelevant attack.)

When I was growing up, Roger Ebert's reviews encouraged me to look below the surface and explore my own feelings about a film.  He knew how to give his opinions in a way that provoked discussion and introspection, not as a bludgeon to convince his audience that his opinion was an absolute truth.  More than that, he was fair when he deconstructed a film and itemized its shortcomings.  Was he always perfect? No.  When he really hated a film, you could sometimes sense his passion get away from him.  But he tried - and more often than not, he succeeded.

When I read the work of most current critics, I think of Roger Ebert and am reminded of a quote from Hamlet: "I shall not look upon his like again."

Critical Mass - the mob mentality of judging and pre-judging movies

There's something that's been kicking around in my head a lot these recent months and I think that at some point in the last month, it finally hit critical mass.  Between the reactions to a lot of summer movies and the release of Arrested Development on Netflix, I'm noticing a significant shift in how we as viewers react to entertainment.

Hype has long been a factor in shaping critical reaction. I'm sure everyone can point to an instance where they were so amped up for a film or TV show that they either convinced themselves to ignore its flaws - or were let down by it so much that they swung the opposite way and declared it the worst worst that ever worsted.  (I'm sure The Phantom Menace provoked both reactions in somewhat equal measure.)

But now we seem to have gotten to the point where the hype isn't just fostering an inevitable backlash (i.e. "The new Arrested Developments suck because they're not what I wanted when I heard the show was returning!"), it's also setting up a mob mentality before people even see the film.  We've gone from reaction to over-reaction to now pre-action.  It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Trekkers enraged at J.J. Abrams spend two years bitching how its going to suck, then spend $15 for a ticket just so they can have their prejudgment validated.

I haven't seen The Hangover III, nor have I seen After Earth.  In fact I have no plans to do so because neither one of them looks like my kind of movie.  At the very least, the trailers for each did such a poor job of selling me on the concepts that I'm not going to plunk down full price for tickets.  Maybe I'll catch then via Netflix someday, but the point is that when my expectations are so low, I'm not eager to rush in and have them confirmed.

Even more notably, these days, when one reacts to a film, it has to be an extreme reaction.  I feel like there's no room for nuance in reactions anymore. You either come out of a film proclaiming it "fucking awesome" or it's "an abortion," the "worst film ever," and justification to have its makers drawn and quartered.  Maybe I'm overreacting and merely am noting those with the loudest voices, but this is certainly what it feels like.

There are a lot of movies I see where my reaction trends closer to a middle ground - not being perfect, but also not inspiring much hate either.  These movies inspire apathy more than aggressiveness.  It's something I'm aware of when I go to see a new film and walk out thinking, "I don't know if I have anything interesting to say about this on the blog. I liked/hated it, but that's about it."  It's times like that when I'm glad I don't have Roger Ebert's old job because I imagine it's a lot harder to write an intelligent review when that film comes up short on inspiring passion.

After Earth is the latest example of this phenomenon. The film was saddled with bad buzz and a lot of ill will directed at Will Smith, Jaden Smith and especially M. Night Shyamalan.  In his review, Drew McWeeny remarked on the fact that some people seemed to be gunning for this movie for reasons entirely independent of its merits.

"M. Night Shyamalan has entered the phase of his career where there is a certain amount of baggage that prevents a percentage of the audience (and the film press) from even remotely approaching a new film by him with an open mind. It's been fascinating to watch the fall from newly-annointed genius in 1999 to openly-reviled punchline in 2013... 

"I see people piling on already, and I'm baffled. Maybe it's the father-son act of Will and Jaden Smith that also has some people cracking their knuckles and sharpening their knives. Keep in mind, I'm not talking about people who have seen the film and didn't like it, but the ramp up over the last few weeks where I've seen people who have absolutely not seen the film railing on it anyway.

"I think "After Earth" is a modest pleasure, but our media landscape now demands that we either destroy a film in a review or we have to canonize it. Enjoying a film and having a complex reaction to its merits and its flaws is evidently no longer allowed."

I'll be the first to say that I don't always agree with Drew.  In fact there's a wide gulf between our reactions sometimes.   But he's not wrong, and for evidence of that, you need to go no further than the comment section where people who haven't seen the film accuse Drew of having been bought.  Because, of course bribery is the only explanation for how one could give a B- to a film from this creative team.

It's one thing to take a reviewer to task if you've seen the work and you feel that he's made a grievous error in his reasoning.  I'm sure you don't have to look too far to find a review where the writer clearly missed important details and that had an impact on their summation.  But to attack someone because their experience didn't match your prejudgement?  That seems insane.  And I think it's worth considering this the next time you walk out of a film and are formulating your own reaction to it.

I want to cycle back and bring this around to the mission statement of this blog, it's worth remembering that if these sorts of pre-judgments have with completed films, you can bet that projects at the script stage will face it to some degree.  Yes, that means it's possible that YOUR script might not get considered in the sort of hermetically-sealed vacuum that you would demand.  People who evaluate scripts are professionals and they do their best, but that can't help if - for example - you've written a poker movie and it ends up being read at a company where 5 of the support staff had to be laid off after that company's poker film tanked.

Like I said, most of the pro scripts I read fall into the "not terrible, but not fantastic" category.  For now, the ones that land at either extreme are still a minority percentage.  But if you're contributing to a culture that can only stand to eviscerate a film or want to have its babies, you might consider how that lack of nuance could eventually infect all forms of critical conversation.

In memoriam of Roger Ebert, my first film professor

I don't remember my first encounter with Roger Ebert's work, which is fitting in a way because at least in the realms of my memory it's as if he's always existed, much like Mickey Mouse, Superman and Mr. Rogers.  It's impossible for me to remember a time when I didn't associate him (and his partner Gene Siskel) with film criticism.  That's one of the biggest reasons that the man's death yesterday at age 70 came as such a blow.

It shouldn't have been a huge shock.  Ebert had spent much of the last decade battling cancer off and on.  It cost him his jaw and his speech, but thanks to his blog, not his voice.  He'd been a prolific blogger and reviewer even since having to retire from his TV show, but just earlier this week announced that he was scaling back his workload due to a recurrence of his cancer.  It was inevitable that cancer would take him, though it was still sad to see it come so quickly.

His passing leaves an undeniable void in the world of film criticism.  It's strange to be mourning the loss of someone I never met, but his voice was so strong in everything he wrote that's it's impossible not to feel like I knew him.  I remember checking one of his Movie Companions out of the library when I was about seven or eight.  At first, I'd merely read the reviews of the films I'd seen.  For some reason it was important to me to know what he thought about Star Wars or Superman.

One detail I recall particularly well is in his review of Return of the Jedi, he singled out a small moment when the Rancor keeper mourns the loss of his beloved pet.  It was a moment I knew, but at that age, I had always felt it was played for laughs.  Roger saw it a different way, as a small moment of humanity and emotion that added a bit of texture to this space fantasy.  I'd never considered those beats from that point of view and I know it opened my eyes to seeing similar grace notes in other films.

I eventually ended up reading nearly every review in his companion books.  To this day, I'm sure there are film whose plots I know exclusively from their coverage in those books.  The thing I loved about Ebert's reviews is that he always made an effort to explain his opinion in a way that you could respect and understand his assessment, even if you disagreed with it.  A lot of critics don't take the time to do that.  The benefit of Ebert's approach is that after you read enough reviews of his, you had a pretty good understanding of the ven diagram that expressed the overlap in your tastes and his. I didn't read Ebert's reviews because I necessarily needed him to agree with me. Often I wanted to see where he and I parted ways and what I could learn from the divergence.

It's fair to say Ebert was my first film professor.  Before there was TVTropes.com, Ebert's companions contained his Movie Glossary, which was the first place I ever saw someone point out movie "rules" (or cliches) like "Fallacy of the Talking Killer" (the instance where the bad guy merely has to pull the trigger and kill the hero, but can't resist either gloating or explaining his plan, thus giving the good guy a chance to turn the tables or get rescued by his buddy), or the observation that no chase scene in an exotic local is complete unless a fruit cart is overturned.  One odd "rule" I distinctly remember is "No good movie has ever contained a hot air balloon."  (Roger allowed that The Wizard of Oz was an exception.)  I absorbed all those "rules" and at the age of 10, vowed that when I made a movie, I'd subvert as many of those cliches as possible.  I guess time will tell on that count.

Back in the early days of letterboxed videos, it was Ebert who enlightened my nine year-old self about aspect ratios, and the fact that the black bars on the top of the screen actually meant I was seeing more of the original picture, not less.  In a 1990 essay, Ebert used the widescreen video release of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade as the entry point into this discussion.  At the time, most people hated the black-bars at the top and bottom of their screen.  They preferred the cropped and pan-and-scan transfers even if it completely messed with the composition and meant you were no longer watching the film the way it was originally composed.

The argument that clinched it for me was when he quoted Spielberg's statements about how this argument would be inverted in the future.

"The real irony is going to come when high-def TV arrives," he said. "High-def will have a wide screen. So now, instead of black bands at the top and bottom of wide-screen movies, you'll have black bands at the left and right of the old pre-1953 movies. What will happen then? Will the same people insist on cropping the older movies from the top and bottom, to force them into wide screen? That would be great. You'd have an Astaire and Rogers musical with their feet cut off. The message is always the same: A movie should be seen in the same screen ratio in which it was filmed. Otherwise, you're missing something." 

Quite a prescient statement more than two decades ago, wasn't it?  From that time forward, I was a convert to preserving the original aspect ratio. (In fact, this argument made such an impression on me that I was nearly able to reconstruct Spielberg's quote from memory.  Only after I went to the trouble of paraphrasing it did I decide to see if the original article was out on Google. I assure you, my recall for some of my film professors' lectures isn't nearly as accurate.)

But I'd be remiss if I didn't bring up Siskel & Ebert.  There was a point in time where I tried to watch that show every week.  It's easy to forget that at that time, the internet was new enough that there weren't a multiude of online critics.  There was no Rotten Tomatoes to tell us what the mainstream critical consensus was - Siskel and Ebert WERE the critical consensus.

Often they agreed, but the real fun was when they disagreed.  They'd openly mock each other's opinions and force the other to defend their like or dislike of a film.  Gene seemed more likely to give a thumbs down if a film displeased him in any way, while Roger took a broader view.  He'd give a thumbs up to a movie that might have fallen short in some ways, but still managed to succeed on some levels.

However this usually put Roger in the position of defending a thumbs-up on a film that was of questionable quality.  Gene never let him forget that he praised Cop and a Half and Benji The Hunted.  But you know what? I liked that Roger always went with his gut.  He wasn't concerned with looking like a stuffy critic who was afraid to praise more populist films for fear of losing credibility.

That said, he wasn't above ribbing Gene for his reviews, and perhaps my favorite moment of their show was when Gene offered a half-hearted endorsement of Broken Arrow, and then allowed Roger to twist his vote from thumbs up to thumbs down.


I could spend all week linking to Ebert reviews and Siskel & Ebert clips like that.  Those were two guys who loved film and loved discussing film for a living.  Too often I feel that passion is missing from many modern reviewers, or if it's present, it's lacking the insight that Roger Ebert's writing often contained.

No one was better than Roger Ebert at reacting to a film on an emotional level, and knowing how to translate that emotional reaction into an intellectual discussion.  Indeed, he once said, Your intellect may be confused, but your emotions will never lie to you," but he was wise enough to know the emotion was only the beginning of criticism. Too many critics are content to proclaim "It stinks!" and just leave it at that.  Ebert's reviews could be blunt and venomous, but they were funny and well-written as well.  I always got the sense that he went to each new movie with his mind open to the reality it presented.  It never felt like he rooted for a movie to be bad, and that's why on those occasions when a film really insulted his intelligence, he could be brutal.  I do my best to live up to that example.

It saddens me that we've lost that voice, but as numerous eulogies over the last day have shown, Ebert inspired many others.  I count myself among that number.  If it weren't for Ebert's reviews and essays, this blog might be very different today.  If you don't know Ebert's work, do yourself a favor - go to his site and start reading, and then go to YouTube and start watching him argue with Gene Siskel.

I don't think we'll ever have film critics as influential as Siskel and Ebert were, and Roger's passing marks the end of an era that I'm sorry we have to leave so soon.  Farewell, Roger.  I hope a man who railed against film cliches will permit me the obvious indigence of concluding this tribute by saying, "The balcony's closed."

Chicago Sun-Times obituary for Roger Ebert

Statement from Chaz Ebert, Roger's wife

Ebert on movie trailers

Roger Ebert on trailers:

"Trailers use exactly the same principle as supermarket demonstrations that supply a sample of cheese on a toothpick. Once you eat it, you know exactly how the cheese will taste. All you lack is having eaten the whole cheese." Source

Which reminds me of this Robert Zemeckis quote:

"We know from studying the marketing of movies, people really want to know exactly every thing that they are going to see before they go see the movie. It's just one of those things. To me, being a movie lover and film student and a film scholar and a director, I don't. What I relate it to is McDonald's. The reason McDonald's is a tremendous success is that you don't have any surprises. You know exactly what it is going to taste like. Everybody knows the menu."

Sigh.