Why film critics matter

People always have to wring their hands over something, don’t they?

Last year the entertainment press bemoaned the fact that no one was going to the movies anymore. This year, now that people are apparently going to the movies again, it’s the fact that people are going to movies critics don’t like: Notably “Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man’s Chest,” which, at last count, has rung up a shade under $1 billion in international box office. If critics don’t know what’s popular, the argument goes, what good are they?

Of course the extent of this critical umbrage against “Pirates” has been greatly exaggerated. On rottentomatoes.com that quantification of critical taste, “Pirates” received a 54 percent on the tomatometer, which I believe — and math majors can back me up on this — is more than half. Meanwhile those critics who didn’t like the film never really hated it. A.O. Scott’s response in The New York Times was typical: “Although there are memorable bits and pieces,” he wrote, “the new ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ is a movie with no particular interest in coherence, economy or feeling.”

Even fans have to admit it’s hardly a coherent or economic film (except, of course, in the box office sense). Critics, far from being snooty, merely judged the film against the original “Pirates” film (tomatometer rating: 79 percent) and found it lacking.

Good ol’ Larry King
But the “Pirates”/critics hubbub is just one of many assaults on criticism these days. Studios are screening fewer movies for critics. Ads are carrying more blurbs from non-critics like Larry King and Earl Dittman. More media outlets are being consolidated into fewer hands, and these owners are guided by a bottom line which doesn’t know from quality, which only gauges quantities: circulation rates, ad rates, profits. Content is also being consolidated. If you own publications in 50 states, why bother with 50 critics? Why not just one? Hell, why not just one from India? At a fraction of the cost.

Then there’s this medium here and its supposed democratization of information dissemination. If a movie can get buzz on the Internet, through either a genuine bottom-up or a faux top-down campaign, why give critics their chance to buzz-kill on Friday morning?

More and more, studios are viewing critics the way the White House views the press corps. We’re “the filter” that is somehow getting between the natural love that exists between corporation and consumer. We’re a snooty elite with bow ties and ink-stained hands shaking our heads and dispensing bon mots about their beautifully created products. We’re the type of people who actually use words like bon mots. Ignore them, the studios say. Listen to Larry King instead. Ah, good ol’ Larry King.

All of this is taking place as our society moves from passive forms of entertainment and communication (movies, TV, newspapers) to interactive forms (video games, Internet polls, blogs). Here’s the latest crisis. Here’s the latest celebrity. Here’s the latest movie. What do you think? There you go: 62 percent. That’s what you think.

Who needs critics for this?

The origin of Jerry Lundegaard
I’m hardly unbiased in this debate. My father, Bob Lundegaard, was a movie critic in the 1970s and ’80s for The Minneapolis Star-Tribune. His critical tastes tended to reflect Joseph Pulitzer’s journalistic motto of afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted — that is, he tended to like little-seen foreign films more than your typical Hollywood thump-o-rama. Not always, of course. I remember “Splash” charmed him and Eddie Murphy impressed him. But he could always deliver a good bon mot against Hollywood when he needed to. In 1981, for example, a movie called “The Legend of the Lone Ranger” was released with an unknown in the title role. In his review my father quoted from the studio’s press kit, which trumpeted: “Klinton Spilsbury comes to the role with no acting experience whatsoever.” My father’s response: “And he leaves in the same pristine fashion.”

By the mid-1980s, the arguments swirling around today’s critics were swirling around my father. He was too irascible, some editors felt, too elitist. He wasn’t in tune with the average Star-Tribune reader. His reward included general assignment duties and an early retirement. Later there was an homage from two Star-Tribune readers in St. Louis Park, Mn., Joel and Ethan Coen, who named the William H. Macy character in “Fargo” after him.

Populism
Our family, in other words, has been dealing with the elitist/populist issue for a while. I tend to fall on both sides of the argument: I’m both elitist and populist. I’m populist in the sense that I believe critical and popular tastes aren’t that far apart. People like quality, they don’t like crap. Pretty simple.

Let’s take a look at the 2006 movies the studios didn’t want to screen for critics, and see how they fared with both the snooty set (on rottentomatoes.com) and salt-of-the-earth moviegoers (on IMDb.com). The rottentomatoes rating is on a scale from 0 to 100, while the IMDb rating is from 0 to 10:

Overall there’s not a lot of difference between popular and critical reaction. Crap is crap, no matter who’s watching it. And while it’s true that no film at IMDb.com gets the “0” rating the critics gave “Zoom,” it’s important to keep the following in mind: The 1.8 rating for “Phat Girlz” from IMDb users? That’s the lowest-rated movie on IMDb.com (minimum 650 votes). Meaning that, at least according to the users of IMDb.com, “Phat Girlz” is the worst movie ever made.

And you thought critics were tough.

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