Conspiracy Theory

I am the kind of person that would read that title and immediately move on to read something else, anything else. Maybe ‘conspiracy’ isn’t the right word for the evil machinations that I have uncovered? Maybe I am stating something that is so blatantly obvious that it’s like I’m the last person to understand the forces that make the world go around? Maybe I’m the last person who isn’t getting paid to go along with the program? What I do know is the forces responsible for making shitty movies in America have bought and paid for those responsible for reviewing movies, both shitty and otherwise.

David Denby and Anthony Lane, the twin twats who review movies in The New Yorker magazine, are either the two most tasteless adults to ever have entered a Cineplex 18, or they are being paid by the big studios to favorably review the offal that those studios call movies—although there is nothing preventing both statements from being true. How else can anyone explain how these two film critics at this hallowed magazine find glowing things to say, week after week, about some of the worst efforts ever captured on film? Think of some of the worst movies you can imagine, movies you wouldn’t watch if you were languishing in a South American prison, and I’ll bet these two can find lots of nice things to say about them. Don’t take my word for it, I’ll abandon my usual irresponsible style and provide quotes from the Now Playing section of the magazine that has thumbnail captions from the reviews:

The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo (some fucking thing) The third in a series about sexy boys and their supercharged cars stars Lucas Black as a reckless rebel who. after a drag race gone wrong, flees to Tokyo to live with his father. There he discovers the thrill of drift racing (rocketing a car sideways by gunning the engine and hitting the brakes at the same time) with a group of yakuza wannabes.

Nacho Libre This story is just an excuse for Jack Black to jump around. He looks great in thick curly hair and a moustache.

The reviewers have a penchant for treating the big studio turds with kid gloves. They save their ire for the small, independent films. It is the movie critics’ equivalent of beating up the little kid with no big brother to defend him. In the same issue in which Denby praises Nacho Libre he savages the small, low-budget film The Road to Guantanamo. Here is his thumbnail for it:

The Road to Guantanamo Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross’s film about three real-life British nationals mistakenly imprisoned at Gitmo is confusingly told and possibly disingenuous.

Now, I have seen neither Libre or Guantanamo, but as someone who subscribes to the NYer, I could actually imagine myself seeing an independent film like Guantanamo. I can’t imagine that anyone who reads the magazine would bother with films like Libre or Fast and Furious

In the arts sections of the New York Times (14JUL06) there was a fairly favorable review of a new frat-boy comedy You, Me, and Dupree while the serious foreign films were relegated to the back pages of the section. It’s not that I equate foreign with serious, or foreign with good—there are loads of shitty foreign films. What I am saying is that if you are trying to make a serious film that has actual human characters, don’t expect to get any help from the media unless you fucking accidentally, through no fault of theirs, somehow make a bunch of money with your project. At that point the big media conglomerates will be falling over each other to kiss your ass, thus insuring that your next film will be a complete load of crap more worthy of major media praise.

It isn’t difficult to understand why this is the situation in America today. There are three companies that own practically every newspaper, magazine. radio station, television outlet, and movie studio in the entire country, maybe the planet, maybe the entire solar system for all that I know—I’m not invited to the board meetings.

Generally speaking, I hate critics. I love the story about the venerated New Yorker film critic, Pauline Kael, who was invited to Hollywood to give a try at film writing. Here was a woman who obviously knew everything there was to know about movies, after all, she had been eviscerating and praising them for years in the magazine, so who better to write the perfect screenplay. Of course, she failed miserably and went back to New York with her tail, or whatever it is critics have, between her legs. This is why I hate restaurant reviews—especially when they are highly caustic—written by folks who have never worked in a restaurant. I would love to read movie reviews written by people who actually make films.

I find the type of film reviews that are found in major American publications to be almost criminally disingenuous in their façade of objectivity. It is obvious that someone is telling the critics how to steer their reviews, so just say so. Precede the review with a short blurb explaining how The New Yorker is owned by Time-Warner, and they make movies. and their objective is to get you to pay to see them.