Maybe his thumb's stuck that way
Aging is certainly nothing sunny spring meadowy to look forward to. Still I am very much excited about the day when it becomes socially acceptable for me to be every bit as curmudgeonly as I already am.
So it scares me to think that my elderly fate may be similar to the conciliatory state that has apparently befallen supercritic Roger Ebert.
I make a point to read IMDb's movie critic review synopses every Friday. For a while I've been noticing Ebert predictably being the rare positive voice for an otherwise universally panned flick. Could it be that Ebert has lost his critical teeth in his old age?
So off I went to Ebert's site at the Chicago Sun-Times. His ratings are based on a four-star system. Logically that means that a two-star movie would be considered mediocre, with everything below being unworthy of recommendation. His current reviews list forty-seven movies from this weekend back to November 9; seven of those films received two-stars or below.
This may give me away for the snob I know I am, but could there only have been seven bad films released in the last two months? Some of the few films for which Ebert does muster some ill will are far too obscure to register anything like popular dissent - go ahead, defend 39 Pounds of Love if you can.
Read his reviews of otherwise critically hated films and it seems like Ebert treats these films like the dumb, unruly child that you have to love. He digs until he finds something redeemable, then decides that the one good outweighs the twenty bad. He'll also try to pinpoint the demographic that might actually enjoy the film; that's an exercise that should have nothing to do with criticism, especially considering the critic-proof nature of some of the films he pays back-handed compliments. I doubt many people changed their mind one way or the other upon reading his three-star review of The Ringer (a 46/100 on the review aggregator Metacritic)
I do still enjoy his prose, and his biggest recommendations do still sometimes match my sensibilities. One of my all-time favorite sci-fi films is Dark City, a movie rarely mentioned by either movie buffs (of which I am one, I guess) or sci-fi buffs (of which I am not one, I know). Not only did Ebert love the film, he analyzed the film shot-by-shot for four days at a film festival.
So maybe I'm not giving some of these movies a chance - after all I have not seen on of the forty-seven movies. I just can't come up with any desire to see, say, Bee Season (four stars from Ebert, 55/100 from Metacritic). I did admit I'm cranky, but come on - Richard Gere plus spelling bees cannot possibly equal a good night out at the movies, can it?
Posted by Joel at 1/13/2006 07:47:00 PM
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