No Movie Monday this week on account of the car being in the shop and no word as of yet on when it will be finished. That’s okay; I was struggling with whether I wanted to do it this week anyway. My main choice was probably The Green Lantern, but it’s gotten pretty negative reviews, so I wasn’t sure I wanted to see it in the theaters anyway. Next week I’ll return to it.
Since you asked my opinion, here it is: take a few days and read a bunch of reviews of movies you’ve already seen by a bunch of different critics. Find a critic who likes the same movies you do, read him or her, and ignore the rest. Professional critics don’t judge on quality anymore. Instead, because they see 1800 movies each year, they look for something new and different, rather than just plain enjoyable.
Case in point: Roger Ebert once wrote that Pan’s Labyrinth was the “best” film of the 2000s. (He might have called it his “favorite,” which was just him being honest.) On the basis of that, I rented it and watched it. Now, I’m not an academic in film studies, so if, by “best,” Ebert means “highest quality,” I have no feet to stand on. But I can tell you that, for me, it wasn’t even the most enjoyable film of 2006. I mean, that year gave us A Scanner Darkly, The Holiday, The Devil Wears Prada, Thank You for Smoking, Stranger than Fiction, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, The Prestige, Little Miss Sunshine, and (my favorite) Wristcutters: A Love Story. I’m not saying those movies are “better”; I’m just saying that I like them more and would be more likely to watch them again.
For my money, some of the best “critics” in the game are the Redbox critics. I haven’t read them much in the past few months, but they were never focused on calling movies “good” or “bad,” but instead saying which ones they liked or didn’t like. I like that kind of honesty.