Do movie critics these days suffer from a fatal disconnect with the vast majority of moviegoers? Do we tend to exalt the obscure, while ignoring and downplaying movies mainstream audiences pay lots of money to see?
It’s an unfair question, but one that is so often asked, it deserves an answer — especially now, the time of year when critics take stock of the previous 12 months, compile their “best” lists and hand out awards while pundits begin to mull over possible Oscar nominees.
Scan the lists on this page. With your money, you voted for blockbusters such as “Spider-Man,” “Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones,” “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,” “Signs,” “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” and both “Lord of the Rings” movies. The critics? With our reviews and stories, we voted for “Far From Heaven,” “About Schmidt,” “Adaptation,” “The Pianist” and the major crossover film, “Lord of the Rings.” Are movie critics that out of touch with the public? Is that necessarily bad? And if so, should average moviegoers or Oscar voters pay any attention to this deluge of critical voting, rehashing and listmaking?
Looking over the lists of movies anointed by the critics so far, compared with 2002’s top grossing box-office hits, you can understand why some observers — especially movie studio and marketing executives and their cronies — become exasperated. After lavishing hundreds of millions of dollars on huge super-productions, media blitzes and mammoth ad campaigns, they have to fathom why a group of cranky critics (who earn far less than they do) have the nerve to prefer an imitation ’50s soap opera such as “Far From Heaven,” a bawdy oddity from Mexico such as “Y Tu Mama Tambien” or an oldster’s road movie such as “About Schmidt” to certified mega-blockbusters like “Star Wars II,” “Harry Potter” or “Austin Powers in Goldmember” — all of which were indifferently reviewed.
An acid-tongue statement of the classic marketing exec position came recently from Peter Bart, editor of the movie industry trade publication Variety (which gets its vast majority of ads from movie studios). In a strident column titled “Nix to the Crix,” Bart argued that audiences and the industry should, and do, ignore critics — apparently forgetting that much of his newspaper is taken up with reviews and that many of his employees are critics.
Little as I think of Bart’s tirade, I have to admit he has one point: Critics do tend to favor less obviously popular movies. There’s a reason. We know that we may be the last line of defense for a film or filmmaker without the huge financial resources conferred by Bart’s good buddies and “Nix crix” sources, the “top studio ad execs.” With one article or review, we can sometimes help those movies immeasurably — and we often treasure the chance. Most full-time movie critics see more than 300 new movies a year, most of them, unfortunately, are bad. When something fresh and exciting comes along, it excites us and hopefully, it shows in what we write.
That impulse isn’t bad, and I think every moviemaker who strives for quality knows it. But at the same time, knowing the obvious blockbusters will thunder along without us, we occasionally don’t give them their due. Critics are sometimes less ready to leap to the aid of movies such as “Spider-Man” that they know already have a huge built-in audience.
That’s a mistake — a common one among movie critics — but not a destructive one. After all, audiences will always find their way to the most popular, highly advertised movies, but not necessarily to the gems with lower budgets and lesser profiles.
Bart is wrong anyway. Oscar voters do pay attention to critics and their opinions and always have — as do audiences. In its Jan. 17 issue, “Entertainment Weekly,” one of the more accurate recent Oscar nominee prognosticators, lists 11 best picture Oscar contenders, and eight of EW’s picks are also among the top 11 films in moviecitynews.com’s scoreboard of this year’s top-10 critics’ lists — including all six designated front-runners (“Chicago,” “The Hours,” Gangs of New York,” “Two Towers,” “The Pianist” and “Far from Heaven.”)
Just as tellingly, the EW list of Oscar front-runners includes only two films mentioned in Variety’s chart of 2002’s top-grossing films: “Two Towers” (currently No. 6) and “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” (No. 4). But that squares pretty well with the recent history of Oscar winners — heavy on critical favorites (such as “American Beauty,” “Shakespeare in Love” and “A Beautiful Mind”) and lighter on blockbusters (with the exception of 1997’s “Titanic”).
That wasn’t always so. In the past, future classics such as “Gone With the Wind” (the most popular movie of the 1930s), “The Best Years of Our Lives” (the most popular of the ’40s’) and “The Godfather” (the all-time box-office champ through 1975) amassed heavy audience and critical support on their roads to best picture Oscars. But the studios don’t tend much any more to lavish mammoth budgets on serious, high quality or weighty films, unless it’s a heavily pre-sold property like the “Lord of the Rings” series or a longtime labor of love by an actor or filmmaker with clout, like “A.I.” or “Gangs of New York.”
This year’s top two hits, “Spider-Man” and “Star Wars II,” both of which I enjoyed, are family-oriented fantasies unlikely to follow in the footsteps of “The Godfather” — and I can’t imagine anyone, even their makers, getting upset by the almost certain exclusion from the best picture race of big 2002 grossers (and critical duds) like “Men in Black II” or “Scooby-Doo.”
That same moviecitynews.com scoreboard lists only three $100 million plus grossers among its critics’ top 20: “Two Towers,” “Minority Report” and “Road to Perdition” (though more may emerge later). So, where does that leave the average moviegoer? Is the moviegoer being ignored by both the Oscar voters and the critics? Not necessarily — because the Oscar-winners, most of them critical favorites, may end up radically improving their grosses and a number of the smaller critical hits are actually, compared to their budgets, bigger moneymakers and crowd-pleasers than the bloated-budget extravaganzas.
The “disconnect” isn’t as great as Bart or his ilk seem to think or like to pretend. This year, the top-20 moneymakers included critical favorites “The Two Towers,” “Ice Age,” “Minority Report” and “The Bourne Identity” and last year’s top-10 grossers included critics’ hits “Fellowship of the Ring,” “Shrek” and “Monsters, Inc.” Scan over the last decade or so, and you’ll always see a number of critics’ pets and prize-winners among the biggest grossers, from “Cast Away” and “The Sixth Sense” to “Toy Story 2” and “Saving Private Ryan.”
What critics try to locate and celebrate is something mass audiences aren’t immediately drawn to: a movie’s lasting aesthetic achievements and moral temper. Those aren’t qualities you can easily sell on TV — but film history proves conclusively that the movies that do last are always a mixture of the big popular favorites and other, smaller films that may have been passed by at first.
Would audiences, in the end, really prefer that we changed our tune and began trashing the little movies, ridiculing foreign art films and savaging all the indies, while hailing the virtues of “Scooby-Doo,” “Charlie’s Angels,” “Armageddon” and “Pearl Harbor”? Some reviewers — usually the most ignorant or insecure — do just that. But the greatest movie critics, I think, are often the ones such as James Agee, Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris, who can see and communicate the virtues in every kind of movie — not just the little ones and not just the ones that cost $100 million to make.
In the end, the most important role for a critic is that he or she operate outside of the moviemaking system and free of its pressures. If we were part of the system, what good would we be as consumer guides?
We may react too strongly against hype and we may get frustrated at the way studio executives target young viewers and the lowest common denominator — with big ad budgets that pull in massive audiences before bad word-of-mouth gets out.
In almost every other art or entertainment form, from literature to painting to theater, it’s understood that there are popular works and critics’ works — and no one insists that they always have to be one and the same. But, in movies, as in pop music and television, critics can actually be subject to derision for not constantly sharing mass taste — or, more accurately, for not being reliable partners in the biggest and most expensive ad campaigns. Perhaps that’s because our opinions really do count.
We tracked the top grossing movies released in 2002 as well as how often movies appear on a random sampling of 130 movie critics’ lists. There’s little crossover between the movies that draw large audiences and those praised by reviewers.
Audiences flock to tepidly-reviewed blockbusters . . .
%% RANKED BY BOX OFFICE GROSS 2002 BOX OFFICE NO. TOP 10 LISTS
1) Spider-Man $404m 12
2) Star Wars: Episode II $310m 2
Attack of the Clones
3) Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets $242m 0
4) Signs $228m 4
5) My Big Fat Greek Wedding $223m 1
6) Austin Powers in Goldmember $213m 0
7) Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers $210m 48
8) Men in Black II $190m 0
9) Ice Age $176m 4
10) Scooby-Doo $153m 0
. . . while critics bestow praise on little-seen movies
RANKED BY TOP 10 BOX OFFICE NO. TOP
LIST APPEARANCES TO DATE 10 LISTS
1) Far From Heaven $12.7m 74
2) Y Tu Mama Tambien $13.6m 59
3) Talk To Her $3.4m 54
4) Adaptation $12.3m 54
5) About Schmidt $31.3m 53
6) Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers $301m 48
7) Chicago $30.4m 44
8) The Pianist $4.4m 41
9) Gangs of New York $61.8m 40
10) Spirited Away $5.5m 39
Sources: moviecitynews.com, imdbpro.com
Chicago Tribune
%%
Critics’ favorites vary: There is often little consensus on which movie deserves top honors.
The chart below lists a sampling of 30 critics and other organizations and their picks for 2002’s best movie.
BOSTON FILM CRITICS: The Pianist
SAN FRANCISCO FILM CRITICS: The Pianist
LOS ANGELES FILM CRITICS: About Schmidt
NEW YORK FILM CRITICS: Far From Heaven
CHICAGO FILM CRITICS: Far From Heaven
NATIONAL SOCIETY OF FILM CRITICS: The Pianist
NATIONAL BOARD OF REVIEW: The Hours
GOLDEN GLOBES (dagger) : Chicago, The Hours
DAVID EDELSTEIN, SLATE: The Pianist
RICHARD SCHICKEL, TIME: Talk to Her
PETER TRAVERS, ROLLING STONE: Gangs of New York
LISA SCHWARZBAUM, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: About Schmidt
OWEN GLEIBERMAN, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Talk to Her
JOANNA CONNORS, CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER: Y Tu Mama Tambien
CHRISTOPHER KELLY, FORT WORTH STAR-TELEGRAM: Y Tu Mama Tambien
KENNETH TURAN, LOS ANGELES TIMES*: Bloody Sunday, Spirited Away
MANOHLA DARGIS, LOS ANGELES TIMES: About Schmidt
MIKE CLARK, USA TODAY: Chicago
JOE MORGENSTERN, WALL STREET JOURNAL: Talk to Her
ANDREW SARRIS, NEW YORK OBSERVER: Adaptation
JAMI BERNARD, NEW YORK DAILY NEWS: Far From Heaven
JOHN ANDERSON, NEWSDAY: Talk to Her
STEPHEN HOLDEN, NEW YORK TIMES: Talk to Her
DAVID KEHR, NEW YORK TIMES:: Spirited Away
A.O. SCOTT, NEW YORK TIMES: Talk to Her
ELVIS MITCHELL, NEW YORK TIMES: Bloody Sunday
JONATHAN ROSENBAUM, CHICAGO READER: Corpus Callosum
ROGER EBERT, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES: Minority Report
MARK CARO, CHICAGO TRIBUNE: Bloody Sunday
MICHAEL WILMINGTON, CHICAGO TRIBUNE: The Pianist
Source: moviecitynews.com
*split vote for top movie (dagger) two categories for top movie (drama, comedy/musical)
%% TOP MOVIE PICKS
The Pianist 5
Talk to Her 5
Far From Heaven 4
About Schmidt 3
Bloody Sunday 3
Chicago 2
The Hours 2
Spirited Away 2
Y Tu Mama Tambien 2
Adaptation 1
Corpus Callosum 1
Gangs of New York 1
Minority Report 1
%%
