I hate reading film reviews. I feel hypocritical and sort of sleazy as I divulge this to you now, but let's be honest—so many of them say the same thing. They tell me, the reader, exactly what the critic knows (which is far more than I know, of course) and then assume a condescending tone which tells me exactly how I should feel when exiting the theater.
This column is meant to address the men and women who get paid large sums of money to spew all over this decade's latest ""Superman"" installment. In no way does any of this apply to The Daily Cardinal, because when you work for free, you pretty much want every movie not to suck. There lies a foundation for true lack of bias.
Moving on, most critics agree with each other, which makes me think they're either robots, feeding off early reviews and/or biased colleagues. Only sometimes are movies judged on the scale they were obviously built to sit on. ""Music and Lyrics,"" for example, was actually given some pretty decent words this week. But in many other cases, any movie with less punch-me-in-the-face-with-amazingness than ""Million Dollar Baby"" is exiled to the realm of one and two star ratings.
Romantic comedies and action films almost always suffer from such unprecedented bias. Because these two genres seem to run in trends (movies about a comet hitting the earth, movies starring Sandra Bullock and/or Hugh Grant), many critics instantly maintain they all look the same. Essentially, the movie theater has become a battlefield for moneymaking and critical haters.
What happened to simply enjoying a film for what it is? And why does everything have to be as good as ""Annie Hall"" to catch a break in this industry? These are the questions I want to address in my columns for the next few weeks. I like to think of it as my ""Critics Suck"" trilogy. That could just be because I've always wanted to create a trilogy, but come on, who doesn't?
Anyway, as one of my former editors knows quite well and loves to make fun of me for, I pretty much loved ""The Day After Tomorrow."" It could be that I watched a lot of ""Buffy"" as a teenager and somehow became obsessed with weird apocalypses. I don't really know. But I found it entertaining. I cannot, for the life of me, understand what people find so humorous about Jake Gyllenhaal almost dying of hypothermia. I probably cried.
Meanwhile, Rolling Stone gave it one star. Los Angeles Times called it ""two parts 1970s disaster flick, one part cable television meltdown."" The Onion—well, the Onion did what it usually does and pooped right on its front porch. I can't understand why so many critics felt the need to treat this movie like a neck boil. Unless I recently became insane, I seem to recall some pretty amazing special effects floating around in ""The Day After Tomorrow.""
Also, for a premise based entirely upon geological impossibilities, the suspense is quite maddening. I always love it when critics hate on movies for using scientifically impossible events to build a plot. Am I high, or aren't movies supposed to be sources of fiction? This brings me to M. Night Shyamalan, who, consequently, I won't get to until next week.
But now to my point: A film should always be judged for the purpose it is trying to serve. Did that romantic comedy make me happy? Yes or no. Did that apocalyptic science fiction thriller excite and madden me with suspense? Yes or no. In the character drama I just saw, did the people change? Yes or no. I will be addressing this more in my next two columns. Stay tuned.
