Blamblog - Brett Lamb's Blog

Thursday, January 08, 2009

I Gotta Bad Case of Lovin' (Bad) Reviews

This afternoon, while I was out getting dog food, I saw the new issue of NOW sitting on the stands and the cover announced that Norman Wilner was going to take on his critics and I thought, "It's on!" Get ready for a scrap!

Last month, Wilner gave Toronto Stories a lousy, single "N" review. This prompted reactions on the NOW website accusing Wilner of being 'too harsh' and not supportive of the local film industry in comments like this:

Every movie that gets made, every last one, is a little miracle, and that should at least be celebrated, seeing as our local "industry" is a pale shadow of what it could be, thanks to 'critics' like this.

I did a little work on that movie (right back to the cover art for the funding proposal) and while I think Wilner's review is off, I also disagree with some sentiments in the comments. I don't think that local critics 'support' local work by soft-peddling their reviews. Every last local film is not a little miracle -- images from Bon Cop, Bad Cop aren't about to start appearing on pieces of toast -- and the best way for local critics to support local work is by doing their job and being critical. The problem with Wilner's review is not that it's harsh, it's that it's not really a critical review.

I love mean reviews (not so much when they're directed at me), from the old PC Gamer reviews of terrible video games to the X-Entertainment reviews of Corey Haim videos. I discovered harsh reviews one day as a kid while leafing through an issue of People while waiting at the doctor's office to have a case of poison ivy corrected. Inside the issue were short reviews of movies, tv and music and the meanest reviews were the funniest. A few years later I got the same buzz reading William Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade. Near the end of the book, George Roy Hill tears into a short script Goldman created as an example and Hill is funny and harsh ... but not personal. He's being critical but it's in the service of the work. I once had a TA who would declare over and over, "being critical is not an anti-social activity."

Reviews of bad movies give the reviewer an opportunity to have some fun and that disappointed me about Wilner's review: it's not harsh, it's feeble. He lists the actors, he lists the directors, he says they suck. Yawn. If you go and read more of Wilner's reviews, you find that they're all laundry lists. There's no passion for exploring anything beyond some particulars that he declares either good or bad. Instead of simply pronoucing judgement on cast & crew, a decent Toronto Stories single 'N' review would spend at least one paragraph trying to get at one core reason why the critic thinks the movie doesn't work ... and one paragraph on mean jokes.

So, back to today's issue ... I reckoned that Wilner was going to hit back and hit back hard. Okay Wilner ... STRIKE:

As for the idea that I – or this newspaper – should champion alternative local film just because it’s alternative and local, well, we’re going to run into some problems there. I’m a movie critic, not a publicist; when a movie is good, I’ll say so, and when a movie sucks, well, I have to say that, too.

And you know what the job of a poo snooper is? THEY SNOOP FOR POOP. Given the opportunity to make an intelligent point about the role of the critic, that's all Wilner could come up with. No mention of his role being anything beyond declaring something either "good or "bad". What's sad is that Wilner doesn't imagine himself as part of a process to make better Canadian films and that's a shame, because that's a stand he could have taken in his column. Instead, he spends eight paragraphs poop snooping around the fact that he views being critical as an anti-social activity.

You could make a good case (but nobody did ... except for me, right now) for local critics to be a little gentler on Canadian films. The movies that arrive here from other countries do not represent the full range of films that are produced worldwide. Other countries produce a lot of crap that never ends up here ... so local films usually end up competing against the best from other countries and our expectations are shaped by that. We think Canadian films 'suck' because we only measure them against the world's best.

Of course, I wouldn't argue that, it's stupid. Wilner's critics' energy would be better spent railing against the things that do conspire to make Canadian films mediocre such as the wet blankets government and corporate funding groups pile on top of filmmakers and the tendency to ape Hollywood conventions that results in crap like Bon Cop, Bad Cop (the most conventially-American Canadian film ever made) and Passchendaele. And Wilner could give them the ammo by examining what's wrong with films instead of just pronouncing "good", "bad", "good", "bad", "good", "bad" ...

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