Midweek Update: Critical Misconceptions

Yesterday morning, my pal Josh linked to me an interesting Guardian article by Manuela Lazic about how Warner Bros. did its level best to push away as many critics as possible from Barbie in favor of influencers. I saw this locally with an influencer screening of Barbie next door to my press screening of Haunted Mansion, as well as the following night when the press screening of Barbie was set against the press screening of Oppenheimer, which had saved the date weeks before. It was the studio basically shrugging and saying, “Well, we tried to show it to critics,” except they didn’t—which is odd, because the film is sitting pretty at an 88% on Rotten Tomatoes from critics who did see it.

Why did Warner Bros. work so hard to hide Barbie from critics and instead leap into the arms of influencers? As Lazic’s article notes, influencers are default positive. They see themselves as partners in promotion, and their sunny dispositions on social media are perfect for connecting with younger audiences who may not read a written review but will trust their favorite online personality. That’s not to say that all influencers are dishonest, but they have different incentives because without a publication for payment, their livelihood depends on positive relationships with brands. Even if no money changes hands, it allows an influencer to have a major company like Warner Bros. put their imprimatur on an influencer’s account, noting them as someone with so large a following that they demand the attention of a multi-billion dollar company.

The other side of this coin is the ongoing misperception of the role of critics. It’s easy to see critics as Anton Ego (Peter O’Toole) from the Pixar film Ratatouille—snobby, aloof, and so impressed with their own critical prowess and power that they’ve forgotten why they do the job in the first place.1 I’ll admit: critics are different, but not quite in this way. Critics, by the nature of the job, have to do more legwork than the average viewer. I’ll use movies here since that’s the world I know, but I imagine it’s similar for music, cuisine, etc.

It’s not that critics are snobs or that they hate everything; it’s that they have to see so much more stuff. The casual filmgoer simply goes to see movies they think look interesting. The critic has to see things they sometimes don’t want to see (I have seen all but one of the Transformers movies; I have no love for the Transformers franchise). Furthermore, the critic, in order to make their deadline, has to submit to the studio’s schedule. Don’t want to spend your Tuesday night seeing The Flash? Too bad! That’s the job.

And that’s the thing: it’s a job. Some may say that this makes all critics irrelevant since they have lost touch with how the average person sees a movie, but the whole reasons we trust critics is their level of expertise and ability to see things that the average person might miss. For some, looking at what a critic thinks may dampen their enjoyment. “Let people enjoy things” is a common refrain, as if engaging with film wasn’t a form of enjoyment in and of itself.

If you work off the stereotypes that critics are nothing but a bunch of cynical grumps (and some are, but most aren’t), then you miss that critics tend to have not only varied tastes, but valuable insights that do more than shout the party line or feed the outrage machine (sadly, the Internet encourages both extremes, which leaves all nuanced takes struggling for oxygen). Moreover, this stereotype leads you to assume that critics are nothing more than a closed off fraternity looking to downvote anything that isn’t Citizen Kane. To be fair, many stereotypes do start with a kernel of reality, and this one comes from the fact that for a long time, newspaper critics tended to be older white guys (because that’s who primarily got hired for prestigious jobs across the professional spectrum).2 Those guys had their preferences, and they also tended to look down on movies with broad popular appeal, such as horror films and goofy blockbusters.

You can see the reverberations of that today, when studios don’t bother screening horror films for critics—or with Barbie, which isn't a bad film by any stretch, but Warner Bros. worried (wrongly) that critics were too stuffy to give the film a fair shake. But I’ve met a lot of critics over the years, and I can’t think of any that went into a movie with an agenda. They may be predisposed due to marketing, the talent involved, the premise, etc., but they try to go in with an open mind and the hope of seeing something good. Even something that looks like disastrous, like Cats, we’re hoping to be entertained, even if it may not be in the way the director intended. The influencer, however, does have an agenda, because they’re looking ahead to the next promotion opportunity. The critic has to be comfortable in the knowledge that a negative review won’t impact invites to future screenings, and if they do cease to be invited, that won't stop them from reviewing movies even if they have to pay for a ticket.

When a movie is getting critically thrashed, talent will like to say something along the lines of, “We made this for the fans, not the critics,” which is a pretty backhanded way of defending your own work: “We made this for people who would watch it uncritically and like it regardless.” Of course, this misses that film critics are cinema’s biggest fans. They’re the ones trudging out to see movies they don’t want to see, trying to find an interesting angle to approach writing about them, and doing it in a marketplace that has never been remotely lucrative for their work.

If the studios shut down all lines of communication to critics—no more screenings, no more interviews—critics would still see movies and talk about them, because that’s their passion. I don’t know if I could say the same for influencers.

Recommendations

Mimic isn’t my favorite Guillermo del Toro movie, but it’s a fascinating entry in his filmography and shows his rough entry into Hollywood filmmaking on the account of the studio messing with his vision. What makes this disc worth purchasing is that del Toro has a commentary track where he openly talks about the ways the studio tried to butcher his film and his attempts to keep his picture intact. The Blu-ray is on sale at Amazon for only $9.

I’ve recommended Dave Chen’s Decoding Everything before, and will likely do so again because I love his insights. I particularly enjoyed this piece about how Marvel paid $212 million for the Disney+ series Secret Invasion, a show that landed with a very big thud because, in a development that any sensible person could have told you, increasing output led to shortfalls in quality.

What I’m Watching

I can’t believe how much I enjoyed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. I should have known better since the film was directed by Jeff Rowe, who also directed the terrific The Mitchells vs. The Machines. The film takes the simple concept of emphasizing the “Teenage” part of the title, which all other adaptations have missed! Getting the Turtles to act like teenagers (and voiced by actual teenagers) gives the film a spark from which everything else works. The film is funny, heartwarming, and makes the group feel like endearing characters rather than the brand exercise of the last two Ninja Turtles movies.

I feel like one of the lessons of both Barbie and Ninja Turtles this summer is you can have a movie that deals with real emotions (fear of death, fear of isolation—or, you know, the fallout of COVID that we’re trying to race past in an attempt to reclaim a semblance of normalcy) but still be funny and colorful. I feel like the grittiness a lot of blockbusters aimed for after The Dark Knight has fallen away completely, and that’s for the best. You can have dramatic heft without sacrificing levity.

What I’m Reading

I’m currently making my way through Katherine Orrison’s Written in Stone, which is about the making of Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 version of The Ten Commandments. It’s fascinating to learn about how DeMille and his crew tackled this old-fashioned epic, and I like the constant subtext from the participants about how moviemaking changed so drastically from them until the time of the book’s publishing in the late 90s. A worthwhile read even if you’re not a die-hard Ten Commandments fan.

In other reads:

How ‘Barbie’ Skewered the Sensitive-Bro Silliness of Matchbox Twenty’s ‘Push’ by Tim Grierson [Cracked] - I decided to wait a week on sharing this one so I didn’t spoil one of Barbie’s best jokes. I love how Grierson goes deep not only on the song’s origins, but how Gerwig uses it in the movie not to mock the song so much but to demonstrate how toxic dudes fail to understand the difference between a love song and an abuse song.

My Impossible Mission to Find Tom Cruise by Caity Weaver [The New York Times] - While the framing of the story is a little silly (“I’m gonna find out where Tom Cruise lives!”), I think it touches on how Cruise’s stardom exists in opposition to how we traditionally see stars today. Whereas other movie stars want to emphasize their authenticity and their ordinary lives, Cruise has blocked off his personal life so that the only Cruise that really exits in the public’s mind is the one who does death-defying stunts in blockbusters. While I understand Cruise wanting to avoid the press since opening up about his personal life has repeatedly blown back on him (even without the Scientology stuff, being a celebrity in the public eye seems unpleasant at best), it has also boxed him in. The Cruise of today now seems so rigid that even him eating popcorn seems robotic.

"They need us. We don't need them:" The fall of Twitter is making the trolls and grifters desperate by Amanda Marcotte [Salon] - As I noted in my Substack this past Sunday, Musk remaking Twitter into a right-wing website was essentially an attempt to lock Twitter’s existing audience into a right-wing social media platform rather than building that platform from scratch. As is often the case, Musk miscalculated. Users have fled Twitter for other platforms and now he and the trolls are now trying to own a decreasing number of libs.

What I’m Hearing

This is my current ear worm. I don’t hate having it stuck in my head because it makes me want to dance.

What I’m Playing

I did it. On Monday, I finally beat The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. I completed all 152 shrines, maxed out the Hylian Armor, and had no problem taking down Ganondorf. There’s still plenty I could do in terms of side quests, exploration, etc., but I’m kind of itching to finish up Hitman on PS5, so I’m probably going to dive back into that.

As for TOTK, while I understand the criticism that it’s simply an expansion of Breath of the Wild, I think that’s selling the game short. To start, I liked that the landmass was the same because it created a sense of familiarity and continuity that made the sequel more inviting. I also feel like that while I liked the exploration of BOTW, I didn’t mind the engineering of TOTK even if I could never create the incredible machines of other players. But more than anything, I just like being in this particular world. It’s beautifully rendered and runs perfectly. Where other AAA games feel plagued by glitches and hampered to meet release dates, TOTK is what I want games to be: finished and polished. I’m not paying $70 to start a series of other transactions with the promise that one day the game will work. Instead, I got a terrific experience and if it takes another 7 years for the next Zelda game, so be it. Nintendo has shown that these are worth the wait.