| Thanks to this "information age" media pundits love to talk about, movie fans have never had it so good. Or so it would seem.
Wondering what to catch tonight at the Globe or the nearest Famous Players multi-screen palace? Just go to www.mrqe.com (Move Review Query Engine) and scan what a couple of dozen professional critics think of the new releases. Or simply Google a film title and behold all that springs up, including postings by amateur reviewers with time on their hands.
Consider what’s out there about a current release, The Missing. I liked director Ron Howard’s tale of a homesteading mother’s search for a daughter kidnapped by renegade Apaches.
But Walter Chaw of Film Freak Central (www.filmfreakcentral.net) hated it. You can almost hear him throwing up (that clickable audio option will probably come later this year).
Andrea Chase of Killer Movie Reviews (www.killermoviereviews.com) thought The Missing was pretty good and Filmtracks’s (www.filmtracks.com) Christian Clemmensen was ready to hand it an armful of Oscars on the spot.
Celebrity critic Roger Ebert wasn’t quite gagging, but his thumb jerked downward. Hollywood Report Card’s (www.rossanthony.com) Ross Anthony delivered an angst-ridden verdict that was kinda positive but rated the film one star out of four. Huh?
Maybe you’re just curious about a suddenly hot director’s track record or where you’ve seen that actress who played the lead’s cousin in the teen romance on TV last night. Search the movie title for the cast list and take it from there.
And no movie storyline ever fails to be summarized if you’ve got a modem.
Some of this crossed my mind as I first sat through the trailer for The Italian Job early last summer, a little steamed because the entire plot was being blown before my eyes. When I later attended The Italian Job, I decided it was indeed a good caper movie and, yes, the trailer had ruined it by accurately telegraphing all the best parts including the ending.
Then the probable reason sunk in. This sort of suspense-wrecking advance publicity would have been unheard of just a few years ago. Why it’s happening now can only be explained as a desperate reaction by a film industry trying to compete with the Internet.
If we don’t tell you ahead of time exactly why and how Mark Wahlberg and Charlize Theron vengefully conspire to destroy Edward Norton, someone out in cyberspace will anyway, the studios seem to be saying. Besides, it’s based on a 1969 film of the same name (I confirmed the date on the Internet) starring Michael Caine, so it’s all public domain anyway, right?
Getting back to my opening premise, I’d say all this information – which is growing more abundant every day – is wonderful, but it pays to have a strategy. Like sticking with a handful of critics and ignoring the rest. Speed-reading 50 reviews of a movie before heading out can leave you more confused than ever.
Also, too much advance web-cruising guarantees you’ll stumble across a movie’s ending. Some writers slap a "spoiler" tag on their review, but not all of them.
On the plus side, a movie can trigger a romp through several websites full of trivia you can impressively slide into conversations. Did you know that in The Missing, Tommy Lee Jones fluently speaks the Chiricahua dialect of Apache?
Sometimes information just lands on you the old-fashioned way. My wife, descended from pioneer Alberta ranchers, spotted Kevin Costner herding white cattle in the Old West movie Open Range and informed me and a few people seated around us, "They didn’t import Charolais into the States till the 1930s!" (I later Googled the breed. She was right, as usual.)
Yet, too much foraging for historical context, to cite another Internet use, threatens your fun quotient. Remember, we’re talking about entertainment, not a semester in film studies.
So if any movie-fan resolutions are in order as we enter 2004, maybe this one is worth bearing in mind: Let’s lighten up.
Let’s try breaking the computer habit at least once a month and make a movie choice for a reason that was good enough for several generations of film fans – because it’s got a really cool poster. |
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