Yesterday I wrote about “Good Night and Good Luck,” George Clooney’s new movie about Edward R. Murrow, CBS and Senator Joseph McCarthy. Neither Helaine nor I thought it was particularly good. That probably guarantees it a best picture Oscar!
Friends and acquaintances have written to tell me how much they disagree. Was I the only person to pan the picture?
I went “googling” to try and find a legitimate negative review. Interestingly, the first I found (the vast majority of reviews were very positive) disliked the movie for many of the same reasons I did.
I have no clue who the reviewer, Phil Hall, is – but here’s his review.
This whole thing reminds me of a Mary Tyler Moore episode. Murray gets involved with a play, which opens to a horrendous review in the paper. After some research, Mary finds this guy also panned My Fair Lady, among others.
Recently, we have also disliked Lost in Translation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Both of those were warmly embraced by ‘real’ critics.
Lost in Translation was unwatchable. I went to see a production of Moliere’s play The Miser today at the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego that received rave notices from reviewers and left well before the intermission. Film and theatre critics are almost all “reviewers,” people with perhaps some journalism training but with no special knowledge or insight into the art form they review. In fact, many newspapers (such as the N.Y. Times) and television stations have a policy of hiring only the untrained as reviewers. Real film and theatre critics — that is, people with a sophisticated knowledge of (and maybe even experience in) the art form are extremely rare. You probably know as much about movies as most movie “critics.” You just don’t have to sit so through as many awful films and suffer the mind numbing brain rot that years of bad movie watching is sure to induce.