Dark Screens!

Why It Matters to Viewers

By Ian Grey

It's 1998, a plush Manhattan screening room. Along with professional critics, the invited audience is culled from the newly emerged nerdy ranks of the dot-com-boom technorati. The film industry is doing boffo business, thanks in part to the free publicity provided by Internet pundits, while a terrific economy runs a cheerful surplus.

Onto the room's stage bounds producer Joel Silver. Although many of his new movie's effects are not yet completed, he trusts that this crowd will get it anyway and spread the word. After The Matrix plays, his gamble is paid in full.

Flash forward to December, 2005. Another CGI-packed, sci-fi movie aimed at the geek contingency. Dot-com is dead, the economy is running a $400 billion deficit, the Internet is poised on being privatized by a regime defined by secrecy, spin and information control. The movie being screened is Paramount Pictures' $60 million, Charlize Theron-starring Aeon Flux ...

Well, actually, it isn't being screened. For anyone. Flux's all-important opening weekend passes, unencumbered by critical remark. About four months later, it's released to DVD, with critical reaction long forgotten.

The practice of studios hiding their garbage from critical view—what, in homage to director Karyn Kusama's no-worse-than-usual actioner, we suggest be termed "fluxing"—is at present limited to genre movies. Lionsgate's See No Evil, Screen Gems' Underworld: Evolution and When a Stranger Calls and Sony's Ultraviolet (now available on DVD!) were all 2006 press no-shows. Lousy niche-market comedies such as The Benchwarmers, Date Movie, Doogal, Grandma's Boy and Phat Girlz were also fluxed. Among current films being released sans critical scrutiny are Dimension Films' remake of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's classic Pulse and Sony's X-Men/Sky High mash-up Zoom.

The Flux gambit is the logical extension of night-before-release screenings of low-expectation movies that make it difficult for daily papers to compose thought-out reviews and impossible for weekly reviewers to meet deadlines. All of which piss editors off—which, once upon a time, was something studio publicity departments tried not to do.

But in the context of a clutch of media providers essentially owning American cinema and much of the media that reports on it, making total information control an easy reality, and the increasing arrogance of studio publicity, Aeon Flux proved a tipping point, such an in-your-face piss-off that critics complained in their reviews: See the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Boston Globe and even The Hollywood Reporter.

To which you might be wondering, So what? Well, three things: 1. Movies are expensive and getting more so. Factor in concessions and transportation and you're talking about a couple paying nearly $50 for two hours of possible amusement. 2. As Salon.com's Stephanie Zacharek notes, "Critics are the only thing standing between consumers and advertising." 3. That, whether it's politics or entertainment, incredibly expensive advertising and publicity comes between what is and what others want you to know.

And who's paying for it? You are.

As of the start of 2006, box-office gross was down 3.5 percent from 2003. This year's summer blockbusters like Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, X-Men: The Last Stand and The Da Vinci Code cut those three-year losses to 1.84 percent ... but the year isn't over yet. And, needless to say, a few individual products do not an industry make. However, over the same three-year period, attendance dropped 7.78 percent. These losses are explained in part by ticket price, up approximately 8 percent since 2003.

And so the cineplex viewer is also unwittingly subsidizing theatrical distribution for what it is rapidly becoming: an advertising platform for a movie's later DVD, cable and satellite releases.

It's also reasonable to assume that the purchase of those increasingly pricey theater tickets will help cover the millions added to each movie's total cost so as to support exciting innovations in studio publicity, such as online and cell-phone ads. Increasingly, your ticket dollar also covers visual plugs for other studio product, as manifested by the mysterious video store in Miramax's Jersey Girl that apparently only stocked Miramax films. This is in addition to ubiquitous product placement, often for consumables also owned by a film's parent company, and which amounts to nothing less than paying for commercials.

Meanwhile, film journalists, like the journalism profession in general, have earned public mistrust with their eagerness to praise mediocrity, and their paralyzing fear of losing access to all-expenses-paid junkets featuring stars tutored in parroting publicity's party line.

All of which has led to, as New York Press critic Armond White noted in 2003, "The current lunatic notion that film journalists are part of the movie industry, rather than unbiased reporters, commentators, watchdogs. You know, critics." White's assertion has again been underlined by New Line's fluxing of Snakes on a Plane, whose monumental Internet pre-release buzz rendered the need for critical props moot.

If a movie—and nearly 700 of them were released to theaters last year—doesn't clean up in the first weekend, it's soon yanked to make room for the next contender. Meanwhile, the gap between theatrical and DVD release is shrinking. This creates a need in the industry to convince folks to shell out $9 or more to see something now when they can wait a little while and pay $3 to rent it. In rushes publicity and out goes the only factor that might dissuade folks from such behavior: the press.

The discouraging thing is that it's working, as attested to by the respectable earnings enjoyed by semi- or fully fluxed genre films such as New Line's Final Destination 3 (which took in $19 million its opening weekend), the aforementioned When a Stranger Calls ($21.6 million) and Underworld: Evolution ($26.8 million) and Buena Vista's magnificently dire Stay Alive, which in one month turned an estimated $8 million investment into a $15 million return.

Adding more pressure to studio publicity's need to not let any negative word come between first-weekend product release and potential ticket buyers are smart folks willing and able to use emerging technology to replace a likely obsolescent production/release model.

ClickStar, a new venture just announced by actor Morgan Freeman and Intel, will allow low-cost film downloads. HDNet films, cofounded by dot-com billionaire Mark Cuban, is crafting an alternative to the studio system of controlled access as it produces low-cost high-definition features—among them, six promised films by Steven Soderbergh—exhibited in the companies' Landmark Theaters chain.

Then there's the rapidly approaching reality of "day-and-date" releasing, which means releasing films simultaneously across theatrical, television and home-video platforms. Which, along with those increasingly slim time margins between theatrical and DVD release, renders the need to actually go to a theater ever less pressing. Which makes studios even more compelled to do anything they can to lure audiences into paying top dollar for that opening weekend.

So expect more forced silence on the critical front. While film reviewers have always been limited in their ability to stop people from wasting good money on total junk, the difference is it's now a literal situation. Happy viewing, America.

Why It Kinda Doesn't

By Mike D'Angelo

At multiplexes around the country this weekend, a small and surpassingly nerdy army of the disgruntled will join avid fans of hilariously bad movies in long lines for Snakes on a Plane. You'll have no trouble identifying these sorry souls—they'll be the ones muttering darkly to themselves or their companions, small spiral notebooks tucked furtively beneath one arm. Please do your best not to point or stare. These are professional film critics, and they're unaccustomed to seeing movies on opening weekend, hip-to-hip with regular folks who weren't enticed to the theater via some sizzling-hot promotional giveaway on the local Top 40 station.

Though we're getting more and more accustomed to it every week. Snakes on a Plane is by no means the first movie this year to open without any advance screenings for the press—just the most eagerly anticipated. Granted, studios have always shoved brown paper bags over the heads of their worst stinkers, but until recently this amounted to only a tiny percentage of their output—generally low-budget horror films and comedies predicated on bodily fluids. Just lately, however, they've become emboldened. Hardly a week now passes without that little box explaining that the publication's review will run tomorrow, or in the next issue. And there's been a corresponding upswing in mournful and/or outraged think-pieces asserting that this trend represents the (umpteenth) death knell for film criticism. Do critics still "matter"?

Fact is, we never did—at least not when it comes to big, dumb, unapologetically populist flicks like Snakes on a Plane. And there's a simple reason for that: You don't pay any attention to us. Yeah, I'm talking to you. The one who's made it to paragraph three of this very article, and who fully intends to turn to the reviews immediately afterward. The one who's already chomping at the bit to see Half Nelson and 13 Tzameti, based solely on all the raves coming out of New York and LA. You just don't care. I say that without a trace of bitterness or rancor, truly. It's just a fact. And it means that what some testy critics, feeling spurned and irrelevant, have termed cowardice or obfuscation is really little more than sound, sensible business strategy.

I don't understand why Hollywood ever shows critics its blockbuster wannabes, frankly. Setting up press screenings is expensive and time-consuming, and there's no upside whatsoever, apart from keeping the critics happy so that we'll keep supporting their handful of hard-sell art films. Bad reviews might dissuade a few particularly malleable readers from taking a chance on the otherwise irresistible Phat Girlz or Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector, but no amount of raves will significantly boost the box office for Miami Vice or Superman Returns. People either want to see those movies or they don't. They may glance at the reviews out of curiosity, but even an overwhelming critical consensus isn't likely to alter their weekend plans.

And at the risk of permanently alienating all of my colleagues, I'll let you in on film criticism's dirty little secret: You're right to ignore us. We have no idea what we're talking about. As a consumer guide—which is how most people, including the writers and editors, tend to think of them—movie reviews are all but useless. Readers know this better than anyone. They quickly and correctly intuit that critics don't watch popcorn fare the same way civilians do. What they may not realize, though, is that this tendency has nothing whatsoever to do with our desire or willingness to be superficially entertained. It's strictly an occupational hazard: No human being, however complacent or shallow, can watch 300 movies a year without eventually growing numb to the conventional and formulaic. It's not that critics can't appreciate good mainstream thrill rides; we still get plenty excited when something like, say, Sam Raimi's Spider-Man movies come along. But movies that fulfill every last expectation, and offer nothing more—which can be perfectly satisfying if you haven't put been through those exact same paces already 27 times over the past three months—start to feel like work to us.

So don't entrust us with your film-going decisions—at least not when it comes to the movies that speak for themselves. (Tiny, obscure dramas with no stars and no apparent plot are another matter entirely—you do need us for those, and hence so do the studios.) And that goes double for Snakes on a Plane, which has reportedly been reverse-engineered to conform precisely to what audiences want from it, to the point where Samuel L. Jackson was recalled to the set to speak dialogue written for him by the blogosphere. Reviews of big, dumb Hollywood movies are plenty useful, but only as the other half of a dialogue. At their best, critics can articulate your own half-formed thoughts, or provoke you into a grudging reassessment; what we offer you is not a snap judgment but our time—time spent mulling over every detail of a movie in search of fresh insight, or at least a few clever turns of phrase. The intense scrutiny we can't help but bring to every picture makes us unreliable as a recommendation tool, but it also enables us to catch nuances that you were too busy laughing or screaming to process at the time (we were, too), and that you can't be bothered to dredge up later (we can be bothered; it's our job). Read us, but pay scant attention to the number of stars we allot, or to the precise inclination of our thumbs.