Or Crash-lash, or Brokeback-lash. Your choice.
I thought I would have heard the plaintive wails coming from my neighbors here in the Gaybourhood. Instead, I find it online. See the article from the London Free Press and from Roger Ebert.
It’s rather amazing to see that some people are saying that they’ll give up going to movies because a movie they liked didn’t win a freakin’ award. Will someone please explain to me how that diminishes their enjoyment of the movie?
“Oh, it didn’t win an award. So all those critics, etc. must be wrong. It probably sucks.” (I haven’t been to see a movie in months, and have not seen any of the nominated films. Nor is that ever my criteria for doing so. See why below.)
Umm, I hate to be the one to break this to you, but if you think that way, then you’ll never see a movie, since there’s always at least one critic who doesn’t like something (that’s why they’re called “critics”). Which is why I will skim maybe one movie review a month. I used to write movie reviews in law school for the student newspaper, since I would see about a movie a week. But I purposely kept the reviews to a paragraph and limited to stating whether I liked the movie and why (or why not). My thinking then (and it remains so today) is that if you think that a movie sounds or looks interesting enough for you to see, then you’ll go see it no matter what anyone else says.
For instance, my all time favorite movie is Raiders of the Lost Ark. See the IMDB entry and the official Web site. I’ve seen it over 225 times. At least that’s when I gave up counting. There was a point where I could recite every line of dialogue for every character; that’s how much I enjoy the movie. But other people don’t like it. And I don’t care.
The truest test for the quality of a movie is word of mouth, not word of critics. If you’re interested in this, look at the drop-off in box office revenue for a movie between the first and second weeks of release and then again between the second and third weeks of release. If the percentage is high, that generally means that the movie doesn’t have much staying power and that the people who really wanted to see it already did, and they told their friends that they didn’t like it. People are far more likely to trust their friends’ opinions than they are the opinions of some critic whom they’ve never met.