TimeMagazine Tagged Articles at Cinematical

When I bought my first DVD player, in 2000, it was accompanied by a glossy flier for a company called Netflix that allowed you to rent DVDs by mail. Intrigued by the convenience and lured by the promise of no late fees, I signed up. Nearly a decade later, I am still a happy and loyal customer.

Richard Corliss, film critic for Time magazine and a venerable elder statesman in the world of cinema, takes a more jaundiced view, which he explains in a piece bluntly entitled "Why Netflix Stinks." Many of his criticisms are the sort you would expect from a man his age (65): Netflix keeps people from leaving their houses and interacting with humans; it makes independent video stores go out of business; it encourages kids to congregate on his lawn and listen to their rock 'n' roll music; it makes Sizzler run out of shrimp too soon after the 4:00 p.m. dinner rush; etc.

All of that is more a matter of philosophy, I suppose. But then Corliss sullies the good name of Netflix with this criticism:

"With Netflix, you surrender those basic American rights: impulse choice and instant gratification. You must cool your jets for two to four days, dependent as you are on both the skill of Netflix employees to put the correct movie in your envelope (sometimes they don't) and the speed of the U.S. Postal Service. By the time a video arrives, you may have forgotten why you rented it."

As a long time fan of the original TV show, and as a grown up version of the kid who used to memorize William Johnston's paperbacks ... as a former elementary school student who went in for as many tedious "Would you believe?" jokes as the legions of film critics writing about this week's box office success ... as all of these things, I'm not expecting anything more heart-breaking this summer than Get Smart. From the under-performing villain (the usually savory Terence Stamp) to the dull direction by Peter Segal, the film was a complete tick-off.

Richard Schickel spelled out his own disappointment in the opening paragraph of his review in Time Magazine:

"A schlemiel may be, must be, grievously acted upon by the always malevolent world. But he can never be permitted to act effectively against that world. At the end of his adventures he must, somehow, triumph over the forces of darkness that surround him - but only accidentally so...In that spirit of genial fantasy, we permit out surrogate that utter self-confidence, that sublime sangfroid, with which with he cheerfully motors his way around and through disaster."

As the end of yet another movie cycle draws to a close and all our attentions are focused on which flicks are "Oscar-worthy," we get an article from Time Magazine's Richard Corliss that ponders the question: What are film critics thinking? The piece, entitled (flatteringly enough) "Do Film Critics Know Anything?", wonders if there's an actual point to all this year-end glad-handing in which all the film critics and award-giving bodies fall all over each other to tell you how this arthouse film (that made $156,349) is better than this Lithuanian documentary about the wicker industry.

Here's a good section: "You will be forgiven if, like my friends at TIME, you are scratching your head and feigning interest, hoping I'll get quickly to the sexy stuff, like best non-fiction feature (the Iraq docs No End in Sight and Body of War and Michael Moore's Sicko) and distinguished achievement in production design (Jack Fisk, There Will Be Blood, L.A.) . Gee, you're wondering, did The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the French story of a man totally immobilized by a stroke, beat out the German spy drama The Lives of Others? (Three out of five critics groups say yes.) If you're getting restless, movie lovers, too bad. You'll be hearing the same obscure names at the Golden Globes and on Oscar night." (Full article here.)

After reading through the article twice (and with all due respect to Mr. Corliss, an accomplished film critic if ever there was one), my response is this: Must everything be whittled down to the lowest common denominator? Have even the words "best" and "finest" been annexed by the committee that decides which DVDs get the biggest Walmart shelf? Obviously, "film critic" is a pretty excellent job, all things considered. But let the professional movie-watchers have their brief moment to spout off, praise some obscurities, and make their lists. If we're asked to muddle through eleven months of remakes, sequels, video game flicks, comic book movies, mindless action explosions, crotch-centric teen comedies ... why wouldn't you want a month in which OTHER movies earn the spotlight?

So if Sally Secretary has never heard of Persepolis or No Country for Old Men or The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and the critics' year-end group-stroke for quality filmmaking actually turns her on to something more challenging than, say, Hairspray -- then what's the problem? Corliss closes his piece thusly: "...critics fighting over which hardly seen movie they want to call the best of the year." Hmph. Perhaps Mr. Corliss would like the Academy to institute something called Oscars 2, and everyone can vote in on how Night at the Museum is so much better than Meet the Fockers. (I call copyright on that idea!) I have no idea how "hardly seen" my favorite film of the year will be; it doesn't come out for a few weeks. Unfortunately for my reputation as a useful film critic, the film happens to be in Spanish. Darn.

So to offer just one lowly film critic's response to the query posed in the article's title: Yeah, film critics know a lot. Like how if Hollywood concentrated on making better movies, you'd see a lot more "popular" fare on a lot more nomination lists.

Though Cinematical was not mentioned (no worries, it's just more food for my therapist), I have to give props to Time Magazine for, well, giving props to all those movie blogs out there in a new piece called Boys Who Like Toys. Essentially, the article (written by Rebecca Winters Keegan) talks about how fanboys (and the websites they visit each day) have become "one of the most powerful taste-makers in Hollywood," perfectly capable of either making or breaking a movie in a matter of hours. Heck, there's even an entire film (appropriately titled Fanboys) devoted to these folks heading our way soon. Hence, the studios have noticed; recently, they've created entire divisions whose main responsibility is to remain in close contact with the online world, invite bloggers to their movie sets, hand out exclusive online-only content and, generally, try to steer buzz in the right direction.

According to Spider-Man 3 producer Avi Arad, "Hard-core fans represent a small piece of the viewing public, but they influence geek culture, journalists, Wall Street. You don't want them to trash your project." Among the sites mentioned in the article, I feel JoBlo, The Movie Blog and Cinema Blend consistently deliver honest, opinionated movie news with a ton of humor and a whole lot of fun. And hey, I'd like to think we here at Cinematical do the same thing ... except, I probably shower a lot less than John Campea. Look, let's be real: It's easy to show up online, present your audience with a bunch of flashy graphics -- combined with copy-and-paste posts from Variety and/or the Hollywood Reporter -- and call yourself a movie blog. Some folks make a very successful living doing that, and the studios (who are always afraid you'll say something bad) love them for it. But I tend to feel the moviegoing public (myself included) want more. They want honesty. They want opinion. They want to debate. Most of all, they want to have fun. And that's what going to the movies is all about. So, support your movie blogs ... you'll be glad you did!