BEST CINEMATTERS EVER! or How hype is hurting film and film journalism

This isn't about any particular site or writer, if it were then the problem wouldn't be big enough to write about. The problem is one of a culture that becomes more pervasive by the day and that has, I believe, begun to seriously undermine the two artforms that I love: film and film journalism. I see this problem becoming mutually parasitic; undermining the quality of journalism and making it harder to enjoy the films that journalism is about. The problem is hype.

I grew up in the 90's. The internet existed, but I only began using it in 1996, aged 15 and while it seemed miraculous to me then it was, at that point, largely an achingly slow collection of Geocities pages and lo-res pictures. Frankly I was better served for movie information by magazines and the Cinemania CD-Rom (think Encarta, but for movies).  I love the internet. It has given me incredible opportunities as a writer, introduced me to and enabled me to stay in touch with movie loving friends worldwide and given me a lot of good laughs, but while I've no desire to come off as an old fart (especially as I'm only 32) I sometimes miss the dark ages.

Hype has always been part of film journalism. I respect that as a journalist and I used to enjoy it as a film fan. The thing is, hype has fundamentally changed since I was younger and those changes have, in my opinion, made both journalism and films worse. Growing up I consumed film magazines. Each would have the same few stills from upcoming releases and while they might sometimes cover the same films (though the late, lamented, Neon often went more off the beaten path; they put Buffalo 66 on the cover) they did so in ways that felt individual and had distinct voices. The key was anticipation. This was all the info I would be getting on a film; one story per mag. Between each end of month binge I was left to hanker after the next glimpse of what I was hoping to head to the cinema for later on. It built excitement, allowing me to see and to know enough to be intrigued but not enough to feel like I would be walking into the film knowing more than the flavour of what I would be getting. This is what the internet has, seemingly for all time, killed . 

Hype fills a gap. It dons the same clothes as news and occasionally it genuinely is news, but the end result is always the same whatever the type of story or the tone of it; it is hype. This hype circles most closely around the films that audiences are most anticipating. In recent times we've had The Dark Knight Rises, Prometheus, various Marvel based films and now we're beginning to ramp up for the hype machine's biggest push ever: Star Wars Episode VII. A certain amount of hype is not just worth doing, it's essential.  If Disney is spending $200 million on a film it would hardly be wise to not let the moviegoing public know that it is coming out; awareness creates desire and desire sells tickets. However, I feel there is a balance to be struck, that that balance is now tipped heavily in one direction and that the imbalance can be blamed, at least in part, for the lacklustre reception of many recent blockbusters.

The first example that comes to mind is Prometheus. For the longest time we knew very little about Ridley Scott's Alien prequel (there was even some doubt about whether it was really supposed to be an Alien prequel). This all changed in the three months or so leading up to its release. There were the typical trailers and posters, the mass of stills, but what really made an impression were the 'viral' promo videos; short films connected to the film and featuring its characters, but not actually using scenes from the film. There were so many of these and other promotional items and they so dominated many film fans social media streams that the film was soon dubbed 'Promotheus'. 

Prometheus is not a good film, but I believe that it was damned by that media strategy to an even worse reception than it might otherwise have received. By the time audiences got to see the film it seemed many of them were no longer anticipating it, in fact many appeared actively bored of the world, so overexposed had it been in the previous few months. Between the trailers, the posters and the virals most of the film's most striking images were overfamilliar even before the film was out. The world and the characters held few surprises. It was, perversely, more like seeing the final iteration of the film's advertising than much of a film.

For those of us on social media (which I never was until 24FPS began to gain an audience), hype isn't just something generated by official channels, it's a self-perpetuating entity.  Each thing that gets written about a highly anticipated film, each trailer that comes out, each clip, still and poster, gets multiple bites at the cherry through retweets, reblogs and comments on the story or item.  One casting rumour can already dominate a Twitter timeline for hours at a time as more people learn about and offer commentary on it (see recent whispers about Chiwetel Ejiofor being in Bond 24).  Studios know this and they take advantage, making hype ever more piecemeal because they know that every little bit will be seized on and discussed, increasing awareness of their product.  This piecemeal approach has led to what I consider to be the most asinine trend in film promotion right now: adverts for adverts.

Ads for ads tend to take one of two forms.  There is the more traditional 'teaser'.  Until a couple of years ago the teaser was a self-contained thing.  They tended to be short and feature little or no footage from the film, instead concerned with announcing that something was on the way, but they were a complete thing in and of themselves.  Recently the teaser has become less self-contained, instead some films are now simply putting a few seconds of their trailers online early as a teaser not for the film but for the trailer.  Just last week we got a twenty second 'sneak peek' of David Fincher's upcoming Gone Girl, as a precursor to the trailer launching.  Who does that serve other than advertisers?  At least full trailers and clips are advertising a thing, a trailer for a trailer advertises nothing but the next advert for a thing.

Perhaps even more asinine and irritating is the new trend for countdowns; weekly, daily or sometimes hourly graphics designed to pop up in social media counting down to the arrival of a film or, disipritingly frequently, a trailer.  I believe that The Amazing Spider-Man 2 did a series of countdown graphics leading up to the teaser for the film's first trailer.  That is, for those of you counting, a series of adverts for an advert for an advert.  I remember there being much complaint about this, but simply by talking about it we were still doing the bidding of the advertisers and damning ourselves to more of the same.

Of course much of the social media comment comes about through genuine enthusiasm and the devotion of fans to their favourite thing.  That's the last thing that I want to denigrate; if you like something, be it Polish cinema from the 1970's or Star Wars, great, feel free to shout about it, but I do think we should be aware of what the cumulative effect of all this commentary can be. 

As a critic I do sometimes worry about shouting too loudly about how much I love a movie because I'm acutely aware of the danger of overhyping a film and therefore increasing the chance that it will disappoint someone seeing it for the first time.  This is another place in which I'm wary of the cumulative effect of social media.  Being a film critic and being friends with a lot of film critics means that my social media experience is very much geared towards film, so when a particular film starts to pick up critical traction it is very hard for me (and many other big movie fans) not to be acutely aware of that reception.  We are all supposed to go into screenings with a completely open mind and while that's rarely, if ever, possible I do try.  Advanced knowledge of a film's critical reception can colour that essential impartiality and I believe it sometimes makes films harder to enjoy.

The last time that I felt this became a problem was with Gravity.  I skipped the screening at the London Film Festival as it clashed with something else I wanted to see, and which was not going to get a massive release within a few months.  Thereafter, all I heard about Gravity was not merely that it was brilliant but that it was a game changer; the film to make the 3D sceptics (Hi) eat their words, a film that would be among the defining cinematic events of your life.  I went and saw it and found... a good movie.  No more, no less.  It's 3 stars for me.  It changed nothing, defined nothing, but even though it's a good movie the sense of disappointment was substantial because what had been promised was so incredible.  The thing is, incredible is the word.  There was no way that Gravity could have lived up to its (admittedly largely viewer generated) hype, because to do so would require it to have irrevocably changed the way I look at cinema.  I've seen one new film that has done that (though only in relation to one genre) in the past decade and it was not Gravity.

Ultimately I think hype is degrading two things I love.  It's not exactly making films worse, but I contend that it makes them seem worse by making us bored of them before they've come out or by building our expectations to unattainable levels.  I do believe it makes journalism worse, not everyone is guilty and there are ways to cover a new trailer or bit of news and still write something interesting.  Unfortunately more often than not I think it ends up being an excuse to bash out some quick copy and gain some hits (and certainly my stats might look a lot healthier if I covered film news or posted trailers).  Writers and sites I like and admire get dragged on to this treadmill; a treadmill I think is slowly damaging what they do and the reason they do it.

So how do we combat this?  I don't know that we can.  The social media genie may change forms, but the chances of it going back in the bottle are almost non-existent.  Sites and advertisers need each other and they need readers to see their content, so they will justifiably take any opportunity to make sure that content is thrust in our faces.  Without disengaging from social media and the positives it offers this negative isn't going to go away.  Of course I, like many others, refuse to watch the endless virals, to click on the endless links and to start reading every review that comes out, but as I said, once this material piles up you don't even need to engage with it to feel the effect of it.  I think we're screwed, mostly because in another 15 years I can imagine pining for the time when hype was only THIS bad.

Cinematters: Roger Ebert: 1942 - 2013

I never met or knew Roger Ebert, and despite his curiosity about other writers, I doubt he ever read any of my work, but, just as is the case for many other film critics, he was a huge part of why I do what I do. I can’t possibly do the man justice, but here are some thoughts, some personal reflections, prompted by his passing yesterday.

When I was about 12 my family got a new computer, it was the early 90′s, and it had one of those new fangled CD ROM drives. With it my parents got me a program called Cinemania; a sort of illustrated movie guide with thousands of review on it, to serve my growing obsession with movies. There were three critics whose reviews were included on this programme. Every film had a review by Leonard Maltin, but over and over again I found myself drawn to the titles (about one in five, as I recall) that had reviews by Roger Ebert. Maltin’s reviews were short bites of opinion, Ebert delved more, in a way that I hadn’t seen before. His writing on film wasn’t objective, wasn’t looking from a distance, it was about personal response both in terms of interpreting and qualitatively evaluating the films he saw. It’s probably no exaggeration to say that, without really understanding that I was doing so at the time, I studied those reviews as seriously as I studied any homework ever given to me. Pauline Kael (the other critic included on some of the entries in Cinemania) was perhaps a bit highbrow for my liking at the time, but Ebert was the first person who really made the idea of evaluating a film beyond the simplistic ‘I liked that’ or ‘I didn’t like that’ response accessible to me.

I think I could probably do with taking a page from Roger Ebert’s book in my approach to what I do. Over the last few years, especially after he lost his voice to cancer, it was my impression that Ebert began giving a pass to a lot of films I felt didn’t deserve one, but I admired his attitude of always walking into a film hoping to be impressed by it, and his willingness – which sometimes seems to go away in older critics – to embrace new cinema and new filmmakers with great zeal; to champion them rather than bemoan the idea of movies getting worse each year. I aspire to do this myself, and there are few greater joys than when I am able to hold something up and say ‘look what I found, it’s brilliant’.

Ebert embraced the new in other ways too, especially through blogging, which seemed to give him back the voice that was taken from him. His posts were often moving and funny in the same breath, but what was just as impressive for me was the way he encouraged writers, both his ‘far flung correspondents’ and other critics making a name for themselves online. Ebert was, in many ways, the inverse of the snobbery that the likes of Armond White have displayed toward young and online film writers. I was already writing before I really saw this from Ebert, but it gladdened me to see someone so respected and so long established in the field display such a gracious, even excited, attitude towards the way criticism has opened up through the internet.

I think the most important lesson that Ebert taught me as both a reader and a writer is that it’s not important how often you agree with a critic, what’s important is that you believe them, that their opinion carries conviction and weight. I sometimes thought Ebert was bonkers, I sometimes found him contradictory, but I always believed that what he wrote was his honest opinion, and that real thought had gone into that opinion. That’s what I aspire to as a critic, not being influential or being agreed with so much as being believed. I also loved his style; a one way conversation that often left you thinking more deeply about even a movie you didn’t like; it’s another thing I try to incorporate into my own work, but will never master in the same way.

I only ever saw Ebert’s television work years later, thanks to the internet, and while I loved his chemistry with Gene Siskel, and the way they both went out of their ways to review and to champion great little movies, those weren’t the things that really affected the way I saw him, or what I do in terms of writing. For me, it all comes back to the way that great voice translated on to the page. It’s no exaggeration to say that reading Ebert’s reviews when I was twelve years old profoundly changed the way I think about, talk about and write about cinema, perhaps even the way I watch films. Would I have written any of the pieces I’ve written here or elsewhere over the last 13 years had it not been for him? Perhaps, perhaps not, but I think if I had they would be very, very different, and probably not as good.

I didn’t want to write an obituary for Roger Ebert, I’ll leave that to people who knew him, instead I suppose what this piece has become is a personal thank you to the man. He never knew it, but he made a huge difference in my life. Thanks Roger.

Cinematters: Armond White is wrong… observations on film criticism.

Many of you will have, even if you haven’t heard the episode of /filmcast he made his comments on, recently read about comments made by New York Press film critic Armond White on the state of film criticism. Notably he said that he believes it is fair to say that that Roger Ebert destroyed film criticism. ROGER EBERT! The man who has done more to introduce people to film criticism than anyone else alive, the man who essentially introduced criticism into popular culture (along with Gene Siskel) with At The Movies, the man, lest we forget, who WON A FUCKING PULITZER PRIZE for his criticism. Amazingly, this was but the tip of the gigantic iceberg of wrong that White unleashed on /filmcast and actually it’s not the point I most object to.

White has a bigger bone to pick with the proliferation of young critics on the internet (ironic, given that White’s own notoriety comes largely from his own web presence) and suggested that nobody under 30 should be allowed to write criticism because they inherently lack the life experience and knowledge of art, politics and religion that he believes is required to do the job, to say nothing of the formal education in film. Where to begin?

Let’s start here, one thing is clear to me and that’s that despite the many people accusing him of being stupid, Armond White is not an idiot, and you’d be an idiot to dismiss him as such. The problem with White isn’t that he’s dumb, nor that he’s dishonest, the /filmcast interview demonstrates very well indeed that as wrongheaded as most of his opinions seem to be they are both genuine and intelligently spoken (actually, he’s got a rather flowery way of speaking and writing, which often verges on the pretentious). For my money he’s misdirected his obvious intelligence. He clearly has some understanding of how to read a film. In fact if anything he’s probably got too much understanding and enthusiasm for reading a film because he seems to think that whatever reading he comes up with, whatever the film, he must be right. And he’s so often not.

Let’s take a quick look at his Toy Story 3 review. Armond says:

“Toy Story 3 is so besotted with brand names and product-placement that it stops being about the innocent pleasures of imagination—the usefulness of toys—and strictly celebrates consumerism.”

I see where he gets that reading, but he grasps so tight on to the idea that he doesn’t see either why the toys that Pixar have chosen are recognisable ones (because Barbie and Ken are more identifiable for an audience than, say, Amy and Bob; it’s all about emotional connection) nor that the actual message that Toy Story 3 spends most of its running time delivering is THE EXACT OPPOSITE of what he thinks it is. Toy Story 3 is not a film about our disposable, consumerist culture. It is a film about the emotions we have connected to the stuff of our lives, and the rite of passing that on to the next generation. It’s as far from consumerist as you can get.

Now, let’s say that White’s right, and that Toy Story 3, rather than being a beautiful, elegiac, emotional story IS just a long form advert… well surely then that’s true of a lot of films, and especially the 150 minute car advert that is Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Here’s Armond on that film:

“Bay is an ideal director to realize this peculiar genre, which remakes the surfeit of adolescent commercial media as a means of multimedia gratification.These cars, trucks, motorcycles and planes—both human-friendly Autobots and dastardly Decepticons—metamorphose fast, but their transfiguration is like the mechanical toy descriptions in E.T.A. Hoffman: fantastic and uncanny.”

So Michael Bay’s car porn is about transfiguration, but Toy Story 3 is just an advert? Lunacy! White puts a great deal of stock in a theoretical film education for critics, well, lucky for me I have one of those and that’s a real problem for Armond. White writes like a kid who has just discovered film theory, and fallen in love with the ideas, but doesn’t yet know how to apply them. There’s enthusiasm for the language, but little understanding of it. He throws out big words as if their big and complicated nature alone should make us gasp at the insight, giving little thought to the kind of film he’s looking at and whether it really warrants this level of analysis. This is the thing; not all movies need to be analysed for their subtext (Revenge of the Fallen, frankly, has none, it’s all text and very loud and obvious text at that).

White’s Transformers 2 review is so mind-alteringly strange that it almost approaches parody. He doesn’t actually LOVE the film, but the things he ascribes to Michael Bay are often flat out hilarious. Here are a few extracts:

“Who else could compose a sequence where characters (albeit robots) go from the bottom of the sea to another planet in one seamless, 30-second, dreamlike flow?”

The answer to this (whisper it) is “anyone with the CGI budget”.

“Sam innocently acquires the secret code of the aliens’ cosmic history—something to do with his American kid innocence and appreciation of middle-class life’s abundance.”

hahahahahhahahahahahahahahaha.

“Bay’s post-nuclear version of Hoffman’s The Nutcracker stirs emotion from our pop culture, industrial experience then connects to ancient spiritual myths (like Kingdom of the Crystal Skull). It’s too much the production of industrialization to be considered magic, yet Bay’s sheer fascination with seeing is impressively communicated.”

This paragraph exploded my mind into a thousand pieces (if only Michael Bay had been there to film it. With six cameras. Against a sunset. In a circular motion. In slo-mo). Emotion, in Revenge of the Fallen? Honestly, when?


There's more, much more, where that came from, but I don’t want to just rag on Armond White for one review, largely because I’m sure there are quotes you could pull from this site and use in a similar way if you were so inclined. Actually to a certain degree I’m glad White is writing, he may be certifiably insane, but he seems to believe in every last word he types, no matter how far up its own arse his prose disappears, and you certainly can’t accuse him of being dull. Criticism is a job for the opinionated, and White is certainly that.

Dumb though Armond White isn’t, he did say something very, very stupid on /filmcast when he actually declared that there should be no film critics under 30. Now, I’m not, as White would style it, ‘a professional, pedigreed film critic’, but I like to think that I AM a film critic. After all, I do have that film education, that grounding in theory. I have seen films from every decade from the 1890’s to the 2010’s. I have seen films from over 30 different countries and in practically every style and genre (the only ones where I feel my experience is truly lacking being Bollywood and, well, porn). I, in short, know my shit. I am 29.

Now, apparently, Armond White thinks that in just over 11 months, on my 30th birthday, I will be magically gifted the life experience needed to qualify me to write about movies, but that the fact that I’ve spent 21 years immersed in cinema, seen over 7000 films, written about movies for an audience for 11 years and now have an audience of several thousand a month apparently doesn’t count. Well frankly that’s bollocks, and dismissing young internet based critics is blinkered and stupid.

I’ve been writing and reading film criticism on the internet for over a decade, and over that time, largely through the Joblo.com forums, I’ve seen a lot of young moviegoers who began simply as enthusiasts expand their horizons and develop their critical faculties. Did each of us like some embarrassing shit along the way, has each of us written something we wish to god we hadn’t pushed send on? Of course, but that’s exactly why Armond White is so catastrophically wrong. It is GREAT to see young people who are switched on to cinema (indeed to culture of any kind) and the younger they begin both watching and writing about cinema the faster their viewing habits and their criticism will develop. Many of the fellow critics with whom I have become friends through the net (smart, switched on people every one of them) are younger than me, and some of them blow even my mind with the depth and breadth of their knowledge of and love for cinema. Is White REALLY saying that we shouldn’t listen to them (or me) because they haven’t turned 30?

My worry about culture and the commentary on it is the exact opposite of Armond White’s; as I look around I see ever increasing numbers of sheep, herding themselves into Hollywood’s latest abomination and drooling in slack-jawed pseudo approval, I see the ever increasing acceptance in cinema of simple adequacy, so when a member of this generation sits up and says that they want to engage with movies I want to encourage them. I want to help excite them about this wonderful artform, not to tell them that their opinion is worthless to me for the next 15 years. What kind of prick does that?

I recently met a kid on the train who clearly loved movies, he was 10, so he doesn’t have any grounding in film theory, nor any pretensions, he was just excited by cinema. That’s a wonderful thing. I told him that I was a critic, and he asked how I’d started doing it. “Write”, I told him, “just write about everything you see, you’ll get good”. Film criticism is too important, and cinema a thing of too much childlike wonder, to be left strictly to the grown ups.