ON FILM: Film previews often out of critic’s reach

LITTLE ROCK — It’s time for another edition of “Ask Mr. Big Shot Movie Man.” All questions answered are genuine, though perhaps intended rhetorically, and are from actual readers.

Dear Sloth Bag,

Why do you write so few reviews on a weekly basis? For example, this week you only reviewed Paris.

JB in Junction City

Well, Jeeb, you’re pretty astute to notice the fall-off in production - I’m averaging just a bit more than two movie reviews per week this year when most years I average close to three per week. But the plain truth of it is I see every movie the studios - their publicists and distributors - allow me to see in advance.

I tend to see more movies in the fall (when studios are looking for critical support of their Oscar-seeking dramas) than I do in the summer when they unleash their blockheaded action movies. I’ll probably be pretty busy from now to the end of the year, but much depends on budgets - ours and theirs. You might have noticed there has been an economic downturn: Movie studios are spending less money. We’re spending less money. So I’m getting fewer chances to see things before they hit theaters.

Think about it. To review a movie,I have to see it before it opens. And for me to see a movie, a studio has to arrange with a theater to show it. Sometimes they show it at night with an audience (most comedies are screened this way), but more often they book a theater and show it to me in the morning.

Now it costs the studio (actually more likely the film’s distributor or whoever is footing the bill for the movie’s promotional budget) something to ship the film in, and to rent the theater. Not much, given the budgets of these things, but something. And sometimes they decide it’s not worth it to screen a movie in Little Rock for a handful of critics (or maybe only one critic). Especially since they know we’ll very likely run a wire-service review of the movie whether I see it or not.

It’s a bit ironic that we’re actually more likely to see movies with very small promotional budgets than your average major motion picture, because smaller studios are more likely to send DVD screeners to critics. You generally have to promise to send these discs back, and they are generally watermarked and branded with piracy warnings (that I take very seriously, by the way), but it’s a fair and inexpensive way to make movies available to critics.

Larger studios aren’t doing it because they’re afraid of the Internet being flooded with bootlegs - which is a real concern, although as far as I know therehas only been one film critic who has ever been convicted of film piracy, and he was probably an unwitting accomplice.

Another way I see movies in advance is at film festivals. But because we curtailed our travel this year, I haven’t been to any film festivals where I could have caught any of these films. If this year had been more typical, it’s likely I would have seen The Men Who Stare at Goats at the Toronto International Film Festival. Since I didn’t go to Toronto this year and I couldn’t convince Overture Films it’d be in their economic interest to screen the film for me, we had to rely on a review that moved on our wire services.

I only reviewed Paris in last week’s MovieStyle section because the distributor - in this case the Independent Film Channel - made it available to me. And I saw Coco Before Chanel because Sony Pictures Classics overnighted a DVD screener to me. I didn’t review it - Karen Martin, my wife and former MovieStyle editor, did, as a favor to me - because we received it on Tuesday afternoon and I usually spend Wednesday dealing with the logistical details that go with putting out a newspaper section. She had the piece to me by 9 a.m. Wednesday, which isn’t the main reason I like to use her reviews but certainly doesn’t hurt.

I would always prefer a locally written review, because part of what a film critic provides is a consistent voice with which readers can familiarize themselves. If you read my reviews regularly you probably know something about my taste, and you can infer things about a movie based on what I leave unsaid, my syntax or even the length of the review. Readers develop relationships with writers, and these relationships are improved through exposure.

Ideally what we’re doing is having a conversation - the writer states something and the reader makes a judgment about that statement in his head based on his prior experience. If your prior experience includes reading a lot of what that particular writer has written, then there’s at least a chance that the piece will be more useful than if you’re wholly unfamiliar with the writer.

Plus, I know - for the most part - where the local writer has been. I trust the regular contributors to MovieStyle; some of the critics that move on our wires, not so much. Some I suspect like to get their names in ads and on DVD boxes. Some just don’t have a very adult approach to film criticism - they’d rather spend the review showing off how clever they are.

In any case, we aim to review everything. And I try to write as many of those reviews as possible. If I can’t, I want a critic I know and trust to write the review. But sometimes we have to go with what we can get.

Mr. Big Shot Movie Man is an occasional, wholly fictional, contributor to this column who lives only to serve. Write him at:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

MovieStyle, Pages 35 on 11/13/2009

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