On Film

Movie Man hates the numbers game

Q. Whatever happened to Mr. Big Shot Movie Man? We haven't heard from the old boy in quite some time and I rather enjoyed his occasional drawings back of the curtain to expose the sausage factory-esque workings of the MovieStyle section. What have you done to him? I suspect that he was a little too frank and transparent for the powers what be.

-- Barry in Mena

A. All you had to do was ask. Like the magical Steve Landers, the mere invocation of my name conjures me corporeally, Barry-Bear. I'm here to serve and dish, and address the concerns of the curious unwashed. So shoot -- er, ask -- away.

Q. OK, so what are those numbers that accompany the reviews? They look like grades. Are they grades? Explain yourself, mister!

-- Grantland in Fifty-Six

A. Sigh. The grades again. How I hate the grades. What is it with you people and grades?

The only thing I hate more than the grades themselves is talking about the grades. So, like Woody Allen did with Marshall McLuhan in Annie Hall, allow me to bring in an expert to explain my point. Ladies and gentlemen, the wine critic Robert M. Parker Jr.:

"There can never be any substitute for your own palate nor any better education than tasting the wine yourself," he tells you. "Any scoring system ... ultimately makes the taster more accountable to the reader. I am comfortable with my point system and I recognize its limitations: There is nothing scientific about it, and it should not be interpreted that way."

They're basically for people who don't read the reviews. They're based on the old-school grading system I grew up with -- 93 to 100 is an A, 86 to 92 is a B. Once we get below 85, the movies are pretty much average or worse. In practice, I use the scoring system pretty much the same way Parker uses his -- 88, 89 and 90 are good scores; 87 and 86 are positive scores; 85 is a neutral, anything below that is at best average.

I can live with this system, but in all truth I'd rather not. I don't particularly like assigning grades to movies. I don't think it's fair, I don't believe it's very helpful, and I know there's no reasonable way to distill all that's interesting or uninteresting about a movie to a two-digit number.

We go along with the convention because people expect to see some kind of scoring system incorporated into newspaper reviews, whether it's zero to five dancing boxes of popcorn or -- my favorite -- the San Francisco Chronicle's icon of a moviegoer in various stages of excitement.

The idea is that a lot of people won't take the time to read the review -- they simply want to know whether a movie is "good" or not. While in a perfect world we'd all read reviews after we've seen and thought about the movie in question, I recognize how the world works.

But the least important part of any piece of criticism is the verdict. I don't like turning my thumb up or down and don't think that's a critic's job. What we should be doing is considering the work of art at hand and bringing to light interesting things about it. I know people have come to expect a critic to work as a consumer advocate, but you can't judge a movie like you can a pair of running shoes or a laptop computer.

Besides, none of us ever sees the same movie. And we never see the same movie twice. While I'm comfortable writing about the ways movies work and don't work, while I'm confident enough that some of the observations I make about movies are valid, I hate the finality of the verdict. I'm not a judge, I'm a noticer.

A movie is more like a bottle of wine. Some people would just as soon drink something sweet and cold. But while the mysteries are ineffable, the pleasures of a great bottle are real, if not accessible to an uninitiated palate.

Q. I understand you love the Little Rock Film Festival. But how come you didn't write a single word about the Bentonville Film Festival, either before, during or after the festival?

-- Bella in Bella Vista

A. Oh dear. B, I have to tell you, I wrote several words about the BFF. Just not in the MovieStyle section. I wrote about it in my Sunday Perspective column and on the blood, dirt & angels blog. Karen Martin also wrote about it on BDA as well as in MovieStyle. It was the subject of an editorial in the newspaper. Our folks in the Northwest part of the state covered the day-to-day activities of the festival.

MovieStyle's prime mission is covering the movies that open in Arkansas theaters each week. Occasionally, when we have room and time, we might devote some space to some aspect of local film culture, but for the most part, the main thing we're interested in is movies that will open in theaters. The BFF really wasn't about those kind of movies; most of the films presented there are destined for video or television distribution.

Q. The review you ran of Tomorrowland was obviously biased! Why can't you just give us the facts and let us decide for ourselves? If you look on the Internet you can find dozens of objective reviews!

-- Walt in Des Arc

A. W., let me first say that the idea of an objective review is risible. A review is a critique of a work, an assessment, a judgment call. By its very nature it's subjective, and one hopes, the product of a singular consciousness. A critic is not a presenter or reporter or a shill. A good critic might make critics of the audience, but will never return a neutral verdict.

That said, the verdict is usually the least interesting part of any review, and the primary objective of any piece ought to be to have something interesting and possibly true to say about the work under consideration. For me at least, my aim is less about convincing a reader to see it my way than to stimulate the discourse about the movies we consume.

Mr. Big Shot Movie Man is a fictional construct who occasionally answers real questions from real readers in this space. Write him care of:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

www.blooddirtangels.com

MovieStyle on 05/29/2015

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