ON FILM: So many movies, so few great ones

I don't watch as many movies as I used to.

Most of that is due to circumstances beyond my control. Studios have cut back on their promotional screenings in this market so I'm seeing fewer films before they open, and we're relying more on our far-flung correspondents -- Dan Lybarger in Kansas City, Mo., and Piers Marchant in Philadelphia -- to attend screenings in those markets and write reviews. While I'd like to review more films, the system has worked fairly well the past couple of years. Dan and Piers have strong voices and excellent critical faculties.

I don't mind skipping less promising films -- the older I get, the more I realize that our time is finite. I understand why Pauline Kael used to take summers off. I don't need to see every superhero movie or every tent-pole franchise designed to play as well in China as in Jacksonville. And it's kind of nice to be able to slip out to a Sunday afternoon matinee and catch Hell or High Water or Sully without feeling any pressure to write about them. (Though I probably will get to writing about Hell or High Water. It was so good in so many ways.)

I still get my shots. And I still watch a lot of movies. Last weekend I screened seven documentaries about the South that will be part of next week's Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival. I also re-watched the festival's opening night film, Command and Control, which I'd seen at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this year. (It might be the scariest movie I've seen since George Sluizer's 1988 Dutch-French film Spoorloos, which is better known in this country as The Vanishing -- and which was remade in English by Sluizer in 1993. But you want the original.)

And this is the time of year when my movie-watching starts to ramp up, because this is the time of year when studios think that critics might actually be able to help their movies. So they send me DVDs and computer links and I start to go a little mad -- I'll probably see about 150 movies from now to the end of the year. (I'll watch almost all of them, though I've gotten better in recent years at hitting the eject button. If I'm not going to review a bad movie, I figure I don't have to watch the whole thing. )

There are people who will see more than that. My wife, Karen, who is on the screening committee for the Hot Springs festival and also juried movies for a Vancouver, British Columbia, festival this year, watched just about 75 films submitted to those festivals. Plus she'll watch virtually every movie I will this year.

Chris Wilks, the Hot Springs screening committee chairman, tells me he watched about 400 films in preparation for this year's festival, and that first-time committee member Kristine Artymowski watched more than 300.

"Four others watched over 200, and about 15 watched 150 or more," Wilks says.

Not all these films were feature length, and committee members aren't required to watch every movie to the bitter end, but it still represents a huge time investment. And it also changes your relationship with the movies.

Most people see fewer than 10 films a year in a theater. Naturally, they relate to movies differently than people who spend a substantial portion of their lives paying close attention to movies. Naturally, there's a discrepancy between the viewpoints of general audiences and what I'll call "elite moviegoers."

And one of the tasks of a film critic writing for a general-interest publication is to find a way to service both of these constituencies -- to write about movies in a smart way while keeping the broader audience in mind. That means you have to review movies the same way you review restaurants -- while it's not wrong to talk about how groceries are procured and prepared, you need to keep in mind that in the end consumers are paying for an experience. Just as you don't have to know how to cook to enjoy a three-star meal, you don't necessarily have to have a lot of technical knowledge to enjoy a movie.

(Sometimes I think knowing too much about how movies are made makes it too easy to see around the sides of things. If you're thinking about how the director is using the camera while you're watching the movie, you haven't given yourself fully over to the movie and the director hasn't completely succeeded.)

By definition, most movies are mediocre. We (reluctantly) employ a grading system here that I hope somewhat reflects this reality -- an 85 on our scale is a solid C, an honorable average movie. Anything above 85 is, by the individual critic's lights, a little better than average. Once you get up to 88, 89 and 90 you're talking about the best movies of a given year. Anything 90 or above is a three-star restaurant. The upper grades are reserved for transcendental experiences -- movies that come along once every few years or so.

It's all very subjective, but my feeling is there's a greater gap between a movie graded 90 and one graded 89 than there is between an 86 and an 84. And there are plenty of movies graded lower than 80 that I'd recommend under certain circumstances. But I don't pretend it's not an arbitrary system or that it means all that much -- the grades exist as a concession to convention, to the TLDR ("too long didn't read") culture that makes us all so tired.

Had I my way, we'd skip the grades and you'd read the reviews. (And if you've gotten this deep into this column, you probably already read the reviews. Hello, choir.)

My point is that we see a lot of movies. And that seeing a lot of movies is a necessary part of a film critic's education. (If that seems obvious to you, understand that not everybody believes that. Plenty of people who haven't seen Murnau's Sunrise or Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar are perfectly willing to tell you what the best films of all time are. And that's OK, because the movies are like pop music -- the best ones are easily apprehended and deeply felt. They inspire passion.

I don't watch as many as I used to. But it feels like the ones I do watch count for more.

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

blooddirtangels.com

MovieStyle on 09/30/2016

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