Sometimes when I really dig a movie I’ll see what my fellow critics had to say about the flick in question.
Call it curiosity, or maybe it’s because deep down I fear I missed something that I should have caught in the first place.
Case in point: “X-Men: First Class.” I dug the film’s darker elements, the emotional pull of those freakish young mutants and how the movie delicately wove the Cuban Missile Crisis into the “X-Men” back story.
Some of my peers disagreed, which is fine. But one review in particular jumped out at me.
Andrew O’Hehir’s “X” review over at Salon.com struck me as the kind of analysis written by someone who wasn’t going to like the film no matter what appeared on the screen.
Which begs the question, should critics recuse themselves when the genre in question isn’t to their liking?
I occasionally will pass on reviewing fiscally-based movies like “Capitalism: A Love Story” and “Inside Job.” I simply don’t know enough about economic issues to give them a fair shake.
Should O’Hehir have done the same with “X-Men: First Class?” Consider these snippets from his review:
The problem with fights between superhuman characters is that we don’t understand what they can and can’t do, so the rules of physics don’t apply and it all starts to look like visual clutter very quickly …
While the whole film is professionally executed and goes down smoothly enough, the underlying stupidity of its subject matter can’t help but show through in the end. I was left wondering why I’d spent more than two hours in the dark watching a story about how a kid who survived the concentration camps grew up to be an adult who wears an embarrassing faux-Spartan helmet and calls himself Magneto (rhymes with neato). I kept waiting for McAvoy and Fassbender, two first-rate young actors who generally have shown pretty good judgment, to burst out laughing and chuck the ludicrous costumes overboard.
Parts of his review are beautifully written, particularly when he describes how co-star January Jones uses “her remarkable gift to be beautiful and almost entirely anti-erotic at the same time.” But his contempt for the subject matter left me cold.
He also pulls the Ebert card, casting aspersions on those critics who actually liked the movie, though he doesn’t go “full idiot.”
I’m pretty sure that those who are claiming that “X-Men: First Class” is actually good are engaged in the kind of brainwashed magical thinking that goes along with a culture where the entire media and most of the public have to behave like savvy insiders all the time.
So, what do you think? Was O’Hehir fair to the film? Or does he show enough bias against the genre to make him a less suitable choice to review a film like “X-Men: First Class?”
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{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
Ah, “magical thinking”: much like “cognitive dissonance”, it’s a fun pseudo-intellectual buzzword that can be thrown at anything, justified or not—indeed, whether it even applies or not. (“Cognitive dissonance” is also a convenient substitute for “false consciousness”, if one’s worried about being too overtly Marxist). Unfortunately, the need to “behave like savvy insiders all the time” has nothing to do with magical thinking, and everything to do with the sort of person who calls things “magical thinking”.
Seriously, how the hell does “not pretending to be too cool for a comic book movie” have anything to do with behaving like a savvy insider? What weirdass moral inversion—you can say Alinskyite if you want—is he playing, where he’s the one with the staggering intellectual pretensions, but he claims other people are the ones trying to act like savvy insiders?! I’m pretty sure you either get to be pretentious, or denounce other people for being pretentious: you don’t get to do both at once!
The reason people like this movie is they’re not fourteen anymore, and they’re not worried about looking like kids. Only kids care about looking grownup, little boy.
I’m not a fan of superhero movies, either. In fact, I haven’t seen any of the X-Men movies, and don’t plan on seeing this one either. But if I were a film critic, and my job required me to review this, I think I could manage to put aside my personal feelings and review it based upon what a superhero movie aspires to be, rather than denigrating the genre, and by extension all those who do not share my taste.
I applaud you, Christian, for NOT reviewing movies on which you yourself do not feel expert enough to do so (economic-esque for example).
I believe you are correct. Critics MUST (by honor if nothing else) excuse themselves from reviewing films they are either, pro or con, prejudiced to the subject matter. That being said…honor is something only found in the dictionary now-a-days.
This would make Salon.com review far less films. Wait until “Captain America”…if you think the X-Men review is naive, clueless, and slanted, wait until that one.
I imagine “Green Lantern” will garner high marks from Salon.com, Ebert, and the leftist press who most likely will assume this is a superhero for the enviromental movement.
Salon reviews “Captain America”—in other news, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reviews Schindler’s List!
O’Hehir’s making it really hard for me to resist my impulse to Louis Farrakhan-esque geek separatism.
How would O’Hehir review a film like the Lord of the Rings films or Star Wars? These are both the science fiction or fantasy types of films where the characters wear costumes to set the mood and themes of the piece in an effort to tell the story.
Would he have every film made be based on the concept of reality, and only reflect real world styles, themes, and fashions? I think if you, as a critic, have hangups about a particular type of film (superhero, rom-com, war films, etc) then you either need to make that clear from the offset or refrain from reviewing the film.
Would you want to know if a film critic is akin to Abbie Hoffman if they reviewed “Patton” or “Tora, Tora, Tora”? Yes.
And on the flipside of that coin, I suppose I’d like to know if a critic’s biases for some films (like all the extreme fans of Nolan, Apatow, and Scorsese). If all they ever do is praise these films because they like the directors or actors so much, can their reviews be trusted?
At any rate, these biases should be made known from the outset, so the rest of the review can have some context.
O’Hehir est un connard.
Sometimes it’s good to know some French.
Oué, ça c’est la vérité vrais; cet O’Hehir bougre est bébé d’avocat.
It’s even better to know Cajun French.
I have always believed some of the “top” critics (Ebert, for example) rolled over for directors and actors he adored and gave their mediocre films EXCELLENT reviews so he could “get invited to their Christmas parties”.
Sorry…”Festivous celebrations”.
Here is Scientific American waxing on with a “review” of X-Men.
(B@stards!)
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-evolutionary-errors&WT.mc_id=SA_WR_20110608
Sorry…helps if I include the link.
Hey, I live in a Deep Blue state, cut me some slack!
Sometimes the “outside the box” review can be fun, particularly if it is a snooty critic getting lobbed into something, say, Michael Bay. But professionally, I get sent to cover sports I don’t particularly care for, I still find a way to do my job in an honest manner and not let that come out in the story. I think a lot of critics would benefit from that instead of letting the “hate flow,” so to speak. If you can’t do that, or at least find some kind of viable spin for the critique, then don’t go to the theater that day.
The most helpful reviews are the ones where the film doesn’t match the reviewer’s expectations (or what I perceive to be his expectations). O’Hehir’s review only tells me what he thought about the movie before he walked into the theater. I want to know what surprised a reviewer in the theater: the generic-looking wide-release film that an avant garde reviewer enjoyed, or the horror movie that a horror aficionado found disappointing.