GAG ME WITH A SUPERLATIVE! ! ! : Is It Possible That Movies Can Be Better Than Ever?

Say that you’re wanting to while away a couple hours dreaming in the dark. You pick up your paper and turn to the movie ads to find that they are . . .

. . . Stunning . . . Astonishing . . . Glorious . . . Captivating . . . Fascinating . . . Riveting . . . Glorious . . . Towering . . . A treasure . . . A rare gift . . . A masterpiece . . . A classic . . . Pure pleasure. . . .

Many of these critical assessments are punctuated by exclamation points!

Just like that.

You figure you had died and gone to Movie Heaven with an exclamation point!

The aforementioned words are samplings from our Daily Calendar ads the other Friday. On my calculator, I counted 124 super-superlative quotations. Seems like more quotes than ever. Maybe the Guinness people should be put on alert.

Some of these exciting words describe movies that haven’t even opened yet. In one case, the movie is still in sneak previews!

The quotees represent almost every studio and film distributor of every stripe; the quoters cover movie reviewers from across our country.

Including critics from the Wall Street Journal and Financial News Network.

Nothing wrong with the money media sending critics over to check out the movies. It just sounds funny to imagine your pal saying, “Hey, Financial News Network says this movie is a ‘Towering rare masterpiece classic!’ We gotta rush right over!”

In the same sense, you wouldn’t think to call our neighborhood movie critic and say, “Say, hey, Sheila babe, can you recommend a really stunning and riveting money market account?”

Are movies better than ever? Were movies ever this good? Can movies ever be this good?

We can’t blame critics for invoking a superlative here and there. They are learned people who know their way around thesauruses, so you can’t expect them to use minimal adjectives like . . . pretty good, adequate, bang-up, swell, edifying, beneficial, not half-bad. . . .

(Or if not good, the movie can be described as . . . not good, untoward, deleterious, disadvantageous, cheesy. . . .)

But I’ve seen a few of these movies around which the above superlatives were wrapped; I’ve read a few of the reviews. I don’t recall the critics’ enthusiasms suggested by the extraction of the most magnificent words aforementioned.

The searing analogy that comes to mind are that the single words are like precious teeth that are ripped out of your mouth by some evil dentist.

We don’t tell critics what to write, only how long to write it, and then plead with them to get it in somewhere around deadline.

These are studious and learned people, who spend a lot of energy and consider able amounts of air time and/or valuable newsprint expressing their opinions, defining, clarifying, equivocating, evoking, even evading. It’s a stretch imagining that one adjectival phrase evokes their whole attitude.

Well, we have to acknowledge, there are a lot of unlikely movie critics these days. There are a few of them whose views can be summarized in a small phrase or, say, a numeral.

Like who am I doing now, bouncing in my chair with no hair?

“It’s a 10! It’s a 10! It’s a 10!”

If I were the one making The Rules, I would issue an order in capital letters PROHIBITING movie distributors and their ad/pub people (as advertising/publicity people are fondly addressed) from using our critics’ grand adjectives to hype their movies. So much of the movie media seems to have become co-conspirators in the hype and it’s tough enough in these dark days of disinformation to figure out what’s true or nearly true or we’d like to be true.

The punishment for violating this Executive Order would be that the offenders would be sentenced (with no right of appeal) to see the whole movie until the ending.

There may be a few critics who won’t like this sort of directive, since they like to see their names in the paper a lot. In fact, we’ve heard of critics who have asked ad/pub people why their reviews haven’t been extrapolated of late.

And what about a new policy of not reviewing movies that are intended strictly as commerce with not even the merest pretensions of art. Why send a critic, who is studied in the art of moving pictures and knows how to spell, etc., to see the “Porky’ses” cand the “Friday the 13ths” of the world?

Then they can think heavier about the real movies and what they mean, if they mean anything at all, and have more time to make their deadlines.

Then we can send over the critics from the Financial News Network, Business Week and Standard & Poor’s and they can drop words like bullish , negotiability , leveraging , liquidity . Then there is more sense to be made of concepts like raiders and sharks and gross national products.

Fortune could announce its 500 top films. Kiplinger Letter could sneak in movie tips.

These people know numerals and numeral assessments. They can make better sense out of figures.

You can picture the New York Movie Stock Exchange (affectionately, “the Big Board”) and some balding critic from Dow Jones has just come back from seeing “Howard the Duck, Part 2” and bounces up and down in his chair chanting, “It’s a 10! It’s a 10! It’s a 10!”

For people who understand numbers, who enjoy numbers, this would have real value.