Look, We Aren’t Called Film ‘Critics’ for Nothing

Hear that? The grinding noises way off in the distance? It’s not termites. It’s only those infernal movie critics sharpening their axes and oyster knives in preparation for their year-end, pre-awards post-mortems. Sooner than you or I are prepared, metric tons of punditry about the Year 2000 in Movies will ooze out of the great American screening room faster than “Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas” sucked the oxygen out of whatever multiplex cubbyhole you happened to see it in.

You would be correct in assuming that I’m one of those grinches who didn’t care for Ron Howard’s “Grinch.” (My son, once again, shook me down for stars after we’d seen it. I told him I’d give four to Jim Carrey and, at best, one to the movie as a whole. Fuzzy math, I know, but average it out.) You would also be correct in assuming that what I think doesn’t mean a chicken’s toenail in the real world, whose box office is now being ruled, without any serious challengers in the vicinity, by the Big Hairy Green Thing.

People complain all the time about how . . . well, so darned negative we professional spectators are toward movies in general and Hollywood movies in particular. But as “Grinch’s” $172-million-and-counting bounty would seem to confirm, our spoilsportsmanship has little or no toxic impact on such marketing machines. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to find some readers out there who will buy tickets for a movie because of its bad reviews by those effete, impudent snobs.

Don’t hold me to this, but my sensors are picking up signals from my colleagues about their choices for year’s best that will convince Hollywood partisans that we’re a cabal of elitists. (“Nothing I’ve picked so far hasn’t got subtitles,” confessed one reviewer culling for highlights.) Hello? We are elitists, each in our own quirky way. We’re paid to separate good from bad, time well-spent from time wasted--and you can change “time” to “money” in that last clause without shredding its meaning.

But believe it or not, we don’t hate movies. We hate hating movies. Our idea of heaven is a year like 1999, when the movies--high-, low- and middlebrow, foreign and domestic, big and small--were so generally good that even the stuff we didn’t like that much was still more interesting than, say, most of this year’s Hollywood product. Which isn’t to say that 2000’s mediocrity was of a greater dimension than other, similarly dismal seasons. It’s just such a relative downer coming as it did after such a stellar year.

More, much more, will be said about the movie year’s overall quality--or lack thereof. What probably won’t get talked about as much when talking about 2000’s movies is the unusual number of “cutting-edge” films that drastically polarized audiences and critics. Disagreement itself is to be expected. But such movies as “Dancer in the Dark,” “Bamboozled,” “Black and White” and “Requiem for a Dream” seemed to do more than merely challenge their audiences. They pushed them into distant warring camps, each beyond the reach of bridges, boats, planes and general consensus.

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So sharply divided was the reaction to “Dancer” that some media outlets ran separate reviews, pro and con. Much of this wrangling went on, more or less, beneath the mainstream’s radar. But as awards season approaches, those who think (as I did) that Lars von Trier goes over the top to little good effect and those who believe him to have forged a new kind of movie-musical triumph will be shouting at one another as they try to decide whether Von Trier or his leading lady, Bjork, deserves a trophy.

My own stance places me squarely among those who are allergic to movies that go gratuitously over the top and rub the audience’s faces in grit, slime and terror. So explain to me why I dug “Requiem for a Dream” so much. Darren Aronofsky’s tour of Hubert Selby Jr.’s lower depths of Brooklyn is as stylistically muscle-bound and as emotionally queasy as “Dancer.” Besides which, Ellen Burstyn’s flameout is a lot more painful to watch than Bjork’s (though they both deserve the same trophies). And yet, I was down with the movie’s mad-real distortions of reality--especially when what the Rolling Stones once referred to as “mother’s little helper” kicks Burstyn’s character’s head into Wacky Land.

So if you think critics are being too hard on something you enjoyed, remember that, no matter what we say to the contrary, we don’t always know why we like what we like. And don’t tell anyone I told you this.