A critic out of sync

If being more and more out of sync with how others view the core aspects of your industry is a sign that you are slipping at your job, then I may be slipping as a film critic.

The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) is just the latest example of how I am at odds with nearly the entire critical community on a prominent film.

Simply put, I thought this movie was shit. Noah Baumbach has been on a steady but increasingly steep decline since While We're Young, which has some very strong elements but a wrap-up that I thought was beneath him, and disturbingly conventional in its plotting and execution. I thought Mistress America was a misfire from start to finish, but has a couple moments that keep me from out-and-out hating it. And now we've landed on The Meyerowitz Stories, which I pretty much hated. But just as a favor to Mr. Baumbach, who has made many films I've loved, I refrained from giving it only a single star on Letterboxd. I went with 1.5.

If you look at Metacritic, though, this movie has a 79, which includes 38 positive reviews and only one mixed review.

How can other people see such a different movie to what I see when they watch this?

The dialogue is shamefully expository and stilted. The movie never starts with any kind of thesis what it's about, so when my wife and I had to pause it at the 13-minute mark to deal with our children, we asked ourselves before resuming "What's even going on here?" The directing is some of the worst I've seen lately, which is even stranger as people have been talking about how Adam Sandler deserves an Oscar nomination for this film (if he's eligible, which goes back to yesterday's post on whether Netflix films get theatrical releases). Sandler did not commit any obvious gaffes, but award-worthy? Come on. Dustin Hoffman, Ben Stiller and Emma Thompson are more obvious victims of the bad directing, and what was the point of putting Adam Driver in exactly one scene playing a character whose function was indeterminable? There are absurd set pieces that go nowhere and relate to nothing, and Baumbach also employs this technique where he cuts in the middle of a line of dialogue, apparently just to jar us and make us think he's doing something interesting. In short, this is a poorly constructed film with very few merits.

But, 38 positive reviews and one mixed review.

When digging into the distribution of star ratings on Letterboxd, I found that it has 327 five star ratings, 1,042 4.5 star ratings, 3,161 four star ratings, 2,116 3.5 star ratings and 1,116 three star ratings. In short, 92% of its ratings could be construed as positive. It drops way off from there. I'm one of only 44 people who gave it 1.5 stars, and I was almost one of only 37 people to give it one star. (I guess I would have been one of 38 in that case.)

So, I'm out of sync with the rank and file cinephiles as well.

This wouldn't concern me quite as much if this had not also happened two other times within the past two weeks. And they weren't both instances of films I hated. One was one I really liked (dare I say loved?), that others hated.

The other one I hated came last Sunday, when I also issued 1.5 stars to Brigsby Bear, a precious bit of fakery that didn't make me laugh or feel anything. The distribution of positivity for this movie on Metacritic is strikingly similar. This one musters only a 68 to Meyerowitz' 79, but it has 25 reviews marked as positive, eight as mixed, and none negative. So if I were someone whose critical opinions were measured on Metacritic, I would be the only negative review for both of these movies.

Then there's the movie I really liked, which I am daring to tell you about a second time on this blog if you missed the first time: The Emoji Movie. You can just about flip the distribution of star ratings for this movie as for Meyerowitz. My rating of four stars (!) marks me as one of only 40 who gave the movie that star rating. That's compared to the 1,170 who gave it a half star.

Maybe The Emoji Movie isn't the best example. You have to expect a critic to be an outlier on certain movies. But taken in accumulation with some of my other recent judgments, it worries me.

I guess it goes back to how differently I felt about Dunkirk than most people. At least I had the good sense to cross the two-star threshold with Dunkirk. I gave it two stars. And I may watch it again before the end of the year to see how I was wrong. Watch this space.

Perhaps the most alarming thing is that I keep on having to write this post. I don't have a good way to search how many times I've written on this topic over the years, but when I came up with the title for this post, I noticed it was similar to one I'd written back in February of 2010. I called that post "A year out of sync," and commented on how much I felt I'd differed from others on the films of 2009. Was this starting way back then?

The fact that I've now divorced it from a specific slate of films, and broadened the indictment to focus on myself, is perhaps even more alarming than the thing I just called "the most alarming."

But buck up, young Vance. Just three years ago your #1 film was the film that won best picture, and two years ago your #1 film was the one that won best animated feature. Last year your #1 was the film that seemed like a shoe-in to win best foreign language film, until it didn't. You've also had times when you've worried your choices were too conventional.

I suppose every critic has these times of feeling out of sync, and they are both good and bad things depending on the circumstances. You don't want to lose your credibility by recommending things people hate and shunning things people love, but if you're always predictable and fall in line, then that's no fun either. Really, you just have to be you and give your honest opinions, and hope people value them.

I'm sure by the end of the year I will have a top ten list that looks kind of like they always do -- six or seven that are widely beloved, and three or four "weird" choices that speak more to my personal tastes, or what happens to have struck me as particularly distinctive in a given year.

The Emoji Movie won't be making that cut, at least.