Thursday, September 2, 2021

Pushing that Netflix new release up the hill each day

As a critic stuck in lockdown with movie theaters not open, I feel like I'm caught in a devil's bargain with Netflix that may last until I die.

I need to keep posting reviews of new movies on ReelGood for a theoretical audience whose level of engagement with the material is questionable at best, but with nothing new coming out in most Australian cinemas (about half the states are in some form of lockdown), I'm stuck with the streamers.

The other streamers do release new movies, and you better believe I flock to new material on Amazon or Disney+ or AppleTV+ with a sort of unseemly enthusiasm. I'll probably be watching and reviewing that new Amazon Cinderella this weekend.

But most of the time, I'm locked in a battle of wills with Netflix.

On the one hand, I am grateful to Netflix for providing me new grist for the mill. Since this pandemic started 18 months ago, I reckon a full half of the movies I've reviewed, if not more, were Netflix movies.

But that's also part of the problem.

Although film criticism is something that never ends -- until you decide you want it to, I suppose -- there's something especially Sisyphean about Netflix. The new releases come with machine-like regularity. Just when I think I'm on top of what's coming out, I see another new movie on Netflix's screen saver that seems worth throwing into the queue. 

And the thing is they all look promising, at least from a critic's perspective. Either because there's something intriguing about the concept, or because it stars someone famous, or because it's directed by someone famous, or just because it seems like it would be easy to write about.

That last describes He's All That, which I watched on Wednesday night and cranked out a review before bed in order to keep feeding this unquenchable beast.

Given that most of the sarcastic critical responses to this movie present themselves before you even start watching the movie, it's an easy enough review to write in the 30 minutes before you go to bed. Assuming that your preconceived notions of the film were proven correct -- and mine were -- the review basically writes itself. (And whether you think that shows is something you can judge by checking here.) 

But even if watching the movie and writing the review consumed only two hours of my life, which is a pretty good return on investment, it doesn't mean it's still not exhausting on some level. And not all of them come that easily. I think you can see my struggles a lot more clearly in the last Netflix movie I reviewed, Beckett, here

Although I liked that film a lot more than He's All That, the review was much harder to write. It's a sign of how burned out I'm getting that the review reads like an attempt to meet a certain word count rather than an insightful attempt to grapple with the film's themes and strengths and weaknesses. 

And in a real sign of how burned out I'm getting, I failed in my attempt to do a quick turnaround on Beckett last week. I had planned to do the same thing I did last night, watch it and crank out a review in the same night, last Thursday, when the film was already more than two weeks old. (I don't usually like posting a review of a new film much later than that.) But I only got the review about a third written by midday on Friday, and then it was just lost to the weekend. I didn't even post it until Tuesday of this week.

What's the cure for this obvious loss of inspiration, this obvious capitulation to a drudgery to my work that I usually never feel?

Well for one, maybe some weeks I just won't write two reviews, or God forbid, the three I sometimes squeeze in. My own standards are really the only ones I'm trying to meet. That theoretical reading audience doesn't give a rat's ass whether I write two or one or zero reviews in a given week. When there's one there, they'll read it if they care to, and won't if they don't.

But Netflix isn't my only problem. At this moment I actually have three pending reviews of movies I haven't watched, which I'm sort of compelled to watch because I asked for screeners for them for PR people. It would be only two, but one of my writers flaked on the third, which doesn't lessen our obligation to review the film if we want to keep a positive relationship -- or any relationship at all -- with the PR people. 

So not only are there the Netflix movies I feel like I should review because they will actually get eyeballs, because my readers can actually watch them right now while they are in lockdown, because they're movies people might be talking about anyway (like a remake of She's All That), but I also have to review these movies that I, in my infinite wisdom, have requested to watch, even though they are much less likely to be seen by our audience.

There's some endpoint to this, but I don't know what it is. Maybe staffing up more, so my writers will flock to these weekly or sometimes twice weekly new Netflix releases, while I can review only the ones I really care about. Or maybe it'll be just taking a little break for myself. My website isn't going to shrivel up and die if I go without updating it for two weeks. 

I don't know.

All I know is that right now I feel like Sisyphus. There's always a new movie to roll up that hill. It's just right now, even as I try to dig in my heels, I feel the gravity of that heavy object pushing me backwards down the hill I just ascended. If I'm not careful it could crush me. 

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