Readers who can see the future

One of my favorite late-December occurrences is when my Best/Worst of the Year issue of Entertainment Weekly arrives in the mail. This year that day was this past Friday.

I've been reading EW film critics Owen Gleiberman and Lisa Schwartzbaum for something like 15 years, or however long they've been entrenched at the magazine -- it's possible they were even the magazine's original two film critics. As with any critics, I've agreed and disagreed with both of them over the years. But since I think they both write very well, they're two of my favorite critics to read, regardless of whether our opinions line up. (Since you're never going to agree with everything a critic has to say, the most important thing is that you like how he/she writes -- it's our ability to write that earned most of us our jobs as critics, not our exquisite taste in movies.)

So I practically get heart palpitations when the year-end double issue arrives. I'm just that excited to see which movies they've each named their top ten of the year, not to mention their bottom five.

But as excited as I am, I don't tear right into it. I enjoy the experience of reading these lists so much, I don't want to just ruin it with a quick perusal. I want to have a moment to myself without any interruptions, to take in everything they have to say. Sometimes I even try to cover the opposite side of the page with my hand, so I don't accidentally read the other movies in their top ten (there's a 150-word writeup on each) before it's time to do so naturally.

Anyway, I got that private moment in our hammock yesterday afternoon while my son was taking a nap. (Yep, it was hammock weather where I am -- suck it.) And this year's reading of the lists was as good as ever. I'm expecting to have a lot of crossover with their top tens.

There's plenty of enjoyment to be had in the margins of this spread (which takes up five or six pages) as well -- humorous little asides and other "awards" given out by the two critics. (One example this year: "The Saw VI Enough Already Award," awarded to the Paranormal Activity series.)

This year, they also reserved one whole margin for the readers' picks for the top 10 movies of the year, which are about what you would expect -- with one notable exception. Here, let's see if you can figure out the exception:

1. The Dark Knight Rises
2. The Avengers
3. Argo
4. Skyfall
5. Silver Linings Playbook
6. Lincoln
7. The Hunger Games
8. The Perks of Being a Wallflower
9. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
10. Les Miserables

No cheating by looking at the poster art from this post.

It's strange enough that enough readers were able to vote The Hobbit into the top ten in only a few days between the film's release and the deadline (let's say it was Wednesday) for this issue. Especially since some of those who saw it must have disliked either the story itself or the 48 fps projection, reducing some of its likelihood of making the top ten.

Far stranger: That enough readers voted Les Miserables into the top ten when it hasn't even come out yet.

Huh?

Yeah, maybe anywhere from a couple hundred to a thousand of the magazine's readers were lucky enough to attend some special advanced screening in their city. But the number of these advanced screenings would be very small, and again, it would require almost universal acclaim from those readers to even get into the top 20, one would think, let alone the top 10.

Yet I don't think Entertainment Weekly is making these numbers up. Why would they? There would be too great a risk of discovery. It's not like this is the same as Stephen Glass fabricating entire stories in The New Republic, but any journalistic outlet of any repute would want to avoid even a minor scandal along these lines. And say what you will about Entertainment Weekly, but it's one of the most reputable of the magazines that are devoted to the arts and celebrity culture (outside of the terminally high-brow ones, I should say).

If they did fudge the numbers, though, I'd have to think it would be due to the regrettable problem we critics face this time of year: the fact that the calendar says it's time for us to finalze our lists, but we still haven't seen all the movies we think we must see before we can. To address this very problem, I don't finalize my list until the morning the Oscar nominations come out. In the past, that allowed me until late January or even early February to continue watching and fine-tuning. As I've written about numerous times, I have until only January 10th this time around.

It stands to reason that Entertainment Weekly didn't want a definitive list of the readers' choices for best movies of 2012 if three likely favorites -- Django Unchained, Zero Dark Thirty and the aforementioned Les Miserables -- hadn't even come out yet. There's a decent chance the actual best picture winner will come from this group (ZDT and Les Mis are considered front-runners), so years from now it may look strange if the readers snubbed the eventual winner -- even when you do consider practical realities like publication deadlines. I guess it really depends on how much EW cares about this kind of thing. Realistically, not much.

My wife floated a different idea last night, that readers were voting based on what they expected themselves to like the most. Maybe the readers were doing the work that EW couldn't ethically do, predicting their own tendencies based only on things like trailers and the already-existing buzz. However, that would seem unusually organized on their part -- especially as a strategy that had to be undertaken by multiple voters.

It's also possible EW set up this poll in a fashion they knew was dubious without actually crossing over into unethical. I never saw this online poll, so I have no idea if it was "fill in your own answer" or "select from this list of choices." If the latter, they could have provided Les Mis as an option (even knowing that the movie hadn't been released) in order to get a bunch of yahoos who were excited about it to choose that answer as a gauge of their own excitement. I'd have to think this is most likely the thing that actually happened. But if so, that's problematic in a whole bunch of other ways -- it means that just for the sake of sheer manageability, they would have had to eliminate a number of marginal contenders and necessarily pre-set the parameters for what the final readers' choice list might look like. And besides, if this is what they did, wouldn't they have presented at least Django as an option also? Perhaps theater lovers make up a bigger portion of their readership than those who fetishize violence.

Of course, in an online poll, readers can vote anywhere -- from other parts of the world as well, where the magazine is probably also circulated. But as far as I can tell, unlike with some other prominent recent releases, this movie hasn't opened elsewhere around the world yet. And again, even so, we'd be talking about a very small percentage. 

I suppose what I should really hope is that Les Mis is just so damn great that even the small group of people who have seen it are vocal enough in their support to earn it a legitimate spot on a list like this. I'm enough of a sucker for the theater that I've had my arms wide open to embrace another movie musical ever since Chicago swept me off my feet. However, its 58 Metascore tells me that's probably not the case.

At least I'll definitely see it in time to consider it for my own top 10. The only other time I saw Les Mis was as a 12-year-old child on a family trip to England, where we got tickets in the last row of the theater where it was playing in London's West End. I loved it then when the characters were just specks, so I have to imagine that some of these much talked-about emotions will be stirred up again when Fantine and Cosette are practically in my lap. (I've heard the film features a lot of extreme close-ups.)

Looking forward to making an assessment of its quality that isn't based on crystal balls or time machines.

Safe Men stars became safe bets

Although I quibbled with some of Entertainment Weekly's choices for its 50 Best Movies You've Never Seen, a recent feature that has gotten more publicity than I thought it would, one I can't quibble with after seeing it on Friday night is Safe Men, a 1998 safecracker comedy from writer-director John Hamburg. I don't know about "best," but it's certainly pretty delightful, and I certainly hadn't seen it.

In fact, it's kind of a surprise this film doesn't have a higher profile considering some of the stars it begat.

It's not that the actors appearing in this movie hadn't previously had careers. But most of them were just on the verge of hitting it big, and if I had seen this movie when it was first released, it would have been my first exposure to some of them.

Let's consider it:

Sam Rockwell 
Plays: Sam, a would-be professional singer who can't hold a tune and performs at retirement homes, who is mistaken for a world-class safecracker
First film: Clownhouse (1989, Victor Salva)
First time I became aware of him: Galaxy Quest (1999, Dean Parisot). "Is there air? You don't know!!"
Since: Charlie's Angels, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Matchstick Men, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Moon, Iron Man 2, Cowboys & Aliens

Steve Zahn
Plays: Eddie, the other half of the delusional singing duo, whose father coincidentally happens to have been an actual safecracker
First film: Rain Without Thunder (1992, Gary O. Bennett)
First time I became aware of him: Not 100% sure if I recognized his contribution in Reality Bites (1994, Ben Stiller), but definitely by That Thing You Do! (1996, Tom Hanks)
Since: Out of Sight, You've Got Mail, Stuart Little, Stuart Little 2, Joy Ride, Sahara, Chicken Little, Sunshine Cleaning

Paul Giamatti
Plays: Veal Chop, a low-level Providence gangster (referred to as the "intern" to a senior gangster) who assumes, based on circumstantial evidence, that Sam and Eddie are the safecrackers he's looking for
First film: Past Midnight (1991, Jan Eliasberg)
First time I became aware of him: Private Parts (1997, Betty Thomas) -- who could forget Pig Vomit?
Since: Man on the Moon, Planet of the Apes, American Splendor, Sideways, Cold Souls, Win Win, The Ides of March

Mark Ruffalo
Plays: Frank, one of the actual safecrackers, who is still in love with his ex-girlfriend (Christina Kirk), Sam's current love interest
First film: Mirror Mirror 2: Raven Dance (1994, Jimmy Lifton)
First time I became aware of him: You Can Count on Me (2000, Kenneth Lonergan)
Since: The Last Castle, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Zodiac, Where the Wild Things Are, Shutter Island, The Kids Are All Right, The Avengers

Peter Dinklage
Plays: LeFlore, a "cleaner" type who comes in at the end to, well, clean things up
First film: Living in Oblivion (1995, Tom DeCillo)
First time I became aware of him: The Station Agent (2003, Tom McCarthy)
Since: Elf, The Baxter, Death at a Funeral, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, Ice Age: Continental Drift, Game of Thrones
Note: This is not how Dinklage looks in the film, but this is probably about how old he was. I guess I tested the outer limits of the internet when I tried to find a picture of Peter Dinklage in Safe Men.

Incidentally, all five of these actors are between the ages of 43 and 45.

The film also features Michael Lerner and Harvey Fierstein, but it would be fair to say they were both already established by then -- and haven't done all that much since.

In fact, the one woman in Safe Men -- literally, almost the only woman in the cast -- is the only one who did not go on to greater things. Christina Kirk has worked consistently since then, but the fact that I had to look her up means that she did not go on to have the kind of career she thought she might. She couldn't have been blamed for thinking that this role, as a romantic lead in a small comedy whose male actors were all on the verge of big things, might set her up for her own career of prominent Hollywood showcases. Her wry delivery and undeniable cuteness might suggest she deserved it.

But she did not ultimately have "it," so Kirk has occupied herself in such roles as "party hostess" in Along Came Polly. She has appeared in a couple films I've liked, though: In addition to Polly, she has also appeared in Bug, Melinda and Melinda and Taking Woodstock.

I guess not everybody can become the Incredible Hulk.

A disappointing decline

There were two new major studio releases this week: A Nightmare on Elm Street and Furry Vengeance.

Neither of them was reviewed in this week's Entertainment Weekly.

Which is hardly the fault of Entertainment Weekly. In fact, I'm getting accustomed to seeing the following feature, almost every week, in the magazine's pages: Reviews Online. It's a little box graphic with one (or in this case, two) photos in it, and the following text:

"The studios behind the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street and Furry Vengeance declined to screen them in time to include in this issue. You can find our reviews at EW.com."

EW has to include the Reviews Online box almost every week, but this week I really noticed it, because both of the new prominent releases were not reviewed. Usually one of them would lead off the magazine's movie section, but in the absence of that, Lisa Schwarzbaum had to write an essay called "Directors and their muses." (During which she does also submit a review of Nicole Holofcener's new movie, Please Give, whose studio was gracious enough to make it eligible for critical dissection. Then again, Lisa gave it an A-, so I guess the studio was pretty confident in it.)

There was once a time when a movie could not escape the glare of critics, no matter how wretched it was. You made the movie, you had to stand behind it, at least to the extent that working professionals were given the chance to view your product and let others know whether or not they should consume it.

Not now. If you're the least bit skittish about whether your movie is any good, it's all too easy to avoid the kind of critical lambasting that would kill your movie's opening weekend box office. And why shouldn't a studio avail themselves of this opportunity? It's only business. Granted, a shrewd viewer will probably be even more frightened off by learning that a studio refused to screen a movie for critics, than for reading a bad review. Of course, the movie industry's entire infrastructure is based on the fact that most people are not shrewd viewers.

I should comment here that both of these films are currently reviewed on the website I write for, and were up at a reasonable hour during the day yesterday. Which means either our critics scampered out to a midnight Thursday night screening (which may have been available for Elm Street, probably not for Vengeance) and wrote something up in the wee hours of Friday morning, or more likely, there were critics screenings of the films, they just were not held in time for Entertainment Weekly's deadline.

But I don't find this much of an excuse. Studios are fully cognizant of what they need to do to get a movie reviewed in the pages of Entertainment Weekly, one of our country's leading resources for film criticism, and in the pages of other weekly magazines. Not setting up a screening until the Wednesday night before the film's release is not an "accident," not some low-level functionary's failure to meet the deadline due to inexperience. It's a calculated attempt to add a couple million to the film's box office, because those 300,000 people won't have read how bad the movie was in the pages of Entertainment Weekly.

If I were speaking from the perspective of a studio, I might consider this a smart move. Perhaps I consider it a smart move, even not speaking from that perspective. But I'm coming at it from the critical side, from the judicial branch, from the perspective of someone who thinks that every movie should be judged on its merits. In fact, I use the language of government intentionally here. I would almost be in favor of the existence of a body that required films to be screened a certain amount of time prior to their release. No such body will ever exist, but it should.

So I guess both A Nightmare on Elm Street and Furry Vengeance are pretty bad. I can't say I'm surprised. For about five minutes my wife and I talked about seeing Furry Vengeance. See, she's from Australia, where they don't have squirrels, so she loves loves loves squirrels -- and that's spilled over to me having a renewed love for them. Our mutual love of squirrels has spilled over to loving other critters and woodland creatures.

Furry Vengeance gave us the hope of speaking to us specifically, even if it stars Brendan Fraser and looks stupid. Well, not now. I'm part of a system, Furry Vengeance, and you need to participate in that system as well if you want any love from me.

Really putting yourself out there

Late December and early January are that time of year when film enthusiasts consume massive quantities of top ten lists. For me, they are like Lay's potato chips -- I can't eat just one. Once I've read one critic's top ten list, I want to find all the others in existence.

Usually, this is an exercise in trying to have my own viewpoints endorsed. As I have been compiling my own list throughout the year, I am eager to see how well I've done, as it were. I've talked about this at length previously. As much as many film critics like to be iconoclasts, we also want others to agree with us. It reminds us that we are actually qualified to do this job.

But I'm also looking for the weird exceptions -- the films that no one else liked that make it onto these lists. In a way, this also validates us, because every film critic I know has championed a film that no one else liked. It's a relief when you see other people making bold choices that could bring scorn heaping down upon them.

I still remember the guts it took in 2001, when I ranked Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and Rush Hour 2 in my top ten. Even copping to this fact now puts my reputation in harm's way. But I knew full well what I was doing, knew that these choices might make me the object of great derision. I still say that Final Fantasy was a lush, technologically advanced and sometimes moving animated sci-fi epic, and though I haven't sat down for Rush Hour 2 a second time, I remember considering it one of the most enjoyable buddy action comedies I'd ever seen. I'm a firm believer that any film that's the best version of what it's trying to be might qualify for my top ten. Those spots are not reserved for the arthouse only.

Around this time, I also took a great interest in this website that had hundreds of critics' top ten lists compiled in one place. I submitted my own list in 2001. When it never appeared on the site, I couldn't help blaming my inclusion of Final Fantasy and Rush Hour 2 as the reason for its denial. Even though my top three were pretty conventional choices -- Gosford Park, Memento and Amelie -- and even though I also had some smartly unconventional choices -- Waking Life, The Anniversary Party and Amores Perros -- it was those two unusual picks that seemed to doom me. (Full disclosure: Now that I look at the list, I see that the Mark Wahlberg hair band movie Rock Star was also on there -- another film that I still champion to this day. And since I've now named the other nine in my top ten, I'll say that my #4 was Vanilla Sky, which I now like better than any of them, but which was probably also an unpopular decision. And in case you're wondering about an obvious omission, I didn't see my favorite film of 2001 -- Donnie Darko -- until 2003.)

There are, however, limits to this championing of unpopular movies. Including on your list movies that most people probably sort of liked, but certainly not as high as their top ten, is one thing. But putting a movie that almost everyone hated as high as #2 on your list, and then comparing that movie to one of the greatest horror-thrillers of all time, is quite another.

That's what Stephen King did in his top ten list, printed in this week's Entertainment Weekly.

Now, King is not a film critic, but he is one in the sense that everyone else is: All film fans know what they like and what they don't, and some non-critics take the time to make their own top ten lists. As they should. Even if I get sacked tomorrow, I will probably still make a top ten list every year until I die. And King does have a bully pulpit, as a columnist who appears in the News & Notes section about once a month (as does Juno scribe Diablo Cody).

King loves ranking things, be it books (which he did recently), music (which he seems to do several times a year) or TV. This may be the first movie list of his I've seen, but then again, he probably published one last year as well. I just may not remember it as well, because it was not nearly so outrageous as this year, when the remake of The Last House on the Left was his second-favorite film of the year.

Not only that, but he went on to call it "on par with Silence of the Lambs."

I'll let that sink in a moment.

Now, I haven't seen The Last House on the Left. Nor have I seen The Taking of Pelham 123 (another remake) or Law Abiding Citizen, two other films King at least had the decency to leave in the bottom half of his top ten. But what I heard about Last House on the Left was that it was not only torturous in subject matter -- the story is quite literally about the sadistic torture of two teenage girls -- but torturous in quality as well. In fact, EW critic Owen Gleiberman must have bristled when he read King's list. The Men Who Stare at Goats wasn't the only F grade Gleiberman gave out last year -- he also gave one to this movie.

And The Last House on the Left has an additional significance to me, in the following sense: Before the film was offered to some director I've never heard of named Dennis Iliadis, it was offered to the one feature film director I know personally. In fact, when I saw him last September, we were thanking his lucky stars that he didn't take the project. Maybe he would have felt differently if he knew the world's most famous horror novelist was going to heap it with praise.

The point is not whether or not Stephen King is an idiot. He's not only the world's biggest purveyor of horror, he might also be its biggest fan. This can make a person either hypercritical of horror films, or much more accepting, and King seems to have chosen the latter route.

The point really is -- wow. That's really putting yourself out there. That's really bucking the trend.

And for me, it seems like in order to do something like this, you need to have accumulated years of cultural cachet and have plenty of tenure. Having Stephen King as a columnist is a boon to Entertainment Weekly, no matter what he says. It increases the magazine's profile, even if it does not in itself sell more copies. And I'm sure EW considers King to be kind of an Andy Rooney-type curmudgeon, a sixtysomething who can say whatever he wants because he's earned it. He'd have to do a lot worse than champion a universally reviled film to be kicked out of EW's pages.

But comparing it to Silence of the Lambs? Whaaa ...?

It again raises that issue of whether there is, or should be, a litmus test for a person to prove he/she has the ability to speak authoritatively about movies. King gets a pass, of course, specifically because he is not a critic. What's more, it's kind of understood that Stephen King did not see 150 movies last year. He's choosing his top ten from the 40 or 50 he did see.

But what if it were Gleiberman who decided to make Last House on the Left his #2 movie, and compare it to Silence of the Lambs? What then?

I'm just glad it wasn't me. I'm still trying to live down that whole Rush Hour 2 debacle.

A powerful responsibility

I don't read other people's reviews very often. I think I may have mentioned this before.

It seems like an odd thing for a person involved in a creative endeavor to say. Novelists get better by reading other novelists, filmmakers get better by watching other filmmakers.

But there are several reasons I abstain from reading the work of other critics: 1) If I one day review this film, I don't want to be subconsciously influenced by their perspective; 2) I don't want them to give away things about the film before I've seen it (most critics are good about not revealing spoilers, but not all); 3) I don't want to have my excitement about seeing a particular film destroyed by a negative review.

However, once I do see the film, and I know I'm not going to be reviewing it, then I'm really eager to hear what other critics have to say. That's when I learn from other writers and apply it to my own work. I have a post-viewing ritual of always reading the review on the website I write for, and I also try to go back and find the issue of Entertainment Weekly that carried that particular review, since I have a subscription. There are other critics I read, but not as regularly.

One thing I haven't been able to wean myself off of, though, is checking EW to see the letter grades given out each week. In fact, I have a ritual each Friday of opening directly to the reviews, and scanning the single-letter summations either Owen Gleiberman or Lisa Schwarzbaum has given, with a + or - sometimes affixed for good measure. This saves me from the first two issues listed above, but not the third. A bad letter grade could still cause me to drop a film from my list of weekend priorities.

Case in point: The Men Who Stare at Goats. The second-most surprising letter grade in last week's EW, after the A grade given to Disney's A Christmas Carol, was the grade Owen Gleiberman gave The Men Who Stare at Goats:

F.

That's right, F. F as in Failure. F as in Fuggedaboutit. F as in worst Fucking movie you've ever seen.

Needless to say, this left me slightly less enthused for the military satire starring George Clooney and Ewan McGregor, directed by Clooney's good buddy, Grant Heslov.

But the choice was taken out of my hands by circumstance. My wife's sister and mother have been in town for the past week, and it had always been the plan to kill an evening with them at the movies. My wife decided that The Men Who Stare at Goats represented the best compromise between a film we wanted to see, a film she thought they would enjoy, and a film that would be light and fun. So we scheduled it for last night. And I prepared myself for a little experiment: To boldly go to the theater, even though one of my most frequently read critics reserved the worst rating in his arsenal for this movie.

As I was watching, I kept waiting for that F to materialize. Even realizing I was enjoying it quite a bit, I figured the other shoe was about to drop. Something big would have to happen to turn this movie into a train wreck. To give something an F, a critic should walk away feeling actually offended by the movie in question. At the very least it should be shoddily made and almost totally without merit. And even as we had made it through 80 of the 90 minutes in good shape, I was half expecting someone to drop their pants and defecate on a corpse in the final scene.

Simply put, the F never materialized. I laughed many times and found the film incredibly entertaining. I currently have it ranked 11th out of the 54 movies I've seen this year. The others in my party felt as positively as I did, if not more so.

F?

It's a flabbergasting indictment. I was eager to read Gleiberman's vitriol the moment I got home, but had left the issue on my desk at work. So I read it first thing this morning when I got in. And even though he quite obviously did not like the film, it did not read like an F review.

Granted, different people may define an F rating in different ways. My wife thinks that it has to be the worst movie you've ever seen. My guess is, the critics at EW don't want to give out only a handful of Fs in their entire professional careers, so to them, an F rating is not quite that extreme. But it does mean that you should not, under any circumstances, even to save your life, see this movie.

And it's not the first time that Gleiberman has written an F review with which we completed disagreed. In fact, any time I apprise my wife of a letter grade given in EW, and she disagrees with it even slightly, she cites the example of Timur Bekmambetov's Night Watch. We loved this film; Owen Gleiberman did not. To my wife, his F review of Night Watch, by itself, undermines the very credibility of Entertainment Weekly.

Which gets at the larger issue that goes well beyond The Men Who Stare at Goats and Night Watch, the one I teased in the title for this post, and am finally getting to now: Just how much power a prominent critic can wield. Damning or praising a film is not a responsibility to be taken lightly. Just think of how many people did not see The Men Who Stare at Goats as a result of Gleiberman's excoriation of it. The film made $12.7 million in the U.S. last weekend. But with even a C from Gleiberman, could that have ticked up as high as $14 million?

The answer is, probably not. The answer is, most viewers probably care a lot more about the stars and the snippets they see in ads (Clooney makes that goat fall over -- with his mind!!) than they do about what over-educated film snobs have to say about it. (We're not all film snobs -- but most of us are probably over-educated). But I clearly can't believe that reviews hold no sway at all, otherwise, what am I even doing here?

The old saying is that there's no accounting for taste, and it's true, any one person can hate a film that any other person loves. The difference between critics and other people is that we have been trusted with the sacred task of being correct. What we say is supposed to have actual validity, and not be unduly influenced by an idiosyncratic world view. It's implied in the very job description that we should be able to put ourselves in the shoes of the average viewer, to help that viewer make practical determinations about what they will actually like and actually not like.

In fact, I sometimes wonder whether I have excelled as a film critic merely because I am a good writer (if I do say so myself), or because I am uniquely qualified to decide whether a film is good or not. It's a gray area to be sure. Let's just say I take the responsibility seriously, and if I guess that my own opinion of a film may diverge from the mainstream, I will be careful in what I write. I will really only let loose on a film if I am pretty sure most other people agree with me, which is why I wonder how I would have reviewed a film like Burn After Reading, which I hated, but which is directed by the Coen brothers, and which many people loved. It would have killed me to say anything nice about that film, so I'm glad I never had to make the choice.

The larger issue is not the credibility of the critic, but the credibility of the institution that employs the critic. If Owen Gleiberman (or myself, or any other critic) were just a blogger, he would not have to feel accountable to anybody but himself. He could hate The Men Who Stare at Goats all he wanted without worrying about how it reflected on anyone but him. And I'm sure he and Lisa do have that agreement with Entertainment Weekly. If they had to worry about censoring themselves toward the mainstream, they'd probably quit, and I'd certainly support that decision. The only reason I censor myself even slightly is that I am still paranoid that someone will finally decide that I suck, and cut me off. And also because my reviews have a slightly different purpose, which is somewhere between my own views of a film and the critical consensus on it. When you review a film that came out several years ago, you know what you're up against with the rest of the critical community.

But that raises another interesting point. Because they are reviewing these films without the benefit of any other reviews, letter grades or star ratings currently in existence, critics who write real-time reviews really have no idea how the film will be received. Maybe Gleiberman did indeed think that most other critics would consider The Men Who Stare at Goats an utter piece of crap, and that his hatred of it would seem all the more enlightened. Instead, he backed the wrong horse -- most other critics have been charmed by it. That's why critics, like second-guessed athletes, must stop worrying what other people think. Unless, that is, you start to find yourself consistently out of step with the mainstream, which can be a warning sign for any critic, regardless of how much autonomy he or she has.

But back to that little matter of the credibility of the institution. Gleiberman's F review for Night Watch caused my wife to cast a permanent skeptical eye toward Entertainment Weekly, and his review of Goats is sure to compound that further. For all the staffers at EW who liked Goats, it's got to be hard to stomach the fact that Gleiberman's F grade is the magazine's official stance on the film. That F grade won't die when all the subscribers throw out their physical copies of that issue. No, it'll be preserved for eternity on the web, available to any future surfer who searches the title. After all, that's how I confirmed that it was, indeed, Owen who wrote the Night Watch F review.

And that's where a writer's full body of work comes in. Owen Gleiberman has been working at Entertainment Weekly for decades, and the lion's share of the time, what he says about a film is spot-on. Quibbling over one F grade is not going to be worth it, as each new week features an onslaught of six or more new titles. Onward and upward. In Owen We Trust.

Because it is all about trust. You have to trust a critic to speak for you, to mold your official opinions about pop culture, official opinions that could/will be shared with the entire world. You have to trust this person to wield the F grade only when necessary, even if you disagree with his/her usage of it. You have to trust this person with his/her influence over box office, over the careers of stars and directors, over the future of studios.

Quite a powerful responsibility indeed.