"Anything Day" Movie Marathon

Run out of things to do around your house with your kids/yourself that have any semblance of structure?

Well, have you tried nothing? Or, should I say, anything?

Easter Saturday was a day like that for us.

I wanted to call it Do Whatever You Want Day, but my wife, who came up with the idea, insisted on the branding Anything Day. (To be fair, though, I would have come up with the idea myself had I not thought there was a 100% chance she would reject it.)

And on Anything Day, what you did was this: whatever you want.

That went for both the fortysomething adults and the, um, first-decade-of-their-lives-something kids.

No one could tell you to get off your device. No one could tell you to get out of your pajamas. You could raid the pantry, within reason, especially if no one say you doing it, which they weren't likely to do.

The only rules were that you had to eat meals, brush your teeth at the end of the day and go to bed at close to the time you usually did. And that you could not compel anyone else to do anything they did not want to do (we'll see how well that worked out in a minute). Oh, you could ask someone if they wanted to do something, like play a game. But the other person could just say no.

It was a masterstroke, I think, and now that it's happened once, I daresay it'll be likely to happen again sometime during the indefinite duration of this quarantine.

I, of course, chose a movie marathon.

The way it ended up working out was that we basically each resided primarily in one room. Going from the front of our house back, my wife was mostly in our bedroom, my older son was mostly in the kids' room with his various devices, my younger son was mostly in our living room with our TV, and I was mostly in the garage with my movie marathon, as I will explain in more detail in just a moment. The kitchen/dining room was neutral territory for all intents and purposes.

Now, I had three main guiding principles to my marathon, none of which worked out quite the way I'd hoped.

1) The movies would all be kid-friendly in nature, so people could pop in and not be shocked by a beheading, an outrageous sex act or an ill-timed f-bomb.

2) The kids would be expected to watch something with me at some point, if not through actual compulsion than through suggestion, and because #3 would make it so much fun.

3) The movies would be watched on our projector.

Now, if you remember from my birthday trips to the hotel for my hotel movie marathons, I use this projector to project on the wall at the hotel. But it's a cheap projector. It cost me less than $80 on Gumtree, the Australian equivalent of Craigslist, and I knew it would really only serve the purpose of the unique scenario for which I was buying it, and possibly rarely a scenario like the one that arose yesterday.

The image quality is not particularly good, as I think this projector was designed for stationary content at a meeting, and maybe only a meeting at a company that was just barely scraping buy. In truth, I don't really know who is the market for a cheap projector like this. Me, I guess.

But the mere idea of watching something projected on a wall (or in this case, a sheet affixed by thumbtacks to our garage door) sort of gives the act an air of festivity, and that's what I was hoping to create yesterday.

Again, we'll see how well that worked out, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

And just so this post is not too gargantuan in length, maybe I should get to the actual films in my Anything Day Marathon right now.

How much blackface is too much blackface?

I got everything all set up, including my coffee and toast, by about 8:30, missing my 8 a.m. scheduled start time due to sleeping later than I usually do. (Which, in itself, was a good start to Anything Day.)

First up was something decidedly inoffensive as a start to the day -- or so I thought.

The Astaire-Rogers musical/dance-fest Swing Time has gotten a lot of love on Filmspotting, most recently on an episode in which they gave us a top five movies of the 1930s as a "starter pack" on watching movies from that decade. I'd been feeling a distinct lack of classic Hollywood on my viewing schedule lately, so when I struck out on a couple other things I looked up first, I landed on Swing Time, rented from iTunes.

It was inoffensive in that it did not include a beheading, an outrageous sex act or an ill-timed f-bomb. But that's to say nothing about the offense caused by an unexpected blackface scene.

I say "unexpected" not because you ever expect a blackface scene, but there are some pretty famous ones, like the one in The Jazz Singer. In that case, I was expecting it. I wasn't here because it hadn't come up at all in the Filmspotting discussion of Swing Time, nor in any other I had casually heard over the years.

But yes indeed, about two-thirds of the way through, there's a dance number called "Bojangles of Harlem" in which Astaire appears in blackface as a "tribute" to dancer Bill Robinson. And because it's a loving "tribute" and there's no racism implied (though that doesn't mean there wasn't any received), I expect it escapes mention in discussions of infamous blackface scenes. And in truth, it did not offend me particularly either. The greater offense probably had to do with its non-existent story function, which is a problem I have with musicals from that era, that they go off on these long performance-related tangents that don't have anything to do with the story, and come late enough in the story that they delay a conclusion you are already beginning to anticipate.

Still, it was weird to see, and I suspect it helped knock this classic down a notch for me.

Even setting aside "Bojangles of Harlem" entirely, I found the movie a bit scattershot. And even as charming and talented as Astaire and Rogers are, and as breathtaking as their moves are, those factors alone did not elevate the movie to classic status for me. I ended up at 3.5 stars on Letterboxd.

I got a preview of the rest of my day when my six-year-old came out to plop down with me for about ten minutes of the movie, eager for his own part in the experience to start. "Could it be more ... clear?" he asked, referring to the image. I could tell then that the projector might not be sustainable.

The movie I actually rented for $19.99

I told you a couple days ago first that I was shocked to see the movie Never Rarely Sometimes Always available for rent for iTunes for $19.99, and then that I was considering the rental as a way of supporting the film industry on the whole.

Never did I imagine that if I did take the $19.99 rental plunge, it would be for the sequel to the Trolls movie, which I didn't even see.

But that's what happened when my six-year-old came across my computer open to the iTunes store on Friday night, where he saw Trolls World Tour listed under the New & Noteworthy category. "Why are you looking up Trolls?" he asked. I wasn't, of course, but he doesn't understand how things like iTunes work.

I thought my denial in that moment had put the subject to rest, but during his ten-minute cameo in Swing Time, my son said "You know, I might actually be interested in Trolls." I saw where this was going.

The reason I wanted to start the marathon at 8 was that it gave me a shot at watching two movies that I wanted to watch before I had to throw my kids a bone. But the way it worked out, at noon, I was only starting my second movie, not my third. That was due in part to an hour-long trip out of the house that included two separate trips to the grocery store. I won't get into it, but that certainly didn't feel very Anything Day to me.

Nor did watching Trolls World Tour, but that's what happened at 12 o'clock for the next 90 minutes.

At least I'll say this for my six-year-old -- he was willing to go with me on the projector idea. He didn't even mention that the image quality was inferior, at least at the start, and made all the right comments and rejoinders that served as de facto proof that there was nothing insufficient about our viewing experience. Good kid. We cuddled together on our beanbags and watched.

About 30 minutes in, though, he ventured that maybe it was time to try our old TV, which I'd brought out to the garage as a back-up.

At first I reacted with a heavy sigh, but I knew he was right. The projector was just not good enough for an animated movie, especially not one we'd paid an arm and a leg to rent.

So without striking the projector setup, we did a kind of 90 degree rotation to the right to watch the TV, and my was the difference significant. I realized I had had only a vague idea what this Trolls world really looked like, and that there were details in the set and the characters that contributed to both the humor and meaning of the movie. Secretly, I was relieved by the death of my projector dream -- a death so definitive, in fact, that I didn't get back to it even when I was solo again.

Trolls World Tour started to improve for me after we made the switch. Before that, I was thinking it might not be much better than the animated sequel I saw last year without first seeing the original, The Angry Birds Movie 2, which ended up near the bottom of my year-end rankings. But once I was able to appreciate more of the nuance -- a funny statement for a Trolls movie -- I was able to enjoy the movie pretty well. Not enough to reach the minimum three stars for a recommendation, but close enough at 2.5.

My first Dance in three decades

At just after 2 I was on my own again, and after a short nap in the beanbag pile, I started on a very different type of movie indeed.

I didn't see Dances With Wolves in the theater, though having just turned 17 when it came out, I might have. But I was suspicious of it for some reason, which means I was annoyed to see it clean up at the Oscars the following March, especially when it was up against contenders I adored, like Goodfellas and Ghost. Then I rented it soon after it was released on video, and found myself completely swept up in its scope and emotion.

That one viewing has been enough for me to consistently keep the movie near my top 100 on Flickchart over the years. (It currently sits at #102.) But its massive 181-minute girth has prevented me from ever confirming that high opinion.

Simply put, I needed an Anything Day to correct that.

So from a little after 2 to a little after 5 I did indeed soak in the beautiful cinematography of the Nebraska prairie without watching it late at night and falling asleep. I considered for a moment switching back to the projector, but that would have diminished that beautiful landscape. Plus there was the little issue of the subtitles, which are notoriously hard to read on this projector.

In short, I was pretty much as engaged as I was the first time, though probably inevitably not as moved. I remembered quite well the moment that really got me the first time, when Wind in His Hair shouts down from an elevated perch to the valley below, where Costner's title character is departing at the end. He proclaims their eternal friendship. As this was the Lakota who had most doubted the befriending of John Dunbar at the beginning, it felt like a moving testament to how much Dunbar had become a member of the Lakota family. And though the tear ducts didn't flood like they had the first time, there were damp eyes this time too.

As I was watching Dances With Wolves, I felt conscious of how its white savior narrative might play 30 years later. Fortunately, watching helped convince me that it may not actually be a white savior narrative. Sure, Costner's film pats Dunbar on the back for being an enlightened humanist who was more eager to befriend the Lakota than slaughter them, and he does indeed provide some valuable services to them. But I think in the end, they probably save him more than he saves them.

My older son provided a bit of a distraction during this movie, as he came out once saying "I want to book my movie!," having had enough Fortnite (if that's possible) by then. He was brushed off pretty easily the first time, but on the second one, I knew I'd have to act. Having given him the task of deciding on a movie he wanted, he came up with Scoob!, the new Scooby Doo reboot that as far as I know hadn't been released yet, and sounded like a (gulp!) second $19.99 rental.

When I found (to my relief) that it has, indeed, had a coronavirus-postponed release, he didn't have any other ideas, and was starting to look more glum. He had initially told me he might want to watch two movies with me, and that was now looking seriously in doubt, especially if he didn't have any idea what even the first one would be. (That said, he did reject participating in Trolls, and that was on him.) Fortunately, I decided it was time to switch away from iTunes rentals and actually landed on something that would work for both the kids.

Subtitles on, subtitles off

The original Karate Kid was a beloved childhood classic for me, and I was only a year older than my nine-year-old is now when it hit theaters in 1984. So seeing the 2010 remake, starring Jackie Chan and Jaden Smith, available on Netflix, it gave me the idea that the new one might work for him like the original did for me -- but would probably not do for him, just because it would seem "old." Plus, I thought the six-year-old -- who had started to stagnate in the living room, the only one still in his pajamas -- could probably watch as well.

I had a couple backups -- Next Gen or a Studio Ghibli movie -- but I was relieved to see that my son accepted The Karate Kid. I was a bit bummed, not to mention surprised, that it was two hours and twenty minutes long, but my wife had agreed to make us a macaroni and cheese dinner to supplement our microwave popcorn, so as long as the movie ended sometime in the vicinity of their bedtime, it would work.

And you know what? This is a pretty charming remake. Three-point-five stars.

The 140 minutes passed faster than I thought they would, and I could not even identify any parts that clearly seemed like fat. The action is updated well while keeping the same core narrative details. For example, instead of "wax on, wax off," young Dre learns defensive movies by repeatedly hanging his jacket on a hook. My kids thought Jackie Chan's Mr. Miyagi -- er, Mr. Han -- was crazy, but the reveal of the method to his madness worked for them just as it did for Dre. (Incidentally, the title Karate Kid is kept for brand awareness reasons only; as the movie is set in China, it's really kung fu that he's learning. I felt it was an acceptable sacrifice, and probably necessary in a cinematic environment that was already turning its eyes toward China a decade ago.)

The 140 minutes didn't prove a challenge for my kids either, who both stuck with it. The younger one threatened to fade at one point, but I think this was more an act of rebellion about having to eat his dinner than any loss of interest in the movie.

One minor annoyance, though, was that the movie didn't have an effective default subtitle setting. There is not a lot of Chinese spoken in this movie, but there's enough that you feel like you're missing something if you don't have the subtitles on. Sometimes the context is enough, but there was a scene about halfway through where Chan and the evil sensei (not really a sensei) have a conversation of a minute or so where you just don't know what they're saying.

So we turned the subtitles on for that, but we quickly realized that with the subtitles on, that meant that everything would be subtitled -- even the English. I thought this could actually help the one of the two of my kids who could read the subtitles, since I don't suspect he understood everything Chan was saying, even when he was speaking English. But he quickly became annoyed by it, so we had to turn them off again, only to turn them back on again twice more during the rest of the movie to understand certain scenes better. So instead of wax on, wax off, it was subtitles on, subtitles off.

He got annoyed when I wanted to read the subtitles to my younger son, so he too would understand what was going on, but we got through it.

By the end, the kids were so pumped up that the nine-year-old was throwing actual punches in our hallway while getting ready for bed. A couple landed on my leg, and one hit my six-year-old in the solar plexus, prompting tears.

No good idea/deed goes unpunished I guess.

Subtitles off

The final movie of the night was supposed to be Timur Bekmambetov's Night Watch, which I bought some four years ago when trying to prevent a local used video store from going out of business. Now that the kids were packed away for the night, I could relax my earlier content standards.

But here we had a subtitle problem again.

I don't know if you've seen Night Watch, or if you did, whether you saw the version of this vampire movie that I did. But in the version I saw -- twice, in fact, within a couple years of its release -- the subtitles themselves were these great pictorial interpretations of the movie's themes. Like, the English words might drip blood or get blown off the screen. I daresay it was a significant factor in my enjoyment of the film.

This DVD did not have that.

In fact, the language settings were all screwed up. First of all the languages themselves. There were two languages, both of which were English, except both of which were actually Russian. There was no dubbing, as I'd feared when the opening narration was in English, but both language options seemed to be exactly the same, with English narration and Russian dialogue.

This would have been fine except for the subtitles. Again, there were two subtitle options, one of which simply contained no subtitles at all, even though it said it was supposed to have them. The other subtitle option? Just plain text written out on the screen. The stylized subtitles have not been preserved on this DVD, and maybe have just vanished into history.

So instead I watched Event Horizon.

This was a random choice from perusing Netflix. I'd remembered really disliking it, but had also questioned that dislike over the years, as I know this movie disturbs some people. So I decided to give it another shot to disturb me.

It did, a little bit, in that it gave me chills a couple times. I do think there are parts of the execution that are just too broad by half, which I think is what I latched onto when I first saw it back in 2007 and gave it, I was surprised to see, only 1.5 stars. (Though I should say this was a retroactive star rating given in 2012 or 2013, when I added all my previous viewings to Letterboxd.)

Although there's some indelible imagery in this movie and some cool ideas, I guess I don't respond that much to space horror in which the images people see are of things from their own past/memory. Though my own thoughts on that are inconsistent, as this is what happens in Tarkovsky's Solaris, which I love.

Anyway, Event Horizon is better than I remembered, and that was good enough to end the night.

Some funny coincidences

Any time I do a marathon I like to note some funny coincidences between the movies, and there were some here too. So, to finish off this post, here they are.

1) The first two movies both feature a character named Penny.

2) Dances With Wolves and The Karate Kid both feature people trying to learn each others' languages.

3) Karate Kid and Trolls World Tour both have characters who do a "pinky swear."

4) Subtitles were a consideration in the way I watched, or whether I watched, three of the candidates for this marathon.

5) Kevin Costner is the director and star of Dances With Wolves. He also appeared in the movie Swing Vote, which is, along with Swing Time, one of only three movies I've seen that start with the word Swing. (Okay, that's pretty flimsy.)

6) Both Event Horizon and Swing Time feature characters who gouge out their own eyes after travelling to another dimension.

Okay, I think that's about enough for today.

Little Timmy Bekmambetov makes good

Even after he's made four movies that have been seen widely in the United States, Timur Bekmambetov is still not a name that rolls off the tongue, and not just because it's Russian. We've learned far harder names of foreign-born directors. (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, anyone?)

But at least it's finally a name worth saying again.

After I was disappointed in, well, almost everything he's been involved in since he made a splash with Night Watch (which hit Russian theaters in 2004 and which I saw in 2006), little Timmy Bekmambetov is finally back in my good graces with Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

Little Timmy?

It's something I started to call him a couple years back. I have no idea why except that it made me laugh. It seemed like a guy named Timur might go by Tim as a nickname, and Timmy is a funny nickname for Tim. What's funny about it is that unlike Jimmy, Johnny, Joey or any number of nicknames that end in a Y sound, no one goes by Timmy as an adult. In fact, probably no one goes by Timmy much later than third grade.

It wasn't really meant as a diss to Bekmambetov, and it doesn't have an overt meaning. It's not that I think his filmmaking is childish, or that I think he wears a bib while he eats. It was just a little slice of randomness that made me giggle.

But after watching Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, I think I owe the guy a lot more respect, perhaps enough that I need to ditch the nickname for awhile.

Let's go back and explore his career to this point to get a better idea what we're talking about.

Little Timmy made two films few have heard of -- the Russian film Peshavar Waltz and the American straight-to-video movie The Arena, produced by Roger Corman -- before taking the cinematic universe by the lapels with his 2004 vampire movie Night Watch. The movie pulsed with style and innovation, whipping up some terrific action set pieces and all manner of blood and viscera in its eye-popping production design. But perhaps its most original aspect was something its Russian audience didn't even get to see. The film turns its English subtitles into living pictorial elements, typing out in bursts, dripping off the screen like blood, that kind of thing. This little touch only served to make the experience of watching it all the more immersive and exciting.

Where to go but down? So down Little Timmy went. The follow-up in an expected trilogy was 2006's Day Watch, which returned the same world and many of the same characters, but little of the wonder. For reasons I won't get into at length now, the film is narratively static and dull, doing little better than treading water in terms of both its story and technical innovation. To use a (probably cliched) pun, this vampire movie is surprisingly toothless -- in part because vampires actually take a back seat to witches, shapeshifters and other mythological creatures in this installment, to the movie's great detriment. And all the sudden I kind of didn't care if I saw the series' third film, which has not yet transpired and probably never will.

I can't comment on Bekmambetov's next Russian language project, which came along the next year, because I have yet to see (and probably never will) The Irony of Fate 2, a sequel to a popular Russian movie from 1971. Although the movie did incredibly well in Russia, second only to Avatar for the highest box office in Russian history, it never made it here.

And so it was Bekmambetov's Hollywood debut that made his downward slide all the more precipitous. That was a little 2008 movie called Wanted, starring Angelina Jolie, James McAvoy and Morgan Freeman. You may remember it. Here's hoping you don't. Although I'm sure Wanted has some ardent fans, I found it to be non-stop ridiculous -- and not the good kind of ridiculousness Bekmambetov had peddled in Night Watch and to a lesser extent Day Watch. Although it is an adaptation of previously existing material, the movie plays like its only reason for existence is so Bekmambetov can indulge his desire to see things that he (and no one else) had ever seen before on screen. Namely, absurd stunts involving jumping cars and the physics-defying flight paths of bullets, each more absurd than the one before it. What takes the movie from silly to actively bad is that it has a number of big problems in its moral world view, which I also won't get into here. Oh yeah, and the fact that much of the plot revolves around a giant loom. You know, for sewing.

Bekmambetov took (or was forced to take) four years before his next Hollywood directing project surfaced, but he was busy producing other people's movies in the meantime. None of the movies that have his name in a producer capacity have really done it for me (the ones I've seen, anyway). I wanted to like 9, but just didn't like it that much. The same was true for Apollo 18, though I liked that one even less. Then there was last year's flop The Darkest Hour, which I never caught up with, but which received awful reviews. He did go against type a bit by directing a Russian comedy in 2010, Six Degrees of Celebration.

When I sat down to watch Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter on Friday night, I didn't even remember (if I ever knew) that it was Little Timmy in the director's chair. Maybe that's a good thing. By carrying in no preconceived notions, I just took it all in as a fresh new experience with the potential to excite me. And that it did. In fact, only when the credits rolled, and I saw who was responsible for this gloriously kooky movie, did I smack my forehead and realize that I'd felt an excitement akin to the excitement of watching Night Watch for the first time.

Here the audacious and outrageous set pieces really work, and the mixture of over-the-top action with a loving and detailed production design did indeed remind me of Bekmambetov's debut. There's something joyously nutty about watching a young Abraham Lincoln twirl a silver-tipped axe like a baton twirler would twirl a baton. But where Bekmambetov et al really succeed is by telling their story with a straight face. As much attention as possible is paid to developing a reasonably plausible interrelationship between his political career/personal ideals and his role as a man who hunts vampires. You could easily (obviously) go campy with a movie like this, but playing it straight delivered the best possible realization of what was, nonetheless, clearly envisioned as something of a joke by writer Seth Grahame-Smith. Then again, Grahame-Smith adapts his own work here, and keeps the respectful tone toward Lincoln, so maybe the joke never went beyond the title to begin with.

But let's talk about Bekmambetov's contributions, or one in particular that seems to be worth singling out (so as not to ruin the others). It scores a ten in both absurdity and creativity, and on this particular night, that's what I was looking for. Picture this: Lincoln hunts down one particularly reprehensible bloodsucker and chases him into the middle of a field full of stampeding horses. (Best not to think too much about how the stampede started, and why it includes no less than 500 horses.) Now imagine Honest Abe and this demon chasing each other across the backs of the horses in full sprint, occasionally falling down in between them, and sometimes even using the horses as weapons against each other. All shot with enough verisimilitude to make you wonder exactly how they did it.

I thought I should also take a moment to praise Little Timmy as a director of actors -- a side of directing that's oft-forgotten when it comes to directors of grand spectacles like this one. Benjamin Walker makes a highly credible Lincoln, and let me just say that I applaud the balls it took to cast an unknown in this role. (I thought I was making an original observation when I noted that he looked like a young Liam Neeson, and then I learned that he had actually played a young Liam Neeson -- Walker was cast in the role of a younger version of Neeson's title character in Kinsey.) However, the smart casting and the good performances don't end there. Mary Elizabeth Winstead puts her all into Mary Todd Lincoln, Jimmi Simpson, Dominic Cooper and Anthony Mackie are all solid as Lincoln's various cohorts, and Rufus Sewell sinks his teeth deliciously into the villainous role of a vampire who has roamed the earth for millennia, who unsurprisingly passes this particular decade as a plantation owner.

Of course, numerous liberties taken with the life of Abraham Lincoln and fight scenes conducted across the backs of stampeding horses may just not be your thing.

Then again, you may not have liked Night Watch either.

Welcome back, LTB. 

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.