Scorsese targets the ‘devaluation of cinema’

Director is no fan of Netflix, Rotten Tomatoes

How does Martin Scorsese hate modern life? Let us count the ways.

Way back in October, the director wrote a column against Rotten Tomatoes for The Hollywood Reporter, saying internet review aggregators “have absolutely nothing to do with real film criticism.”

At the time, he hollered at the clouds above him that Rotten Tomatoes “rate a picture the way you’d rate a horse at the racetrack, a restaurant in a Zagat’s guide, or a household appliance in Consumer Reports. They have everything to do with the movie business and absolutely nothing to do with either the creation or the intelligent viewing of film.” He wrote that he finds the entire process “hostile” and even the name Rotten Tomatoes to be “insulting.”

In December, he railed against action blockbusters, the use of visual effects and the future of film to the AP, moaning, “Cinema is gone. The cinema I grew up with and that I’m making, it’s gone. The theatre will always be there for that communal experience, there’s no doubt. But what kind of experience is it going to be?”

Scorsese, it seems, couldn’t quite grasp the public’s overwhelming love for streaming services, blaming the phenomenon’s rise on, you guessed it, millennials: “It should matter to your life. Unfortunately, the latest generations don’t know that it mattered so much. TV, I don’t think has taken that place. Not yet.”

And, just this weekend, he tripled down at the Turner Classic Movies Film Festival — truly, the perfect venue for such a declaration. (Fun aside: Scorsese announced he never stays in a hotel if it doesn’t offer TCM, natch). The director spent his lengthy speech criticizing Rotten Tomatoes, fellow aggregator CinemaScore and “the devaluation of cinema itself.”

While accepting the Robert Osborne Award, he took a swipe at online streaming, repeatedly referring to it as content: “(Viewers) can also turn a picture off and go straight to the next piece of content. If there’s no sense of value tied to a given movie, of course, it can be sampled in bits and pieces and just forgotten.”

Finally, Scorsese concluded, “The horrible idea they reinforce (is) that every picture, every image is there to be instantly judged and dismissed without giving audiences time to see it. Time to see it, maybe ruminate and maybe make a decision for themselves. So the great 20th-century art form, the American art form, is reduced to content.”

Martin Scorsese