National Post (National Edition)
ALONE TOGETHER IN THE DARK
POSTMEDIA MOVIE CRITIC CHRIS KNIGHT MISSES THAT COMMUNAL CINEMA FEELING
When Roger Ebert died of cancer, seven years ago this month, he left behind a last review, which The Chicago Sun-Times published three days later. The film was Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder. Not the director’s best work, it has a 46 per cent rating from critics at Rotten Tomatoes and a 37 per cent audience score.
When the movie had screened at the Toronto festival the year before, I’d given it two stars out of four. I adored Malick’s previous film, the Oscar-nominated Tree of Life, and this felt like a cheap knock-off: The Shrub of Life.
But Ebert loved it and gave it 3.5 stars, concluding: “There will be many who find To the Wonder elusive and too effervescent. They’ll be dissatisfied by a film that would rather evoke than supply. I understand that, and I think Malick does, too. But here he has attempted to reach more deeply than that: to reach beneath the surface, and find the soul in need.”
It’s a relief to know that Ebert went out on a film he loved — can you imagine if the last movie you saw were Cats? But one has to wonder whether the knowledge of his own approaching fadeto-black didn’t alter his reception of the work.
Film appreciation never takes place in a vacuum. The viewer, whether a paid professional critic or a paying audience member, brings a lot of baggage to the experience.
And just like at the airport (remember those?), no two suitcases are the same, no matter how closely they resemble one another.
Critics are influenced by the other movies they’ve seen, the lives they’ve lived — Ebert’s wife was African-American and it influenced how he saw stories about mixed-race couples — and their current emotional state. They may even be affected by such minutiae as incipient hunger, uncomfortable seats or that idiot who keeps checking his phone. We try not to let these things sway our reviews, but we’re only human.
These days, the thing everyone brings to the cinema is the coronavirus. Not literally, of course — you stay home if you feel ill! But also not literally because the cinemas have been closed for a month and aren’t opening any time soon.
So what does that do to the appreciation of a movie? I for one have found it harder to strongly dislike anything I’ve watched since the pandemic took hold of our country.
To be clear — and this will come as a surprise to all the Aquaman fans I pissed off back in 2018 — I don’t go into any movie wanting it to be bad, or wanting to hate it. The very best feeling in the world is to come out of a screening wanting to tell the world they have to see this movie.
But most films fall into a wide grey middle zone, which is why the second-best feeling is to want to warn people away, preferably while making them laugh. It’s a distant second, but there it is. It sure beats sitting down to try to write a review that basically says: “Eh. It was OK. I’ve seen worse. I’ve seen Aquaman.”
Over the past month I’ve panned quite a few of the releases on Netflix and other platforms. My Spy, Vivarium and Canadian Strain all earned two stars out of five. And then there was Coffee & Kareem, which got a single star, though I went out of my way to praise the earlier work of its Canadian director, Michael Dowse, and to predict his return to better things.
But even these bad movies don’t seem quite as bad as if I were writing up reviews for a potential cinemagoer. For one thing, it’s not like I can advise you to wait for the DVD or on-demand release: That’s the new starting point. And quite frankly, if you didn’t have to line up and pay a babysitter, drive to a cinema, pay to park, pay for your tickets, pay for your popcorn and then wait through upward of 20 minutes of car ads and endless trailers — well, maybe the movie doesn’t have as high a bar to clear. You’re already comfortably at home, sans traffic and lineups. If it lulls you to sleep, you’re in the right place.
But there are aspects of movie-going that can’t be replicated or bettered at home. Good luck finding a home theatre as big as the smallest Cineplex VIP screen, let alone the chain’s AVX and Imax offerings. And unless you want to vibrate your house into dust, chances are the cinema’s sound system will top yours.
Then there’s the comradeship, whether of family and friends or just like-minded strangers. It’s fun to react together. One of the last films I saw before the screens went dark was the horror-thriller The Invisible Man, and it was both instructive as a critic and enjoyable as an audience member to hear nervous laughter and frightened gasps in sync with my own.
That communal experience can sometimes backfire, however.
I still have vivid memories of attending a promo of Meet the Fockers in 2004.
Promo screenings are full houses consisting of perhaps two dozen critics surrounded by those who have won their tickets through radio giveaways and other contests.
Maybe the crowd was happy to be at a free screening of a new movie. Maybe (my pet theory) everyone had been given drugs while I was buying popcorn. But the audience lapped it up, while I doled out 1.5 stars and declared that “the humour is like an overweight jaywalker — pedestrian and largely foreseeable.”
Don’t be surprised if my reviews lack a certain ferocity in these strange times. I won’t steer you wrong on the one-star stinkers, but a three-and-a-half-er like Love Wedding Repeat is arguably a much better waste of time when you’re on your couch than if you’ve got to leave the house.
And those days will return. They must. The very last film I saw in a theatre was the execrable Bloodshot, and I refuse to let that stand as my final movie-going experience of all time. To quote a much better film, I’ll be back.