Ask Mick LaSalle: A reader dislikes “Dunkirk.”
Dear Mick: I saw the much-touted film, “Dunkirk,” which was a disappointment to not only me but several friends. The movie erratically jumps from battle scene to scene and forgoes any character development.
Mars Breslow, San Francisco Dear Mars: I respect this criticism, because it means you saw what you were looking at. But you’re seeing a virtue as a flaw, because you’re watching a movie hoping it will be like other movies you’ve seen, rather than embracing the possibility of another kind of experience. Or maybe you tried and just didn’t like it. Nobody is obligated to like everything, even good things. Dear Mick: While they’ve been few, the criticisms of “Dunkirk” bewail missing elements like a deep character arc for the hero, a single menacing bad guy, and a romantic subplot. Is it fair to say that the evacuation event itself becomes the main “character” in this case?
Andy Crockett, Alameda Dear Andy: No, characters are people or, in the case of Lassie or Winnie the Pooh, animals. They’re not settings or actions. The main character in “Dunkirk” is you, trying to get out of Dunkirk. I think you’re intuiting that when you say that the evacuation is the main character. In the absence of character development, the evacuation becomes our action, as viewers, rather than someone else’s action with us rooting along. This time it’s not about John Wayne or Tom Hanks. It’s about us feeling trapped and wanting to escape. Dear Critic Mick: Has there ever been a payola type of situation with movie critics i.e. getting paid a large amount of money to write a favorable review for a bad film? If someone could pay the biggest critics in N.Y., Chicago, L.A. and San Francisco $200,000 each for a good review, it would be money well spent.
Robert Freud Bastin, Petaluma Dear Critic Robert: It might be money well spent, but it wouldn’t be money well received for the critic. Even if the critic could get away with it, what’s 200K? How long is that going to last? The studio would then have the critic in a blackmailable situation and own him or her forever. To make it even feasible, however immoral, they would have to pay the critic all the money the critic planned to make between now and retirement. And because there are so many critics, they would have to pay a lot of them — but that would make no economic sense at all, and that would certainly set up whoever’s paying to be doublecrossed. That’s probably why in all the years I’ve been doing this, I have never been offered a bribe and know of no one who has ever been offered one. Really, I can think of only one scenario for an effective bribery strategy, and that’s if there were one huge critic, who was a thought leader for other critics. If you could get to that one, then you’d rope in a bunch of others, poor idiots who wouldn’t even know they were gotten. But even then, you wouldn’t use financial bribery. That’s too obvious. Instead, you’d use the illusion of friendship, or the suggestion of working together on something. You’d use flattery, friendly phone calls, little notes and all the other dark arts that movie stars and Hollywood are good at. You’d lead that critic into a situation of compromise before the critic quite realized it, kind of the way the Russians do it. But right now that strategy is unworkable, because there is no single thoughtleading critic and there hasn’t been one in decades. Dear Mick: A couple of times recently I’ve gone to see a movie you weren’t crazy about but the critical consensus was. Both times, you were right and they were wrong. Please forgive me for having doubted you.
Marc Rosaaen, Daly City Dear Marc: Don’t worry about it. I just want people to read me. I don’t care if anybody listens to me. But look out for those consensuses. A consensus just takes everybody smart and everybody stupid and averages them all together.
Have a question? Ask Mick LaSalle at mlasalle@sfchronicle.com. Include your name and city for publication, and a phone number for verification. Letters may be edited for clarity and length.