"Talking faux-seriously about juvenilia..."

I regret that I haven't seen Guillermo Del Toro's "Hellboy" (2004) or "Hellboy II: The Golden Army" (2008), though Del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth" was my top movie of 2006. Andrew Tracy at Reverse Shot evidently isn't impressed with the Hellboys, and I say "evidently" because I'm putting off reading the whole of his review of the new one until I've seen it.

But that hasn't stopped me from relishing the first two paragraphs! Because Tracy is articulating thoughts I've often entertained but too rarely raised in public. He begins:

Talking faux-seriously about juvenilia has become a marvelous way to avoid talking seriously about the serious. The slew of hyperbolic, overheated critical rhetoric that follows in the wake -- hell, in advance of -- the latest high concept blockbuster is enough to make one gag. In these cases, critical investigation has by and large become a matter of repeating verbatim the films' stridently announced surface-level themes with some linguistic curlicues and intellectual tumbling tossed in.

As it has so often, commercial calculation finds a willing handmaiden in critical laziness, even (or perhaps especially) that evinced by those more intelligent and discerning writers who devote their efforts and talents towards designing elaborate intellectual justifications for films that neither require nor deserve them.

In the New York Times, A.O. Scott seems to be touching on something close to what Tracy is getting at. Writing about the summer glut of superhero movies, he says:

These movies wear their allegorical hearts on their cartoon sleeves, dressing up their stories with intimations of topicality overt, like the Afghan kidnappers in "Iron Man," and indirect, like the ruminations on due process and torture in "The Dark Knight." [...]

I don't want to start any fights with devout fans or besotted critics. I'm willing to grant that "The Dark Knight" is as good as a movie of its kind can be. But that may be damning with faint praise. [...]

And yet stating such themes is as far as the current wave of superhero movies seems able or willing to go. The westerns of the 1940s and '50s, obsessed with similar themes, were somehow able, at their best, as in John Ford's "The Searchers" and Howard Hawks's "Rio Bravo," to find ambiguities and tensions buried in their own rigid paradigms.

But the cowboys of old did not labor under the same burdens as their masked and caped descendants. Those poor, misunderstood crusaders must turn big profits on a global scale and satisfy an audience hungry for the thrill of novelty and the comforts of the familiar. Is it just me, or is the strain starting to show?

Let me continue with Andrew Tracy's next paragraph:

What's most obscene about this pop-cultural mythmaking is that it works so resolutely against expanding taste or knowledge about movies. By focusing so obsessively and voluminously on the most readily, tyrannically available items, critical discussion is not simply reflecting the commercial film distribution situation in North America, but actively contributing to it. By elevating the latest pop detritus to the level of godhead, by implicitly declaring the centrality of pop moviemaking (most often bad pop moviemaking) above all else, it only further occludes those films that don't have the advantage of being relentlessly drilled into our consciousness by the marketing machine. Why bother wrestling in print with films that are challenging, strange, obscure, or entertaining in different and novel ways when The Truth is playing in 2500 theatres?

Yet, to present evidence and reasoning to make a case that such pictures are trite and sloppy and inept is not only to risk sounding like a cranky old spoilsport, but I suspect to give the movies themselves more detailed attention than they really deserve (or can support). Hey, they're just fun, aren't they? Well, yes, to some people they are, and there's no reason to support or pooh-pooh them on those flimsy grounds. Is that really a critic's job, to identify the presence of subjective "fun-ness" in a motion picture? Who wants or needs to read a critic (even an old-timey one) to discover that? How does that add anything to somebody's perception of a movie? Joe Bob Briggs was quite entertaining in a pseudo-redneck kind of way, but the self-styled anti-snobs actually took him seriously, whether they knew it (or cared to admit it) or not. Yeah, they "got" the joke, but they also believed in it.

The danger (and it is a real danger, I think) is the dumbing-down of critical standards (yawn) to the point where we fail to apply critical methods to film at all. Most moviegoers say they don't trust critics, don't read them, and aren't interested in their opinions. They've always said that. A lot of them are lying or fooling themselves, but I think we should take them at their word and stop pretending that we're writing for them. Millions of people watch movies (it may still be the most popular leisure activity in the United States, I don't know for sure), but only a tiny fraction of them read (or claim to read) reviews. Editors need to stop demanding that critics should be writing for the very people who don't read them. And don't want to and wouldn't care about what they say anyway. Harrumph!