By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
The Cricketeer: H'wd sez keep outta the trash
David Germain of AP suggests that denying crickets a chance to chirp at rotten films before opening day might be a bad thing: “Critics are being shut out of more films as studios forgo advance screenings on [pictures] they expect reviewers to trash, figuring the movies stand a better chance of box-office success with no reviews rather than bad ones.” So far this year, 11 movies have not screened for critics before opening day,” by Mr. Germain’s count. “The practice does not sit well with critics, who either must do without or scramble to catch the movie on opening day and dash something off if their outlets want to have a review over opening weekend,” he writes, without producing quotes from reviewers. I’ll give him one: Shawn Levy at the Oregonian disagrees: “Does this sort of thing make me feel obsolete? Unnecessary? Unloved? Hell no! It’s positively liberating! Nobody expects a restaurant critic to comment on the finer points of each new McDonald’s that opens, and film critics should be treated with similar respect. If the studios know that they’re making garbage, they should drive right past the House of Criticism to the city dump and do their business.” While it’s not such a loss when the Adam Sandler production Benchwarmers isn’t previewed—auteur, Dennis Dugan be thy name—it’s more problematic when studios screen serious pictures past many publications’ deadlines, such as Universal did for most reviewers in Chicago for Spike Lee’s The Inside Man. Germain quotes Roger Ebert: “The target audience didn’t care that we hated [horror and teen] movies because they just expected us to hate them,” Ebert said. “If we reviewed them and showed clips and said they’re stupid and awful and violent, that’s a selling review for that audience. So the studio head told me, `Publicity like that can only help us.'”… Sony, the studio behind The Benchwarmers and three other films [horror entries all] not screened for critics this year, declined to comment. Executives at other distributors that decided against critic screenings—20th Century Fox, Lionsgate and Fox Searchlight—either declined to comment or did not return phone calls.” Leaving the last lines to Levy: “But one last thing: If studios want to work around me, they had best not pester me afterward looking for us to run wire service reviews of films they wouldn’t let us see. Don’t tell me that I’m not good enough to get an advance look at your product and then get cross if I refuse to slap a free ad for it on my chest.”