MovieChat Forums > Madame de... (1954) Discussion > Are all critics phonies?

Are all critics phonies?


The top critics on the External Reviews list get the story wrong. These aren't trivial details but major plot points.

Ebert says, "She trusts the discretion of Remy the jeweler. She should not," suggesting that the jeweler betrays Madame to the General, when in fact he is forced to go to the General, because the newspapers report them as stolen, thus making Remy out as a fence. Actually, in going back to the General instead of to the papers, which he had every right to do, Remy is the soul of discretion. Ebert says that Louisa writes day after day and doesn't get her letters answered, when it's the Baron who writes day after day and doesn't get his letters answered.

Hoberman says the General presents the earrings to Madame, then learns she doesn't love him. The General presents the earrings to Madame AFTER he "discovers" she doesn't love him. The presentation is a sadistic joke: he immediately takes them back and, knowing what they mean to her, forces Madame to present them to his niece. This recalls Boyer in Gaslight, in which he uses "lost" jewels to torment his wife, something both critics apparently missed.

These guys are paid to write their reviews, and it seems like they're faking it, because they know the editors are clueless and anyway are only selling clever words, not accuracy. This isn't the only time I've seen this. It's sickening to witness big shot critics reveal how little they care for their subject, how little they care about the reader, how little integrity they really have...and then, get away with it.

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The kind of stuff you mention doesn't get me as worked up as it gets you, but I have noticed it, and it is ... well, newspapers are dying and this is part of the reason why.

I've read reviews where reviewers have not only misread movies, which could be a matter of taste, but where reviewers have gotten names of characters wrong, or revealed spoilers without warning, or misreported details of plot ...

A lot of the people who write for media for pay develop a certain arrogance. That turned me off long before the internet came along and began to undermine media.

Now I'm as likely to base my decision on whether or not to see a film on "amateur" reviews -- which are often stunningly good -- at a place like this than on what the mainstream reviewers have to say.

And ... there is always a sizable population who really hates a movie that reviewers adopt as the cream of the crop. "Borat" or "No Country for Old Men" come to mind. Professional reviewers almost universally lauded those movies. Those of us who hated them had very good reasons to hate them. We got to share our impressions at sites like this, but our existence was invisible in the mainstream press.

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Thanks for the insights. Yeah, I guess I sound pretty "worked up," but my blood pressure is pretty normal.

Stupified, addled, enervated and anaesthetized by TV and the Web, we've lost the ability to be "worked up" over anything, at least worked up to the point where we do anything about it. And I think the media powers-that-be understand this. Screens -- be they TV or computer or Blackberry or cell phone -- are the new opium of the people. On one hand, mass media is (I use the singular because mass media is a monolith) the adversary of the powerful -- it is the court gossip. On the other hand, it is the enabler and collaborator, part of the "bread and circuses" which keep the people pacified, distracted and dumbed down, leaving the spiders and snakes free to do their dirty work. If it weren't for television and the Web's deliberate isolation and alienation of individuals from each other, their pandering to self-gratififcation, hence their destruction of the sense of civic engagement, popular response to, for example, the economic meltdown would be far less passive; there really would be mobs in the streets, like there are now in Europe, where commercial media hasn't infiltrated and metastasized to the degree it has here (give it time).

Everything you say is dead on. The old media tell themselves their decline is due to changing technology. They're only half-right. The decline is also due to the fact that we just don't like them -- for their arrogance, as you say -- but have had no choice but to "take it" (remember Peter Finch in Network). Now, we no longer have to take it.

By the way, I guess I shouldn't indict critics as a class. With all the stuff being pushed at us -- midst all the hype we're subject to -- they help us avoid wasting our time and money. And some do take care: Pauline Kael (alas, long gone) Berardinelli, The New Yorker.... You're right -- sometimes, like with Borat and No Country for Old Men, they all get it wrong. But our issue isn't so much that they get it wrong (or that we get it wrong), but their lack of care. In their privileged position you'd think these jokers at the top would have a higher sense of responsibility, a more rigorous integrity. But they just don't seem to give a *beep* beyond what will get them by. And I guess that's what gets me "worked up".

As for the amateur reviews, some are truly stunning, as you say, but most are pretty bad. I think what we get with amateur reviews is, in effect, "word of mouth," which ain't such a bad medium.

Uh oh, there I went again. ;)

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It seems obvious Ebert was writing his comments on this film sometime after seeing the movie - I have run into that many times (especially in books and magazine articles published before the advent of videotapes) where a "major" critic or historian completely gets many major plot points wrong in a film. This movie wasn't that easy to track down in America until the last few years, perhaps Ebert hadn't seen the movie in years and was recalling from "memory".

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I agree that Ebert was probably working from the memory of a long-ago viewing. However, I've never thought Ebert was all that. The only times I haven't found his style flat is when he has borrowed from Pauline Kael, and he is CONSTANTLY getting things wrong about the movies he reviews.

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[deleted]

Maybe you ne parlez pas français, mais vous avez quite correctly rendered the lines. And your point on the General André de... changing his mood on the spot is quite interesting.

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molly haskell's essay @ cinefiles:

http://www.mip.berkeley.edu/cinefiles/DocDetail?docId=18783

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