Recently, some critics and (heaven help us) critics of critics have asserted that film critics must only see the movies they review in theaters and with an audience. Sure, there’s a pandemic going on, the reasoning goes, but it doesn’t matter — this is how movies should be seen and we must support the art of cinema. If we all get sick, who cares? We probably won’t die. I mean, probably not. The odds are with us.
For the record, I think this is nuts.
For years — and I mean since Ronald Reagan’s second term — I went to public advance screenings of movies two or three nights every week. But I have not been to that kind of screening since March 10, 2020, and I don’t miss it.
I don’t miss driving and worrying about getting there late. I don’t miss getting there late and getting dirty looks from other critics, because the publicists held the movie for me. And I definitely don’t miss parking in some creepy lot at night and walking back to my car while looking over my shoulder.
The actual watching of the movies, that was always great — but not so great that it was ever better than watching at home. For me, seeing a movie at home has always been best. That means watching it not on a computer, not on a television, but with a video projector sending a high-definition image onto an 8-foot screen. That way, I can watch a movie when I want and when I’m in the mood, which is when everybody else watches movies — when they want, and when they’re in the mood.
Offering critics the option of seeing movies at home has been a practice since the days of VHS. Even before the pandemic, virtually all foreign and independent films screened in that way, and not to their detriment. From my couch, I first saw some of my favorite movies of the past 20 years: “Novitiate,” “Julieta,” “After the Wedding,” “Intimate Strangers,” “Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days,” “Revanche,” “The Past,” “The Cold War,” “Elena,” “Le Petit Lieutenant.”
The only difference is that, recently, with the pandemic, almost every upcoming movie has been made available for screening at home, either on DVD or by a computer link. I won’t pretend this is a bad thing. It’s a great thing. I would like it to be a permanent thing.
Now I admit that some movies need a massive screen. They are fewer than you think, but they do exist — for example, “Jurassic Park,” “La Belle Noiseuse” and “F9.” But if studios believe that they have a movie like that, they can screen it in a way that’s still safe. In the past nine months, a number of films have screened for critics, not in little screening rooms but in big theaters where the critics can spread out and feel protected. That’s my second favorite way to see a movie.
Yet more common than films that need a big screen are films that benefit from a packed audience. Comedies are in this class, as well as some action movies. But what is there to be done about that now? Even if you could get a crowd in this pandemic, who wants to sit for two hours, surrounded by strangers and wondering whose mask has fallen under their nose? And who wants to spend two hours with your nose all stuffy and your glasses getting steamed up because you’re wearing an N95 mask?
My point is, let’s not pretend that the current movie theater experience represents some ideal against which everything else pales. The current theatergoing experience is not the pre-COVID theatergoing experience. If critics can’t relax or concentrate, they can’t adequately review anything.
This is why I have no patience for people who’d force others to choose between their safety and their livelihood. I have still less patience for those who’d force such a choice and then offer themselves up as examples of virtuous professionalism. Critics, like everyone else, have varying degrees of risk tolerance. (If I wanted to do something dangerous in journalism, I’d have become a war correspondent.) Others have health problems. Some are disabled. Some have to use public transit. Why take a one-size-fits-all approach that might hurt people?
The pandemic has been hard enough on everybody. Don’t make it worse. If you’re a critic, or a critic of critics, and you really believe that movies must only be seen in theaters, then by all means, see them in theaters. Packed theaters! See them at every opportunity! See comedies! Laugh in each other’s faces!
But don’t go around theater-shaming everybody else. We’re all doing the best we can.