{"id":28868,"date":"2016-04-17T22:37:55","date_gmt":"2016-04-17T22:37:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/?page_id=28868"},"modified":"2016-04-17T22:37:55","modified_gmt":"2016-04-17T22:37:55","slug":"the-pop-of-king-the-four-star-follies","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/king-family\/columns-king-uit-entertainment-weekly\/the-pop-of-king-the-four-star-follies\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pop of King: The Four-Star Follies"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n
\"kingcolumn\"<\/a> I love the movies, let\u2019s get that up front. Have since I was a kid. And I\u2019m from an unsophisticated school of thought that believes a movie (always a movie and never a film, even if it comes with subtitles) should be fun before it\u2019s anything else: an ice cream cone for the brain. Because of this I especially like the summer season, when the studios shoot off so many of their big fireworks. And usually I have fun, because it doesn\u2019t take a lot to please me. I mostly go to be entertained, not to learn the meaning of life.That doesn\u2019t make me\u2014or the millions of moviegoers like me\u2014dumb. I can revel in Glenn Close\u2019s bitchy, over-the-top performance in The Stepford Wives and still realize that the movie is mostly incoherent, although amiable and well-meant. I can enjoy Brian Cox as Agamemnon\u2014and be blown away by Peter O\u2019Toole\u2019s melancholy Priam\u2014in Troy without believing Brad Pitt as Achilles in the slightest. I can easily set aside the wacky science in The Day After Tomorrow and still point to the scene in which Jake Gyllenhaal dives under the rising water in the New York Public Library to use the old-fashioned pay telephone as my absolute favorite of the current season. (Honorable mention: Denzel Washington chewing a mind-control capsule out of a guy\u2019s back in The Manchurian Candidate.)<\/p>\n

There\u2019s nothing wrong with having fun, and I sneer at people who sneer at summer movies\u2014in fact, I sneer at people who sneer at entertainment for entertainment\u2019s sake. I feel sorry for them, too. Riding that high horse has got to be uncomfortable, especially with a stick up your butt.<\/p>\n

Still, there\u2019s been a steady critical gradeflation\u2014what could even be called four-star fever\u2014that makes me uncomfortable when I page through the entertainment section of The New York Times. Here ads for major studio movies now routinely appear trailing kite tails of critical superlatives, and not just from the usual suspects such as Earl \u201cI\u2019ll Praise Anyone\u201d Dittman or Rex \u201cIf No One Else Liked It I Did\u201d Reed. No, now it\u2019s Richard Corliss of Time, Claudia Puig of USA Today, Peter Travers of Rolling Stone, and a dozen other formerly reliable critics who seem to have gone remarkably soft\u2014not to say softhearted and sometimes softheaded\u2014in their old age. Even Roger Ebert, that fierce partisan of the movies, all too often seems to have one thumb up and one thumb up his… aw, never mind.<\/p>\n

Do I want America\u2019s critics to pan good movies? The hell I do; I\u2019m the guy who likes almost all of \u2018em, remember? Or likes even the worst of them a little (Vin Diesel\u2019s tireless glare in The Chronicles of Riddick, for example). All I want is for critics to stop giving four stars\u2014or even three\u2014to two-star movies. In my book there have been 4 four-star movies already this summer (Shrek 2, Fahrenheit 9\/11, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, The Manchurian Candidate), and four\u2019s a feast. What\u2019s wrong with saying that the rest (with the exception of the odious Van Helsing, which did have the salubrious effect of making even Catwoman look good) are perfectly acceptable summer time-passers and let it go at that?<\/p>\n

I mean, look here\u2014is Spider-Man 2 really a four-star movie? I love Sam Raimi\u2019s work and feel the same way about Michael Chabon\u2019s (Chabon had a hand in creating 2\u2019s screen story), but I wince at the idea of putting this movie in the same critical category as The Godfather and Unforgiven. Sure, I loved those dizzying shots of Spidey swinging through the steel canyons of the city. Of course I loved Doc Ock clomping his way up the side of a skyscraper (while not believing the narrative source of those tentacles in the slightest). But let\u2019s be real. The emotional core of this story is a girl who\u2019s in a snit because her boyfriend keeps missing her play. And just what\u2019s the deal with that show, anyhow? I can see a revival of The Importance of Being Earnest for the senior class play at Centerville High somewhere in Nebraska, but on Broadway? That\u2019s harder to believe than Dr. Octavius welding tentacles to his back in the computer age.<\/p>\n

I passed a perfectly enjoyable evening at Spider-Man 2\u2014the night it opened, in fact, and the theater was crammed to the rafters with equally appreciative Spidey fans. But I remember Sam Raimi\u2019s first feature film, the no-budget Evil Dead, which premiered at the Cannes film festival in 1981, when Sam was so young he looked more like a waiter in a Catskills summer resort than an auteur. That was before million-dollar CGI effects, and when Sam wanted to do his version of Steadicam, he simply bolted his camera to a beam. Then he and a couple of friends grabbed the beam and ran like hell. It was crude, but it worked.<\/p>\n

When you looked at Evil Dead, you knew you were looking at low-budget. When you look at Spider-Man 2, you know you\u2019re looking not just at high-budget but at top-end Hollywood Humvee budget. Nothing wrong with that, either. But Evil Dead had a raw and horrifying beauty that has stayed with me for 23 years, and in my mind that makes it a true four-star movie. Spider-Man 2? Very cool, but I doubt if I\u2019ll be able to remember many of the details by the time next June rolls around with a new load of summer pix. But that\u2019s okay, because\u2014like Troy; Dodgeball; I, Robot; and The Day After Tomorrow\u2014it\u2019s a pretty good movie.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I love the movies, let\u2019s get that up front. Have since I was a kid. And I\u2019m from an unsophisticated school of thought that believes a movie (always a movie and never a film, even if it comes with subtitles)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":4585,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-28868","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/28868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28868"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/28868\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28872,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/28868\/revisions\/28872"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}