Since last night, my thoughts on this have continued. I would love to solve this "great mystery," especially if the answer is something other than "people are idiots and don't like movies [or literature or whatever] that were written by people with brains" or "people are arrogant and would prefer to scoff at the opinions of those with education and experience, because they don't need some smarty-pants to tell them what's good, regardless of the fact that that's not actually the purpose of film criticism." I mean, I have to think these things are part of the answer, because obviously there ARE idiots in the world, but I'm not so cynical that I believe that to be all of it.

Part of this is because I can almost understand. It was only within the past few years that I started looking seriously at movies with distinguished looking box covers that boast, in Elizabethan script, about awards won at Cannes and how these eighteen reputable critics consider it the best film of the year. Because, doncha know it, those movies are almost always these slow-paced character pieces. Well, not all of them, but enough of them are for the reputation to be somewhat deserved. Recently I've begun to appreciate many of these movies that others would call "art films." Many of them simply appeal on an intellectual level instead of on a visceral level.

The thing is, these are NOT the only movies that critics endorse! They are, however, perhaps the only films that rely so heavily on critics (real critics, not the no-name quote whores ["we'll wine you and dine you at this press junket and we'll do it again if you let us quote you saying 'Funny!' on the video box cover"]) to sell them. Did you know that Roger Ebert gave the movie "Lethal Weapon" four out of four stars? Unless you read his reviews regularly, probably not. The studio didn't need Roger Ebert to say "one of the ten best films of the year" in the ads for the money. All they needed to show was "Mel Gibson" and "Danny Glover" and picture an explosion.

So I wonder if it is actually the *marketing* of movies that is to blame for the stuffy reputation of critics. The art films are what people *see* critics endorsing the most.

Granted, some critics merit the reputation all on their own. But with regard to quoted conversation in my original post, sheesh, that guy was an idiot. Here he is, specifically asking Roger Ebert for an opinion about a movie, and when Ebert says he thinks it's the best film of the year, he loses interest and says it's not the kind of movie he'd like to see.

What IS the kind of movie he'd like to see? Maybe he figures movies that appear on critics' top-ten-of-the-year lists are all arty, but that's just not true.

Here are some other movies that Roger Ebert considered "the best of the year":

Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
The Godfather (1972)
The Black Stallion (1980)
Malcolm X (1992) (#9 of the 1990s)
Schindler's List (1993) (#6 of the 1990s)
Fargo (1996) (#4 of the 1990s)
Dark City (1998)

And some others that appeared in his "top ten of the year" lists:

The Producers (1968)
M*A*S*H (1970)
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
Star Wars (1977)
Halloween (1978)
Superman (1978)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) (#5 of the 1980s)
This Is Spinal Tap (1984)
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) (!)
Lethal Weapon (1987)
A Fish Called Wanda (1988)
Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988)
Dances With Wolves (1990)
Beauty and the Beast (1991)
The Fugitive (1993)
Pulp Fiction (1994) (#2 of the 1990s)
Forrest Gump (1994)
Apollo 13 (1995)
Jackie Brown (1997)
L.A. Confidential (1997)
Titanic (1997)
Saving Private Ryan (1998)
Babe: Pig in the City (1998) (!)
Shakespeare In Love (1998)
The Cell (2000)

I wonder what the heck kind of movie ANYBODY likes if being a peer of the movies listed above automatically makes it uninteresting. Now, you may not agree with all of those selections. In fact, you *probably* don't. *I* don't. But it doesn't take a movie buff to look at these titles and recognize that they are generally of fantastic caliber.

So WHY, when the same critic that sang the praises of all these films before mainstream audiences even saw them, endorses a movie that does not have the benefit of heavy studio advertising, like "Cries and Whispers" or "Monster's Ball" or "The Right Stuff" or "House of Games" or "Do the Right Thing" or "Goodfellas" or "Being John Malkovich" (all of which also made Ebert's "top ten of the year" lists for the years in which they were released) do critics suddenly become untrustworthy, and people would rather go see whatever movie has been pounded on by marketing (Cliffhanger, Twister, Batman and Robin, The Lost World, Godzilla, Armageddon, Lethal Weapon 4, Pearl Harbor, etc) only to figure out, anywhere from right after to months later, that they actually HATE those movies, and meanwhile the critics had been trying to tell people that those movies suck since opening weekend. Then the cycle repeats when the next heavily marketed bad movie comes along.

It boggles my mind. I am truly at a loss to explain this weird phenomenon. No, critics aren't always right. I can pick out as many titles as I've listed above that Ebert has endorsed that I think are basically piles of dung. But that's why I read reviews instead of going only by ratings -- I can usually (not always) figure out if I'll like something based on what a review tells me about the movie, even if my ultimate conclusion is different from that of the reviewer. In any case, the success rate of critics is so much greater than the arbitrary whims of whatever film studios decide to overmarket. So if a critic whose opinions I respect enough to ask about says a particular movie is "the best film of the year," I'd at least not summarily dismiss it.

People are funny.