We’re so amazed by the stellar reviews of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (if not for Manohla Dargis, Rex Reed and Wesley Morris the top critic score on Rotten Tomatoes would be 100%), that we wondered if it’s the best-received sixth installment of a series ever. And from what we can tell, until some late-come party crashers show up to ruin things, it appears to be nearly true.
Of course, it’s not like there was much competition from past franchises. By the sixth movie most film series are cheap, tired and nearly void of remaining followers. However, there have been a few worthwhile Part 6s, enough to show us that it’s sometimes acceptable for Hollywood to keep going with a film property (even without the excuse and benefit of a popular long-running book series).
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Leave it to Michael Bay to turn something already big into something bigger. No, I’m not talking about the “life-size” IMAX version of Optimus Prime. I’m referring to the gap between critic and general audience tastes, often referred to as the “critic-audience divide.” We’ve already seen it get worse this year via terrible yet popular movies like Paul Blart: Mall Cop, but given the $201.2 million grossed by Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen over its first five days, we film writers are feeling the coming apocalypse soooo much more. Remember how last year we thought The Dark Knight made so much money so quickly due to the fact that reviews were so great? Eh, that probably wasn’t the truth after all.
Of course, a success like Transformers 2’s doesn’t exactly prove critics are worthless, only those who function simply as a thumbs up/thumbs down sort of recommendatory guide. Plenty of critics should continue to be worth reading if they’re otherwise good reads and create or allow for discussion without merely saying a film is good or bad. One of my favorite kinds of critic, for instance, is the kind that may turn me onto a film despite him/her having disliked it, as some scathing reviews of Transformers 2 have almost done.
A reader commented on my previous post about Transformers 2 with the claim that all our negative reviews helped the movie be so successful. If that’s the truth, maybe we should start using negative psychology and trash the great little films we really love. Or, we can just stop worrying about the majority audience liking different things as us and enjoy all the death threats we get from mainstream moviegoers when we disagree with them. Isn’t it often better for our sites’ traffic to stir up contention anyway?
Oh well, here’s another crop of critical whinery after the jump:
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Another blockbuster, another record broken. What’s the big deal? Well, the biggest deal might be that film critics are wasting their time reviewing movies like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, because a billion trillion negative words written about the blockbuster sequel couldn’t have kept it from breaking the Wednesday opening record. Grossing $60.6 million over a day and two nights (the figure includes Tuesday’s midnight show tally of $16 million), Transformers 2 knocked Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix off the throne.
I haven’t heard of anyone liking the sequel, so it’s very possible that word of mouth will keep the movie from making too much more over the weekend. But then again, if another one of my weekends is completely rained out, I’ll probably go see the thing just to see how godawful it is (this Best Week Ever post makes me masochistically curious to see it). The first Transformers was a total bore, so I’d be happier with elements as ridiculously terrible as racially offensive robots and parachute farts, as long as there was something interesting going on.
The only thing keeping me from rounding up a large posse for a MST3K-inspired viewing is the idea that buying the tickets will only encourage Paramount and Michael Bay more (how about a group of us goes and buys Star Trek tickets and then sneak into Transformers? Paramount can’t complain, since they’ll still get the money, only for a better film).
Check out the film blogs’ response to the record breakage after the jump:
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