Day 122: Reviewing My Reviews
I am so happy that summer is here. It’s shallow and childish, but all my favorite movies usually come out during the summer. I enjoy the cerebral fare, but very few deep movies make me feel like I’m doing something new, or going someplace else that’s not of this world. I’m in it for the trip.
I get to see more movies, which makes me happy, and it’s a free day content-wise for the LJ, which I really like, but I was looking over some of my old reviews, and I’m torn.
After having time to think about and let it digest, I was way too lenient on Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull. The more I sit and think; the more the whole thing falls apart for me.
However, I wrote that review a day after seeing it, and I was still feeling the high of seeing Indiana Jones again, in fact, this is the first time I got to see Dr. Jones on the big screen. The warehouse scene was damn exciting and when he first sees Marion made me grin like an idiot, but the rest of the movie just isn’t that good.
Here’s the thing though, which review would be more honest?
I wrote the Speed Racer review as soon as I could. I was still high off the experience of the movie, and my inner ten-year old demanded I tell the world about the film that brought spin kicks to racing. Maybe because I knew my mood writing it, but the opening reads faster and more excited than other reviews I’ve written, and I stand by the review of an ambitious, exciting, fun, but flawed movie.
So, I don’t know what to do, because isn’t the experience of the movie itself the whole thing? The moments in theater where you belly laugh, hold your breath, or have the hairs on your arm and neck stand up, aren’t those the most honest moments? Isn’t walking out of a theater with friends or family talking about what you just saw, those brief moments of joy or disappointment, are those not the moments that the filmmakers are working toward?
On the other hand, don’t these pieces of art, no matter the context or intended audience deserve to be digested and ruminated on? Movies don’t disappear once they leave theaters. They live on at home when you watch them on your computer, throw a disc in the player, or find an edited for cable version on a lazy Sunday. Shouldn’t you watch the movie, and think about it as everyone else will? Should you think about context and social trends of your world, or leave that for later generations and their benefit of hindsight? Granted, that’s thinking long term, but for me, it still asks which review is more honest?
The one I write fresh off the experience, just taking a few hours to sleep before writing or proofing it, or the one where I give myself some distance and look at the movie with a more calculated eye?
I feel like the fresh one is better. The one where I wait longer can be too easily influenced by professional reviewers or even my own friends when I talk to them about the movie.
It’s not like I’m writing for reference books or published essays. I just want to impart some of the fun or not fun I had at the theater.
I’ll leave legacies to stronger writers with more experience in cinema.
Matt