Everybody's A Critic
Do critics often read other reviews of a certain film/album/book before writing their own reviews—to gain perspective, to be "reminded" of certain details, or to synchronize proverbial swatches in order to perpetuate a vast critical conspiracy?
Matthew
This is another one of those questions where the answers vary widely by individuals, so we ran it by the whole staff to see what people had to say.
Donna Bowman:
I typically read book reviews, especially advance ones (Publishers' Weekly etc.), for a couple of reasons. First, those reviews often put authors into a larger context that gives me avenues of research for my own review. This can be especially important in genre writing—a lot of specialty and professional reviewers have a better grasp of the big picture than I'm likely to. There may even be important factual or historical information that isn't in the press material, but that reading other reviews can make clear, avoiding the embarrassment of coming off ill-informed.
Second, other reviews can offer a helpful perspective on how much plot to reveal. For Peony In Love, for example, I was blindsided by the narrator's death and transformation into a ghost a third of the way in. So I wanted to look at some reviews to see how they handled that twist. I'd say that reading other reviews isn't so much a matter of coordinating one's self with the critical consensus out there, but instead an assessment of practices in treating the material. Not that those should be treated as authoritative, but when one deviates from general practice, one should be aware that it is a deviation and have good reasons for doing so. The only way to be aware is to survey what others are saying and doing.
Noel Murray:
I absolutely read as many reviews as I can find before I write my own. I like to know what people are saying, so that I can position my response accordingly, and I like to make sure that I'm not just repeating what a dozen other critics have already written. In addition, reading an informed critic's evaluation of certain movies or albums can cue me to aspects of them that I might have otherwise missed. I like to think of criticism as a big conversation, and the more input I can get from writers I respect, the better my end of the conversation will be.
Nathan Rabin:
I, too, view criticism as an open-ended conversation, but it's a conversation I only join after writing my own review. As a rule, I avoid reviews of anything I might end up writing about, although I do make a point of seeking out as much non-review background material as possible. Though I trust my instincts, I don't want to let other people's ideas influence me in any way. I also don't want to end up unconsciously repeating anything that I might have read elsewhere, so I make a special point of never reading reviews for films I'm writing about. It's a policy that's served me well in the past. I see no point in changing it now.
Josh Modell:
I fall much more in line with Nathan on this, but perhaps not as hardcore. I must say I was a little surprised—not in a bad way—that Noel reads as many reviews as he can. I'm afraid that reading other reviews will point me down a path I might not otherwise have gone, if that makes any sense. (I'm also afraid that I'm inadvertently going to lift a word or phrase, which is why I don't read band bios too closely, either—I've seen reviews that echo record-company bios way too closely.) But I will often read interviews with bands before writing a record review, and occasionally read reviews of their older albums.
Scott Tobias:
The core issue raised by your question, I think, has to do with preconceptions. How might reading other reviews have an impact on how a critic perceives a film, book, or record? Speaking for myself, I'd say it's impossible to free yourself completely from preconceptions; after all, you usually have a history with a particular artist or artists, and you tend to tailor your expectations accordingly. But there are ways in which you can limit your preconceptions, and steering clear of reviews is one of them. And while I don't actively avoid reading reviews (or hearing opinions) before I see a movie or read a book, I don't actively seek them out, either, because I'd like to experience it first on my own. If I do encounter a review, I rarely engage with it in more than a superficial way, because I don't want it to influence any thoughts or ideas that might work their way into my own review. That's why I appreciate Variety: All the nutshell info is right up front in the first paragraph in bold print, and you can skip the specifics until after seeing the movie. I find Variety essential when I'm trying to navigate a film festival—my ears are also open to the opinions of respected friends and colleagues—but otherwise, I don't have much use for reviews until after my opinion has been registered. Then I scour through them obsessively.
Tasha Robinson:
I'm in the "read no reviews until I write my own" camp, Matthew, largely because I find other reviews kind of stifling: Knowing that some prominent critic compared a film I just saw to another film, or the work of another director, might prevent me from making the same comparison, for fear of getting branded a copycat—even if the same analogy occurred to me independently, even if it's the most apt and informative one. It's easier to register my own thoughts without worrying about how close to (or far away from) other people's thoughts they might be, and for me, it feels more critically honest. But that primarily goes for new releases: With historical material, re-released classics and the like, I'm much more likely to try to dig up old reviews, to see what people thought about the film or book when it first came out. That's an essential part of an informed review.
One thing no one's mentioned yet, though: With film in particular, our reviews tend to come out the day of release, which means that even those of us who like to read other reviews beforehand don't necessarily have the option.
The Monster Out Back
Okay, this was the mid-to-late '80s. I think we got HBO at the time, but this may just as well have been a cable TV movie of some kind. It was about a kid who goes to a lake and sees a huge dark form moving in the water, actually coming out of the water slowly and vertically, more like a dinosaur than a large fish or something, so he takes photos and I don't remember, other stuff happens. I do remember that the "dinosaur" turns out to be a big crane or earth-mover of some kind. Some heavy industrial equipment which was put there, I guess as a fraud to make people think there was a monster. Again, I'm not sure.
David
Donna Bowman is ready to put this question behind her:
Here's a peek onto the Ask The A.V. Club factory floor for all you fans. When a question comes our way that we can answer, but that doesn't seem to have an interesting hook into a larger issue or a topic of broader interest, we e-mail an answer directly to the questioner. Then we go on with our lives. But sometimes, hard as it may be to believe, we're wrong about that little matter of broader interest. Sometimes, the old ATAVC inbox tells us, on a monthly or even weekly basis, that certain bits of pop culture are apparently nagging at the frontal lobes of thousands. Ask Tasha sometime how many questions she still gets where the answer is the Ray Bradbury story "All Summer In A Day."
Or ask me about the fake-monster-in-a-lake movie. After identifying it for three separate questioners in the past two months, I feel the time has come to abandon the precision-sniper approach of individual e-mails to interested parties, and adopt the carpet-bomb let-God-sort-'em-out approach of an actual answer in the column.
Once and for all: If you remember a movie where there was supposed to be a monster in the lake, but it turned out to be a piece of construction equipment, it's Frog Dreaming, an Australian family film from 1986. It was retitled The Quest for its U.S. video release, and by all accounts, it was a semi-staple in the early days of Home Box Office, where you probably saw it. A 14-year-old Henry Thomas stars as an American kid hanging out in Devil's Knob National Park, where he hears aboriginal legends about a mysterious underwater creature correlating with weird reports of contemporary sightings, leading to some good old-fashioned teenage detective work, Please help us make this edition of Ask The A.V. Club the top search-engine hit for "fake-monster-in-a-lake movie," so that future generations can help themselves to the answer. Thank you.
You Can Have Magic
I half-remember a TV show about an old man—who resembles an elderly Art Carney—who could do real magic. He kind of mentors a boy, whom I now imagine as a young Robbie Benson type, and gives him advice about life. I remember an episode in which the boy, by spying on the old man, learns how to replicate things, and immediately abuses the power by replicating dollar bills. The show must have aired in the '80s, and if not, the '70s then. What was great about it was the tone and atmosphere: the show absolutely gave the impression that magic existed; and somehow reality as depicted in the show seemed to have a lot more gravitas than, you know, actual reality. I do hope this is enough information to track it down—I had no luck on my own.
Tabare Alvarez
Tasha Robinson is luckier than you:
I suspect that the half of the show you don't remember is also the half supposedly containing all that gravitas, Tabare. As I remember the series, it was fairly punchline-oriented and sitcommy. Not quite The Charmings, but not exactly an Atom Egoyan movie, either. You're thinking of 1981's Mr. Merlin, a one-season wonder in which the Merlin of Arthurian legend is hanging out in San Francisco as an auto mechanic, when his hapless hireling pulls the sword Excalibur—disguised as a crowbar—out of a block of concrete, and thus becomes his apprentice. That Art Carney fellow you remember—"Max Merlin"—was Barnard Hughes, possibly most remembered either as Buzz on Blossom or as the irascible Grandpa in The Lost Boys. ("One thing about living in Santa Carla I never could stomach—all the damn vampires.") He, at least, had some gravitas going—scanning back through his nearly 50 years in film and television via the IMDB, it's worth noting how many of his characters were doctors or judges. Alas, he died last year.
The Robby Benson type, Hughes' apprentice, was Clark Brandon, who had a brief career as a teen heartthrob, prompted by a series of appearances on The Facts Of Life and an earlier role on The Fitzpatricks. (Actually, if you want to see how much Benson and Brandon resemble each other, you could do worse than comparing the Teen Beat pin-ups of the era.) His career appears to have ended with the '80s. The show itself ran to a full 22 episodes—the one you cite, "The Cloning Of The Green," was episode two—and enjoyed some brief early popularity in the ratings before tanking mid-season. Unfortunately, we can't prove anything about its tone one way or the other, since it isn't available on video or DVD. Of course, as with practically every other show that's ever existed, you can see the opening credits on YouTube. Note the production credit of Larry Tucker, one of the original developers and producers of The Monkees:
Make Room! Make Room!
In my elementary-school days, I was utterly obsessed with the selection of short-story science fiction available in the school's library. There was one particular story I read again and again and again. It was about a man who went back in time to the Roman era and clued them in on technologies from his era. This act resulted in massive overpopulation until in present day, the earth was little more than a ball of writhing bodies. I believe the story ends with a man being sent back in time to kill the first man and prevent it all from happening. For the life of me, I can't remember what it was called or who wrote it. Please help!
Scott
Tasha Robinson again:
As Donna noted above, Scott, mostly when we can answer a question but don't have much to say about it, we just shoot the sender a response via e-mail. But this one bugged me for so long that I was pretty sure other people out there would get that "I know I've read this…" feeling from your question, and want to hear the answer. For a long time, I was bogged down with other well-known science-fiction books about overcrowding, particularly the Harry Harrison novel name-checked in the header above your question, and used as the basis for the film Soylent Green. But the details didn't quite match up. However, I finally found the answer on my own bookshelf at home. You're thinking of Frederik Pohl's 1962 Galaxy story "The Deadly Mission of Phineas Snodgrass." I found it in my battered paperback copy of 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories, a terrific collection of ultra-brief stories that come in under a thousand words each. It's a gimmicky collection, but the length constraints force the authors to be tight, concise, and to-the-point. Unfortunately, the collection is out of print, but it's available pretty cheaply used via various online booksellers. Failing that, the story has appeared in several Pohl anthologies. Check your local library.
Next week: Thoughts on Citizen Kane and other "best of all time" list perennials, plus the origins of the old slipping-on-a-banana-peel gag. Send your questions to [email protected].