I’ll probably never review another Kevin Smith movie. At least I won’t if the filmmaker has his way; burned by the response to his rancid film Cop Out, Smith had a blow up on his Twitter feed and ended up saying he doesn’t want critics seeing his films for free any more.
Here’s the complete tirade:
(1/5) @coked_up_jesus “I gotta say that every day I hate film theory & film students & critics more & more. Where is the fun in movies?” Sir
(2/5) sometimes, it’s important to turn off the chatter. Film fandom’s become a nasty bloodsport where cartoonishly rooting for failure gets
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(3/5)the hit count up on the ol’ brand-new blog. And if a schmuck like me pays you some attention, score! MORE EYES, MEANS MORE ADVERT $.
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(4/5) But when you pull your eye away from the microscope, you can see that shit you’re studying so closely is, in reality, tiny as fuck.
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(5/5) You wanna enjoy movies again? Stop reading about them & just go to the movies. It’s improved film/movie appreciation immensely for me.
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Seriously: so many critics lined-up to pull a sad & embarrassing train on #CopOut like it was JenniferJasonLeigh in LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN.
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Watching them beat the shit out of it was sad. Like, it’s called #CopOut ; that sound like a very ambitious title to you? You REALLY wanna
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shit in the mouth of a flick that so OBVIOUSLY strived for nothing more than laughs. Was it called “Schindler’s Cop Out”? Writing a nasty
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review for #CopOut is akin to bullying a retarded kid who was getting a couple chuckles from the normies by singing AFTERNOON DELIGHT.
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Suddenly, bully-dudes are doing the bad impression of him, using the “retart” voice. The crowd shifts uncomfortably. #IfOnlyDaltonWasHere
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And you may impress a couple of low IQ-ers who’re like “Yeah, man! Way to destroy that singing retart!” But, really? All you’ve done is make
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fun of something that wasn’t doing you any harm and wanted only to give some cats a some fun laughs. #YesIcomparedMyFlickToARetardedKid
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It was just ridiculous to watch. That was it for me. Realized whole system’s upside down: so we let a bunch of people see it for free & they
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shit all over it? Meanwhile, people who’d REALLY like to see the flick for free are made to pay? Bullshit: from now on, any flick I’m ever
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involved with, I conduct critics screenings thusly: you wanna see it early to review it? Fine: pay like you would if you saw it next week.
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Like, why am I giving an arbitrary 500 people power over what I do at all, let alone for free? Next flick, I’d rather pick 500 randoms from
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Twitter feed & let THEM see it for free in advance, then post THEIR opinions, good AND bad. Same difference. Why’s their opinion more valid?
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It’s a backwards system. People are free to talk shit about ANY of my flicks, so long as they paid to see it. Fuck this AnimalFarm bullshit.
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I get why the guy would be hurt; despite downplaying the importance of critics later in his feed (saying that only Janet Maslin was really important to his career), Smith’s always been a filmmaker buoyed by the critics. He certainly isn’t a populist filmmaker, considering that until Cop Out he never made a movie that earned more than 32 million dollars. Let’s put it this way – There Will Be Blood, a difficult, arty film that doesn’t appeal to the mainstream on any level, made more money than any Kevin Smith film until Cop Out. It’s naive of Smith to say that Clerks, which made less then 4 million dollars in theaters, wasn’t helped by critics. If Clerks had been ignored by the critical establishment there would have been no further Kevin Smith movies.
But the fact that I get where he’s coming from doesn’t make his statements any less pathetic, whiny or ignorant. He’s staked out a position in the very stupid section of the film world, and I’m sure there are lots of very stupid people who will agree with what he says. The reality here is that Kevin Smith sees no value in film as art – especially his own films. It’s almost shocking to read a director comparing his latest film to a retarded child; I know that Smith had problems making the film, problems which could have soured him on it to an extent, but to get so riled up about a movie that he himself is discounting is beyond strange.
Smith’s tirade represents the cancer that has been killing movie fandom for decades now. The 70s represented not just a high point for filmmaking but for film watching – it was a time when people believed that movies mattered, that beyond being entertaining movies could be at the center of our culture and could say things about us. That opinion has rolled back over the decades, and while cinema is a major economic force in entertainment, it feels more and more distanced from the heart of the culture. Instead of directing the culture cinema seems to reflect it.
Part of what happened in the 70s was that people realized that all movies had value, and critics stopped being just consumer reporters and turned into scholars and historians. Coolest of all was a rethinking of genre films, with directors who made very mainstream, populist films getting finally recognized as masters of the art. But it seems like there was a backlash to this, to the idea of the smart people appropriating the popular entertainment, and after that heady decade critical cinematic thinking fell out of favor. In its place was the mantra of the dumb fanboy: turn off your brain. It’s the thing I hate most*, and I’ve railed against it before. Now Smith has decided to become the personification of it.
Obviously Kevin Smith isn’t the only director in Hollywood who thinks his own movies are lightweight piffles. There are lots of middle of the road directors who just work and who are happy to make movies that hit all the quadrants on the demographics sheet. There are plenty of directors out there who have no illusions about what they’re making. But they’re not Kevin Smith – they don’t have passionate fanbases, and they didn’t begin as darlings of the indie film scene. That’s why it’s so sad to read Smith discounting his own work in that way – some of us were around in 1994 and remember when it looked like Clerks was the vanguard of a new cinema.
It’s still sad to see Smith stand so adamantly on the side of the stupid, though. It’s sad to see him ask why critics are more qualified to judge movies than random fans on his Twitter feed; Smith, a completely amateur filmmaker, has bought into the myth of the amateur being equal to the professional. Obviously not every single film critic in America is a professional, or all that knowledgeable, but plenty are. An understanding of film, of filmmaking and of critical thought is what makes a film critic more qualified to judge movies than a random guy from Smith’s Twitter feed. If Smith was decrying the debasement of film criticism through an inundation of morons with Blogspot accounts I’d be right there with him. But he’s painting everybody in film criticism with the First Showing brush.
The other stupidity trap into which Smith falls is the belief that just because something doesn’t try very hard you shouldn’t judge it very hard. It’s part of that ‘turn your brain off’ crap – simply evoking a couple of chuckles is, apparently, enough. Never mind the fact that Cop Out does not evoke any chuckles at all – it’s arrogant for a director think that it’s okay to foist a film on the public that even he doesn’t find all that great. If Smith doesn’t want to be judged on a filmmaking level let’s judge him on a sheer consumer level – does he really believe that Cop Out, a retarded child of a film, is worth a full price admission at a movie theater? Middling movies happen all the time – hell, we’re running a list about them right now – but you would hope that a director would put as much work into the film as he would into tirades defending it from critics.
I feel like it’s now okay to dismiss Kevin Smith. He’s given us permission. He’s said that he’s not making good films, or even films that really try very hard. And in many ways he’s probably doing critics a favor by keeping them out of screenings; now they’ll have two more hours to spend doing something important. I expect Smith fans will show up here eventually to berate me, but these people seem to be even more dismissable than Smith himself – at least he’s getting paid to be bad at what he does. The Smith fanbase is made up of people who don’t just consume subpar movies, they revel in them. These people are hardcore fans of stuff that even the guy who makes it says isn’t very good.
Fifteen years ago I thought Kevin Smith was the voice of a generation. It turns out he is – the generation just happens to be lazy, stupid people who are perfectly content going through life without an original, interesting thought in their heads.
* just because I need to explain this every time: not every movie needs to be a deep and spiritual or intellectual experience. Movies can be dumb and still be great. What movies shouldn’t be is background noise. The ‘turn off your brain’ contingent are about movies that don’t engage on any level, that require no participation from the viewer, and that disappear completely from your mind the moment the credits roll. That’s Muzak.