DID THE CRITICS KILL ANOTHER MOVIE?

Critics are crowing that THE LONE RANGER is a bomb like JOHN CARTER.

And JOHN CARTER, like THE LONE RANGER, was a fun movie.  Ask Alex Cavanaugh.

It's a Jerry Brachheimer film, guys! 

You were expecting maybe HAMLET?

Now, critics are saying the young do not want to see a Western no matter who is in it. 

Really?

The critics loved Brad Pitt in THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES (2007) with a 76%  critic rating and a 73% audience rating. 

THE LONE RANGER

received a 73% audience rating before the flood of critics gleefully slashing it.

In today's skiddish movie marketplace,

it seems critics jump into a howling mob frenzy to negatively review a movie --

and such things destroy movies these days.

"Director Ridley Scott relies on suspense techniques that looked tired in The Perils of Pauline:

for the most part, things simply jump out and go 'boo!'

 

Under the circumstances, the allusions to Joseph Conrad (Nostromo) and Howard Hawks (The Thing)

seem unforgivably presumptuous.

Instead of characters, the film has bodies."

—Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE
 

Capra's first production through his newly-formed Liberty Films,

It's a Wonderful Life lost money in its original run,

when it was percieved

as a fairly downbeat view of small-town life. 

 

Only after it lapsed into the public domain in 1973 and became a Christmastime TV perennial did it don the mantle of a holiday classic. 

 

In fact, the original NEW YORKER review for it was so vicious that if George Bailey had read it, he might have committed suicide anyway!

 

GODFATHER II
 

 

 

"The only remarkable thing about Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, Part II is the insistent manner in which it recalls how much better his original film was."

 

"It's a Frankenstein monster stitched together from leftover parts.

It talks. It moves in fits and starts but it has no mind of its own...
Looking very expensive but spiritually desperate,
Part II has the air of a very long, very elaborate revue sketch."
—Vincent Canby, The New York Times
 

GONE WITH THE WIND
 

 

 

"And how badly written it is!

There is hardly a sharp or even a credible line.

It is picture-postcard writing,

as it is picture-postcard photography"

 Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Atlantic

 

 

CASABLANCA
 

 

 

"The love story that takes us from time to time into the past is horribly wooden, and clichés everywhere lower the tension."

—New Statesman

 

"The climax of Casablanca concerns the efforts

of Laszlo and his wife to leave Morocco.

Rick has two letters of transit, which would make that easy.

 

 Reluctant to help,

Mr. Bogart at last does the manly thing

and Mr. Rains saves him from the consequences.

 

Nothing short of an invasion could add much to Casablanca."

 — Time Magazine

 

 

DIE HARD

 

 

 

 

"On a technical level, there's a lot to be said for Die Hard. It's when we get to some of the unnecessary adornments of the script that the movie shoots itself in the foot.

 

Here's a suggestion for thrillermakers:

You can't go wrong if all of the characters in your movie

are at least as intelligent as most of the characters in your audience."

—Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

 

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK
 

 

 

"Kinesthetically, the film gets to you. It gets your heart thumping. But there’s no exhilaration in this dumb, motor excitement...

 

There’s nothing at stake in Raiders—

no revelation, and no surge of feeling at the end."

.—Pauline Kael, The New Yorker

 

 

THE WIZARD OF OZ

 

 

 

 

 

“I sat cringing before M-G-M’s Technicolor production of The Wizard of Oz,

which displays no trace of imagination, good taste, or ingenuity…

 

I don’t like the Singer Midgets under any circumstances,

but I found them especially bothersome in Technicolor…

I say it’s a stinkeroo.”

 – Russell Maloney, The New Yorker

 

"It has dwarfs, music, Technicolor, freak characters

 and Judy Garland.

 

It can't be expected to have a sense of humor as well,

and as for the light touch of fantasy,

it weighs like a pound of fruitcake soaking wet."

—The New Republic

 

TITANIC
 

 

 

 

"What does $200 million buy?

The 3-hour-and-14-minute 'Titanic' unhesitatingly answers: not enough."

—Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times

 

 

GLADIATOR

 

 

 

"By the end of this long film, I would have traded any given gladiatorial victory for just one shot of blue skies."

—Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times