Critics left in the dark.

I blogged before about the increasing tendency to send a movie to theaters without critical review. The studios decide that a movie will get nothing but bad reviews, so they simply decide to skip it. Of course, critics review these movies anyway, and savage them, but then it's too late. For me, I tried to find reviews of a couple of recent movies (Ultraviolet and Aeon Flux) before going to see them. I didn't find any, and I saw the movies anyway.

To be fair, if I had seen a lousy review (of the kind that came out for these movies after their release), I would have probably gone to see them regardless. So if the goal of the studios is to take the critics out of the equation entirely, I guess that's working. It seems silly that the studios work so hard to include good reviews, saying that reviews matter when they're good for the movie but don't when they're not.

When the critics are left in the dark, so is the moviegoer.

Random Observation #1: The Technorati search does everything I've ever wanted, and I am in Blogger Heaven.

RO #2: It occurs to me that I include links to provide elucidation and counterpoint to my own comments. If you don't read my links, all you get are my unadulterated opinions of the world with no facts to get in the way. So I don't know why I get pissed when nobody clicks the links. It's the extra HTML work, I guess, I'm so damned lazy.