A.V. Club Blog

Several years ago, back when Gene Siskel was still alive, he and Roger Ebert

did a theme show entitled “You Blew It!,” in which they razzed each

other about particularly egregious cheers and jeers. For example, Siskel got

on Ebert for hating David Lynch’s modern classic Blue Velvet

and liking the Burt Reynolds/annoying moppet comedy Cop And A Half.

The show was basically a funny rehash of old arguments, because the passage

of time had done nothing to shake either one of them from their original opinions,

no matter how untenable they had become. I’ve always felt that a better show would be

“I Blew It!,” in which the critics look back on their decades of

reviewing movies and confess to a few blown calls. And yet I’ve never

once seen a piece in which a critic admits that his/her original opinion was

in any way misguided, which strikes me as completely unnatural, if not downright

bull-headed in its obstinacy. To me, changing your views goes hand-in-hand with

your growth as an human being: If I held fast to every opinion I ever had on

a movie, the 13-year-old in me would still think The Ice Pirates is

hilarious, because it features a break-dancing robot.

It’s a dirty little secret among critics, I think, that we don’t

always feel today what we felt yesterday, yet I think that’s a secret

that we keep as much from ourselves as from our readers. As a critic, you want

your opinions to be authoritative and certain right from your first encounter

with a film, lest you be perceived as a bigger waffler than the last couple

of Democratic Presidential candidates. (Beats the stay-the-catastrophic-course

philosophy of our current leader, but that’s for another forum.) To me,

a review is a record of how a critic feels at that moment in time, not some

stone-chiseled verdict delivered from on high that can never be changed. And

yet my movie critic friends are almost perversely reluctant to concede any ground,

which I think has something to do with their opinions already being registered

in print. If you admit you’re wrong, you’re weak and not to be trusted,

least of all by yourself.

With that in mind, I’m prepared to make a few confessions here that go

against the official record that you find in the archives. I should say first

that outright reversals are extremely rare; it’s not often that I’m

so uncertain about my feelings that I hate something I professed to love or

vice versa. In most cases, opinions are like carry-on bags in the overhead bin:

Items may shift during the flight. This year alone, a few films have settled

in ways that the original reviews don’t quite capture: The dark political

comedy/fable Lord Of War

so wowed me with its urgent and irreverent treatment of the gun-running trade—the

final scene, especially, sends you out on a high—that I was too quick

to overlook the lazily sketched portraits of the main character’s brother

and wife. It was hard to put a finger on why Gus Van Sant’s Last

Days didn’t impress me as much as the other films in his “death

trilogy” (Gerry, Elephant), yet my reservations have melted away a bit

in retrospect, because I feel like Van Sant means for his Cobain character to

be a ghostly half-presence—or, as Keith puts it so well in this week’s

DVD briefs, someone who’s “learned how to haunt the world before

figuring out how to die.” War

Of The Worlds has also improved slightly upon reflection and a second viewing,

but it’s more a matter of emphasis: The ending is still a huge Spielbergian

misstep, but he puts on such a clinic of visual storytelling throughout that

his feats of direction should not be understated.

Of the honking errors I’ve made in my eight years writing for The

A.V. Club, there’s only one review I’d like to take back, which

is my rave for American Beauty.

Obviously, I was not alone in liking the film at the time—it won an award

or two, if I recall—but what first appeared to be an audacious and daring

comedy from a major studio now seems like a Hollywood gloss on well-trodden

indie territory, leavened by “transcendent” moments like that goddamn

floating plastic bag. How could I overlook the leaden irony of iron-fisted dad

Chris Cooper’s suppressed homosexual impulses? Or the overplayed Stepford

Wife brittleness of Annette Bening’s performance? The film makes me wince

with regret whenever it pops up on cable, and all I can say in my defense is

that its surfaces (courtesy of the late, great cinematographer Conrad Hall)

are so seductive that one can be forgiven for overlooking the hollowness inside.

So how rigid are your opinions? Do you find yourself unwilling to budge most

of the time or have there been times when a movie has shrunk or grown dramatically

in your estimation? We’ll take your confessions below…