Elvis Mitchell: Film’s Critical Condition

On the phone, Elvis Mitchell's imposing physicality doesn't affect me. His over six-foot frame and two-foot-long dreads are washed out by the soft voice of a well-spoken and thoughtful man. A former film critic for the New York Times, Mitchell has been hosting the public radio program The Treatment for over ten years and is currently an editor-at-large for Interview magazine. A Visiting Lecturer at Harvard, Mitchell recently co-conceived and executive produced The Black List, a documentary film which premiered at Sundance and will air on HBO beginning August 24. Mitchell is known for his stream-of-consciousness writing, but when I spoke with him, he couldn't have been more direct about the death of the film critic, our box office obsession, and the draw of Will Smith.

You have a profound love and knowledge of film, and you study film. But you ended up a critic rather than a maker of film. Where do you think the division lies between someone who studies film and someone who makes it?

I would say a lot of people who are makers of film are also students of film. When you have this enthusiasm, you have to let other people know about it, and express it. As a critic, I’m involved in a conversation with these filmmakers about what they’re doing. A lot of the fun is talking to these people, or meeting them afterwards, and getting some sense of what it is that they were trying to do and their success level at getting it across. Sometimes you can point things out that they didn’t even see in the film, because they’re so deep in it on a day to day level. Criticism is valuable because it can offer a perspective to audience and filmmaker as well.

Online, everyone has their own opinion—and the professional film critic, people are saying, is not as necessary as they once were.

There’s a kind of nostalgia for an era that didn’t quite exist the way some people remember it, with rare exceptions, like Bonnie and Clyde. Movies got a chance to play out ... they didn’t open and close in the same week. Nowadays, it’s all about box office, with movies opening in 4,000 screens. If we were lucky, what a critic could do was draw attention from other producers or studios to somebody so other people could seek this filmmaker out and keep him working. There were rare cases when a critic could really make or break a movie. It’s funny because I think there are more critics now than there ever have been. Twenty years ago, there was no Entertainment Weekly, and there weren’t blogs, and there weren’t that many magazines devoted to this kind of stuff. It’s really kind of popularized.

What do you think about the fact that a blogger has the same kind of reach as a professional? There are hundreds and hundreds of opinions on Rotten Tomatoes, and it’s proliferated everywhere. Do you think that’s a valuable thing, or do you think it’s ruining the art?

We used to have alternative newspapers, where people could get their start and not work for much money, and get the word out there, and that doesn’t exist anymore. Now most of the alternative newspapers and magazines are owned by one major company, so the voices are absorbed, and there just aren’t the opportunities that there used to be in print. The blogosphere has become where people go to do what they used to be able to do in print years and years ago.

So much has changed with the marketing of film too. Now you have the opportunity to know everything about the movie before you even see it.

That’s the sad thing too. There’s all these shows, Access Hollywood and Entertainment Tonight, with all this information about all the budgetary aspects of film. People didn’t want to know that much before. That’s what’s really replaced reviewing ... how much money a movie makes, that kind of score-keeping, that’s what’s really done criticism in.

What about the Internet’s role in hyping films way ahead of their release?

It’s certainly blown up on the Internet because everyone can cover it now, and everyone has access to information. Print is a dying medium. My hope is that the blogosphere will be a golden age of people saying what they want to say about movies, going out of their own pockets, and being able to get the excitement across that people used to read from Pauline Kael, and Vincent Canby, and Andrew Sarris in the golden age. Doesn’t it worry you that there’s so much interest in the financial aspect of films?

When did that become news? When did that shift occur?

When the studios started telling how much money the movies made, that became a real indicator of what people were doing, if people were going to see a movie. And having all that information about the movie takes some surprise away. I wonder if these days The Sixth Sense could get released the way it was ten years ago. I mean, the studio didn’t give anything away in the trailer, and there was this great, unofficial contract between audience members, they weren’t going to tell other people what the movie was about. That was really fun and exciting, to be able to be surprised by a movie, and that’s something we’ve lost.

These days, with all the online attention a film receives before and even after its releases, a lot of it is given away to the audience before they even get a chance to see the film.

Any critic worth his salt works really hard to not dwell too much on giving away story points. The unfortunate thing is criticism is kind of a consumer function, because movies are expensive, so it’s a big deal. You’re making a bet on, is this movie going to make me happy, if I have to pay more than ten bucks now every place in the country, and then pay for popcorn and everything, you’re talking about a sixty, seventy dollar investment, it’s a pretty big deal. You can go to dinner cheaper than you can go to the movies now. That didn’t always used to be the case so people want that information because it helps them make a decision.

Do you think that film criticism still has the power to dictate the future of a movie? I wonder if something like Speed Racer had come out to rave reviews, if it would have tanked the way it did.

You can look at all the critics’ ten best lists, and probably at least half of those movies no one sees. When I was with the New York Times, you hope that if you’re writing about an indie film or a film playing the art house circuit, if you write a rave, that would make a difference ... and probably as many cases as not, it did make a difference.

So do you feel a sense of purpose and duty when you’re reviewing a film?

Oh yeah, always. When it’s something you’re really excited about, you want people to know about it, you want to spread that excitement. Studios figure if you use these actors and this kind of plot, you don’t surprise anybody, then people will go. There are a few people who guarantee that kind of box office, and Will Smith is one of them. You think about how badly reviewed Wild Wild West was, people went to that, and it was a terrible movie. Or look how badly reviewed Hancock is, and people are going to that. That’s not keeping people away.