What We Learned This Week: February 27-March 1

LESSON #1: ROTTEN TOMATOES IS DOING THE RIGHT THING— Better late than never and following the lead of IMDb, the popular review aggregator website is banning user reviews being posted to films prior to their release.  This week, internet trolls were piling on Captain Marvel before the film was even released.  Since there’s no good way of vetting strangers off the streets versus the critics that build the Tomatometer (myself included), this was a necessary stoppage and a measure I wholly appreciate.  Let the pros lead the way first and users join in after. There’s no need for haters trying to make an internet name for themselves hijacking a film’s standing with unsubstantiated garbage and fake reviews like that.  

LESSON #2: ROGER EBERT WAS HUMAN— Speaking of film critics and piggybacking on the Oscars crowning a new year of “best” films and performance, I stumbled across a 2016 article on Taste of Cinema that dug through the archives of Roger Ebert to find ten great films, some with Oscar successes, that he “hated” with less-than-stellar reviews.  From Gladiator to Reservoir Dogs and more, it’s quite a little list.   

LESSON #3: STEVEN SPIELBERG, HARVEY WEINSTEIN, GEORGE LUCAS, PETER JACKSON, AND JAMES CAMERON ARE THOUGHT OF MORE HIGHLY THAN GOD— With awards season just completing with the Oscars this week, I found an interesting little article last fall on MovieWeb that collected acceptance speech data from the Academy Awards up to 2015.  As it turns out, the five most thanked people at the Academy Awards before God were the five men mentioned in the lesson title.  Other fun data from the study included that the Academy was thanked 43% of the time and parents thanked only 28% of the time. How about that?

LESSON #4: PHYSICAL MEDIA CONTINUES TO TAKE HITS— With the push of streaming services and digital access, we’re slowly seeing physical media inching closer to becoming an endangered species.  I think we’ll alway have a niche like the Criterion collection for high-end keepers and this new little wave of 4K, but expect those store shelves and home displays to shrink as the years continue.  One big body blow to the standing of physical media came this week with Samsung announcing they are not longer going to manufacture Blu-ray players.  This feels heftier and more uncertain than the transitions we’ve lived through in the past (VCR to DVD, DVD to Blu-ray) because there’s not a new physical “thing” replacing the previous media.  We have files and hard drives now. Welcome even more to the future.  

LESSON #5: TREAT YOURSELF TO A GOOD JOURNALISM MOVIE— If you’ve been following WWLTW lately, I like ending on a thematic list of recommendations.  Call it homework assignments or something to build for Letterboxd. This week, take a gander at this list of the 10 best journalism movies as listed by the Washington Post.  There’s not a bad film on it.  Use the JustWatch app or search engine to find where they are available for streaming or rental

 


DON SHANAHAN is a Chicago-based and Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic writing on his website Every Movie Has a Lesson and also on Medium.com for the MovieTime Guru publication.  As an educator by day, Don writes his movie reviews with life lessons in mind, from the serious to the farcical. He is a proud director and one of the founders of the Chicago Independent Film Critics Circle and a new member of the nationally-recognized Online Film Critics Society.  As a contributor here on Feelin’ Film now for over a year, he’s going to expand those lessons to current movie news and trends while chipping in with guest spots and co-hosting duties, including the special “Connecting with Classics” podcast program.  Find “Every Movie Has a Lesson” on Facebook, Twitter, and Medium to follow his work.

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