Status Anxiety

17 October 2009

The problem with it being so cheap to make films is that there are so many bad ones

For the past three months I have been reviewing films for the Times and it has been quite an eye-opener. Before embarking on the job, I subscribed to the general view that cinema is not what it used to be. With the exception of a brief renaissance in the early 1970s, the art form has been in a state of decline since its heyday in the 1930s and 1940s. But I had no idea just how bad things had become.

Take The Spell, for instance. This low-budget British horror film, released a couple of weeks ago, was so bad that the critics started pouring out of the preview theatre within the first five minutes. By the end, there were only three people left. It was so amateurishly made, it was as if a group of delinquent teenagers had been given a camcorder and told to remake The Exorcist within the next 24 hours. Actually, that makes it sound more interesting than it was. I emerged from the screening room with smoke billowing from my ears and spent the rest of the day organising a petition to send to the Society of Film Distributors demanding that they change the rules regarding which movies are eligible for review.

The Spell was far from exceptional. The national film critics are forced to endure this form of torture all the time. If you’ve ever come out of a movie wondering why it got so many good reviews, the answer is because we’re comparing it to the other films we’ve seen that week. Next to The Spell, the latest Jennifer Aniston romantic comedy seems like a work of staggering genius.

I used to do the same job for the Guardian in 1992 and that now seems like a golden age. I remember being shocked by how poor My Cousin Vinny was — something that seems scarcely credible today. If I had to review it again next week, I’d give it four stars.

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