Well, it had to happen — several reviews of Indy’s newest outing have hit the fan, and they aren’t all that pretty. The worst one has been posted at Ain’t It Cool News by someone who calls himself (or herself) ShogunMaster:

. . . this is the Indiana Movie that you were dreading. During the whole of the movie, there was not a single moment that I thought our hero Mr. Jones (actually Colonel Jones as he was a hero in WWII now) was in any sort of peril or even significant inconvenience. In most cases, you were so many steps ahead of the characters that it was really just an arduous wait for them to get through it.

Ouch. According to Michael Cieply of the NY Times, ShogunMaster probably saw the film at an exhibitor screening last week:

Paramount had shown the film to a handful of theater company executives at its Los Angeles lot and elsewhere.

Movie studios increasingly tend to protect their biggest bets from advance showings. Two years ago, for instance, Sony Pictures screened “The Da Vinci Code” for critics at the Cannes Film Festival only two days before its opening in the United States. But exhibitors’ screenings can open a window for determined reviewers.

Such screenings are required in about two dozen states that have laws against blind-bidding, a practice in which theater owners were once asked to bid on films they had not seen.

As Johnny Carson used to say, I did not know that. But given that Steven Spielberg is it’s director, it’s unusual that advanced reviews of any kind have leaked about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull; according to Cieply,

Mr. Spielberg is unusually fastidious when it comes to protecting his films from advance word that can diminish excitement or muddy a message planted by months of carefully orchestrated publicity and expensive promotions (including, in this case, a February cover article in Vanity Fair, complete with Annie Leibovitz photos of the cast, and leather bullwhips delivered weeks ago to newsrooms).

Mr. Spielberg customarily avoids leaky test screenings. Even Marvin Levy, his publicist of more than 30 years, said he had not yet seen the new movie.

At least as interesting as what may or may not be a legitimate review has been the blogosphere’s response to it. It started with David Poland at The Hot Blog, who wrote about Cieply’s piece:

Wow.

Does it get any stupider than this?

I hardly know where to start counting the layers of idiocy. But I will try.

1) The big paper gets to be top of the heap. By makng a NYT story out of 2 anonymous “reviews” of this movie, The Paper of Wreckord took a blip that would have been seen by a few hundred thousand people, at most, who are going to this movie no matter and made it into national news that will now be picked up by every paper in the country in one form or another. Congratu-fucking-lations. How proud Bill Keller must be!

Then, Craig Kennedy at Living in Cinema takes a similar, if better-written, tack:

Frankly, it’s the kind of piece you’d expect to find in a blog not unlike LiC. There is little in the way of actual reporting. Cieply called Spielberg’s publicist Marvin Levy and got a couple of one line quotes that don’t illuminate or offer any new information and then he talked to Tim Ryan, the senior editor at Rotten Tomatoes about when legitimate reviews of the film are likely to first appear. That’s it. The rest I could’ve done myself if I’d cared to think thing about such a thing for longer than two seconds.

When I see folks react like this, I wonder a couple of things. First, are they stockholders in Paramount Pictures? Why should they care if the Times reports — undoubtedly on a slow entertainment-news-day — a piece like that? Could there be a little jealousy involved, that this guy who wrote such an inconsequential piece gets to write it for the Times?

Second, do they get the irony of castigating someone for exploiting a non-story by doing the same thing themselves? Kennedy seems to be at least semi-aware of this, but Poland seems not to have a clue. Come on guys, it’s the blogosphere. It’s what we do, what I’m doing, digging up stories, posting them with a spin, trying to stir up readership. Lighten up!

Finally, as all the carefully-laid plans of mice-and-Spielberg highlight, those who live by the hype sometimes die by it. Carefully-leaked little tid-bits about the movie, fedoras given out at Blockbuster, bull-whips sent to reporters — sometimes they backfire. And if leaks like this don’t matter, if anonymous, viral reviews don’t amount to a hill of beans, why is the director so hell-bent on controlling them?

Be that as it may, in this case, negative reviews probably won’t matter — if any of this summer’s blockbusters is “critic proof,” this is the one. I’ll certainly go see it, if only for the nostalgia, and to see how Harrison Ford hides the walker.

Tags: , ,