Bill Goodykoontz on the disappearing critic's screening

The Republic’s film critic notes that the movie studios are showing fewer and fewer movies to critics for review:

I’m starting to feel like Charlie Brown. I never get invited to anything.

OK, that’s an exaggeration.

But this much is true: Of the three major releases that open Friday, Sept. 11, today none was available for review. I watched a fourth film, “Lorna’s Silence,” on DVD.

The three films are Sorority Row, a slasher pic; Whiteout, a thriller with Kate Beckinsale set in Antarctica; and I Can Do Bad All By Myself, the latest bit of sentimentality from Tyler Perry.

Slasher films make money whether they are good or bad, and Perry presumably doesn’t care or doesn’t need to care what white critics say about his black films.

Whiteout is more of a puzzle; locally, it was screened on a Wednesday night, which is too late to make the Republic’s deadlines. That strategically leaves local word-of-mouth to the screening audience and to less-serious local critics. Beckinsale, as Goodykoontz notes, is a fairly respectable actress, but in the end even respectable actresses end up in bad films, and the studio was trying to give the thing whatever protection from critics it could.

Manohla Dargis in the NYT, for example, reviewed it today. Her verdict? “[A] perfunctory, by-the-numbers approach to the story and its characters.” And she ended with this kiss-off:

And shouldn’t there be penguins? I thought every movie about Antarctica had to have penguins. Has someone done market research proving otherwise? Is the whole penguin thing over? Or maybe the penguins read the script and told their agents to pass. Smart birds.

Goodykoontz’s is a good reminder, though, that the movie studios, like the record companies, while busily marketing themselves in public as friends of consumers and fans, often work behind the scenes in ways to screw over their customers—and in this case their news sources.