Have you seen Encanto? Of course you have! It’s been a streaming phenomenon since Disney put it on their Disney+ platform on Christmas Eve. Perhaps you have young children and are now on your fifteenth viewing. Surely you’ve listened to the soundtrack. You must have, since the Encanto soundtrack (written by LIn-Manuel MIranda) currently has six songs on the Billboard Hot 100. The catchy songs have earwormed their way into playlists across america. The film has a 91% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes, indicating almost universal praise.
Don’t worry. We aren’t going to talk about Bruno. Or turn this site into an Encanto appreciation blog.
Oh, did you just get “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” out of your head? I’ll fix that.
We are instead going to talk about some of the 9% of critics who didn’t like Encanto.
The Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast on NPR did an episode reviewing Encanto when it came out in November. Their consensus was that it was a visually beautiful but pretty slight entry from Disney. Stephen Thompson, their resident music critic, in particular singled out the songs for being forgettable and not at all catchy. He went so far to suggest that Lin-Manuel Miranda should take a break since he obviously was running out of steam.
Yeah, about that... (Did we mention the six songs from the soundtrack on the Hot 100?)
So that review aged like unpasteurized milk left in the sun. So much so that Thompson felt compelled to rewatch the movie and relisten to the soundtrack to see if he’d missed anything on first listen.
Now this is surely a fantasy of writers everywhere. The critic who gives a bad review is utterly humbled by the massive sales and adulation of the writer’s adoring throngs and publicly recants before slinking off into a tear-stained exile. (Not everyone? Just me?)
And it never happens. Never.
Being a writer means you have to deal with the slings and arrows of critics, both professional and amateur. And since writers are often nitpicky by nature, it of course means we focus on the bad (or weird) reviews rather than the good ones. I’ve written two novels. They’ve gotten a lot of good reviews! Yay! But of course I remember the dumb ones. Like the guy who left a five star rating with the one word review: “meh.” That just lives in my head, rent free. Why did you rate it five stars? WHY? And of course there are the people who have left me a rave review (“Funny! Exciting! Great!”) but have some weird personal rating system where that only merits 3 stars. What lofty book gets gets a five out of five from you, dear reader? (“To Kill A Mockingbird is both a riveting courtroom drama and a tender coming of age story! 3.5 stars!!”)
One of the first things my publisher drilled into my head was DO NOT ENGAGE with readers posting reviews. NO. DO NOT. There is no winning. If you do, you either come across like a whiner or a bully. (That’s why I’m not linking to them.)
It should go without saying that you don’t actually have to like a particular movie or book, no matter what critics or crowds say. Absolutely everyone has their own example of a movie they love that everyone else hates and a movie that gets enormous critical acclaim that they can’t figure out why. Personally, I love Death to Smoochy - the Robin Williams comedy about a rivalry between kid’s show performers. I am largely alone in that opinion, since my wife and I were literally the only ones in the theatre when it came out. And for the life of me, I cannot understand the critical appeal of Lars von Trier who seems determined to degrade his actresses in every movie.
And honestly, it really doesn’t matter WHY a critic or a reader dislikes something. Sometimes something just rubs you the wrong way, or you weren’t in the right frame of mind. Art can be transformative, but if someone is resistant to change, what can you do? And maybe, upon reflection, you might be more open to something at a later time. All you can ask is that the reviewer clearly articulate their reasons as to why they dislike something.
I should add the caveat: if the reason you dislike something is wildly sexist or racist or otherwise bigoted, then you can get fucked. For example, you’re absolutely free to hate on The Last Jedi (just to pick one eternal example explored on Twitter dot com), but if your reason comes down to “they put wokeness and girls in muh Star Wars” then expect me to mock you relentlessly.
There’s always been this division of audiences vs critics, or the snooty elitists versus the unwashed rabble. And of course, things that are popular aren’t always good and things that are good aren’t always popular. For example, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen made about a billion dollars more than the recent Nightmare Alley, and the Guillermo del Toro noir movie was about a billion times better than the terrible sequel about fighting robots. And sure, sometimes critics are too quick to dismiss genres out of hand, and audiences are too reluctant to try new things. The level of discourse on social media does very little to help nuance. Trying to write something in 240 characters reduces everything to quips and snark, trying to get the most likes and clicks. And sometimes a film or book just can't be reduced to a couple of sentences, and the first impression is incorrect.
No comments:
Post a Comment