My wife’s a bigger horror film fan than I am, so when I get in a flick from that particular genre in to review, she’s been known to go watch the DVD before I get around to it. In the case of “An American Haunting,” she started watching it…but she said that it started to get so scary that she decided she wanted to stop watching it until I could watch it with her.
Fair enough…except that I kept setting it aside, we both got busy, and, basically, we forgot about it…until this week.
So we finally watched it, and, yes, the film does have some scary moments. It doesn’t necessary scale the heights of horror greatness throughout its 90 minutes – when your film’s about a relatively young girl who’s haunted by a mysterious spirit, it’s hard to get past the inevitable similarities to “The Exorcist” – but it’s an enjoyable enough, good-looking horror flick, made more interesting by the fact that it’s a period piece (it takes place during the 1800s) and aided immeasurably by a solid cast that’s top-lined by Donald Sutherland and Sissy Spacek. Unfortunately, what’s painted as a ghost story throughout the majority of its run time suddenly changes gears dramatically at the end…and while I’m not looking to give it away, I’m guessing the conclusion will have you reacting in the same way my wife and I did: by asking, “Are you kidding me…?”
But, then, as a critic, my opinion doesn’t count for much, apparently (even though, mind you, it’s precisely the same as my wife, who isn’t a critic), based on a rant by the film’s writer / director, Courtney Solomon, on the DVD.
Solomon opts out of doing a proper commentary; he starts off doing an in-screen video commentary, but he quickly gets bored and, instead, decides to hop in his car and drive around to the various places involved in the film’s creation. After talking about all the online promotion done for the film and how it helped its box office peformance immeasurably, he starts talking about critics; he understands why they have to exist but that he doesn’t have to read what they have to say, that a director needs to know when he himself is happy with his work and not change it based on the opinions of others. Fair enough…but, then, he starts into an attack on the entire profession of film criticism that’s like a snowball rolling down a hill, growing in vicious intensity with each passing moment.
Dare you read the transcription?
Why does somebody become a movie critic? Let’s examine this for a second. Okay. Childhood dream. I mean, you know: doctor, fireman, lawyer, President…I dunno, we all have childhood dreams. Do you think anyone one of those includes somebody who says, “I want to be a movie critic”? I don’t think so. So, to me, what it is is a fallback career. It’s probably, in most cases, somebody that came out to California to be a filmmaker, writer, an actor, who knows what, and didn’t get to do it. They don’t actually make anything. So instead, they need to survive, that’s fair enough, so they probably have an education – some are literate, according to Stephanie here, some aren’t – and, essentially, they just fall back on this career and they criticize other people’s hard work. I guess my whole comment to the critics is, we had a bad rating, and, yet, for horror movies, our film…the real gauge is, “Did people go see the movie?” And from Week 1 to Week 2, our movie only dropped 34%. For horror movies, the average drop from Week 1 to Week 2 is about 60%. So obviously, the people who went to see the movie thought it was pretty good, or good enough to tell their friends to go see it the next week, which resulted in a lower drop. In fact, we never dropped below 50% in any of the 14 weeks that we were in the theater.
I’ll tell you a little story. I went down to a certain place with the release of this movie, and it was an important aspect of the release of the movie, so I spent some time down there, and I spent some time down there with some of the main critics for the main newspapers. Yeah, we went to the screener, we went out and had dinner, we drove around in a limousine, we took ’em out and got ’em drunk, we had a good time, we were out ’til 3 in the morning, the stars were there. Everything was great. You wanna know how many stars our reviews in that particular state got? Four. Four out of four.
So I want to ask you: do you think these people are really objective, or do you think they just like to be treated a little like a celebrity, a little bit like someone important, so they can have their fucking ego stroked so they can write you a nice fucking review? ‘Cause that’s basically what it comes down to. In other words, what I’m telling you, all this shit, that’s what it is: a pile of shit. Nothing true about it at all. You treat them right, they treat you right; you don’t give them any attention, then they come down on you. And that’s why it’s just better to let the audience make up their minds, because that’s who the movie’s really for, not somebody who gets paid to write a piece of journalism so that they can say to their boss, “I did it, and I reviewed X number of films this week, so give me my paycheck” Because that’s all these people are, and they’re just looking for as many freebies and as many perks as they can get to write reviews.
Hey, fellow movie critics, I know you’re out there: what say you to this guy’s position…? Because I’m telling you, I could’ve known Courtney Solomon since kindergarten, and I still would’ve gotten to the end of “An American Haunting” and said, “That ending was AWFUL.”
