Last week I was lifted from obscurity to semiobscurity when the website Vocativ announced that I was the most reliable movie critic in the country. “Screening for Hacks: America’s Movie Critics, Rated” is based on a formula that writers Adam K. Raymond and Matan Gilat concocted using numerical data from Metacritic, one of those sites that harvests reviews, converts them into number values, and averages these to rank new releases. I’ve always thought such sites are ridiculous, not to mention a little demeaning: as film editor I try to persuade my contributors that we’re writing literature, not consumer advice. But we all know that’s baloney—how can you be a man of letters when people keep turning your letters into numbers?
From personal experience I can tell you that there’s nothing less fun than a room with 50 film critics in it. (As Stamets pointed out to me, that may be the reason the Lake Street Screening Room, where we gather to preview many new releases, seats only 49 people.) But from now on I expect my colleagues to treat me as a Solomonic figure—the lawgiver, the soothsayer, the final arbiter of any dispute. When the lights go up, all heads will turn toward me. In fact, in the tradition of Solomon, when we can’t agree whether a movie is good or bad, I shall simply order that the movie be cut in half. Everyone knows the first half of a movie is usually better than the second half.
