Film Editorials Archives | Deep Focus Review

Rotten Tomatoes Payola and Critical Ethics

Brian Eggert — Sun, 10 Sep 2023 13:55:16 +0000

You may have read last week in Vulture about a PR firm called Bunker 15 that paid smaller, self-published, Tomatometer-approved critics to post positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes (RT) for Ophelia. The 2018 film had a poor reception initially, with a 46% rating on RT. However, after the firm began paying critics, it achieved the desired “Fresh” label. The firm would offer these critics $50 or more in payola for a positive review, and they would also lobby critics to change their negative reviews to positive ones. The Vulture story spends most of its time questioning the influence of RT on the film industry. Sure, the Tomatometer score can have a significant impact on a film’s box-office performance, and studios and distributors often make decisions about marketing and promotion to appeal to that score. It’s shameful, yet not altogether surprising, that PR firms would attempt to manipulate the RT score. Director Paul Schrader shrewdly summarized the problem: “Rotten Tomatoes is something the studios can game. So they do.” Much of the Vulture article makes a case against RT in general, with several interview subjects from Martin Scorsese to Quentin Tarantino decrying the platform because it seems to thwart critical thinking […]

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Chimeras of Independence in Ritwik’s The Cloud-Capped Star

Maaisha Osman — Mon, 06 Sep 2021 14:43:23 +0000

Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-Capped Star, 1960), by visionary Bengali filmmaker Ritwik Kumar Ghatak, or just Ritwik for Bengalis, powerfully captures the despair of being in a constant state of transience. It’s a film about the pervasive sense of embitterment over the newly drawn border and the traumatic terms on which independence from British rule had finally been won in India. Undivided Bengal was perceived in British India as a region with sectarian conflicts between Hindu and Muslim segments of the population—incorporated within a Bengali cultural and linguistic identity but carved into two separate territorial entities in 1947. East Bengal (now Bangladesh) formed the eastern wing of Pakistan, and West Bengal became a part of India. Bengalis such as Ritwik—who migrated to West Bengal during the 1940s but had deep roots in East Bengal—saw their homeland become a foreign country overnight. Many refugees settled in Calcutta, taking over swampy land in the eastern peripheries of the city to build ‘refugee colonies’—the crumbling settlements that we see in Meghe Dhaka Tara—and struggling to maintain their dignity. Meghe Dhaka Tara tells the story of Neeta (Supriya Choudhury), the eldest daughter of a downwardly mobile Hindu middle-class family, who barely keeps her family […]

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Cheap Thrills: Dark Castle Entertainment

Brian Eggert — Fri, 30 Jul 2021 03:22:02 +0000

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Courtroom Malfeasance

Brian Eggert — Wed, 16 Jun 2021 03:26:45 +0000

Courtroom dramas are an arena unto themselves. Through them, justice is served on a grand cinematic stage, but then so are miscarriages of justice. These stories usually involve a series of conflicts that culminate with or revolve around a significant court case. Legal thrillers like Witness for the Prosecution (1957) or Anatomy of a Murder (1959) employ a defense attorney as a protagonist, and we follow that attorney as he builds his case strategy like finding clues to a murder mystery. In films such as The Accused (1988), we’re on the prosecutor’s side, watching as she seeks to put away a deserving criminal element. And sometimes we follow an attorney conducting a lawsuit with social or ethical stakes, such as the leads in Philadelphia (1993) or more recently Dark Waters (2019). Whatever the case’s specifics may be, courtroom dramas, quite obviously, orbit around the courtroom and its usual trappings. Attorneys pore over legal books, evidence, and strategies to find some angle to win their case. Then they engage in over-the-top dramatics to convince the jury, often by introducing incriminating evidence or testimony that disproves another witness’ version of events. The accused looks back at their loved ones, who worry about […]

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Do the Oscars Even Matter?

Brian Eggert — Wed, 21 Apr 2021 21:33:38 +0000

Every year, I grapple with the Academy Awards and their significance. On the one hand, awards season is my favorite time of year. Everyone seems interested in the movies, and that’s infectious. People who don’t spend their entire year seeing and talking about new releases seek out the nominees. They watch movies they might not have watched otherwise if only to be part of the conversation that people like me are having all year long. Debates about who deserves to win, who was nominated, and why, and what the nominees say about our culture, also permeate the media and water cooler talk. Movies are in the air, and I love that. Still, the importance of the Oscars remains something I vacillate about. How much stock should one put into their legacy and canonization of film history? Are the Oscars truly a reflection of the best in film for a given year, or are they more about Hollywood congratulating and promoting itself with a night of glamor? And why should we care about who wins when, given enough time, their choices prove obsolete? Pick a year, any year, and you can question whether the Academy got it right. You might note […]

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Satyajit Ray’s Charulata: Calm Without, Fire Within

Maaisha Osman — Sun, 07 Feb 2021 18:45:46 +0000

Charulata’s eponymous character personifies the alienation afflicting a generation caught between past and present in colonial Bengal. The film is Satyajit Ray’s 1964 adaptation of the Bengali novel Nashtanirh (The Broken Nest) by Rabindranath Tagore, a polymath—as well as poet, novelist, playwright, composer, painter, philosopher, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, who has blended Bengali literature and classical music with contextual modernism. Set in late-nineteenth-century Calcutta when the Bengal Renaissance was at its peak, and India was under British colonial rule, the film revolves around an intelligent, curious, resilient, and well-cultivated young woman named Charulata, played by Madhabi Mukherjee. Around this time, the western education curricula—introduced into British India in 1835—had given rise to a new bourgeois elite, who forged an uneasy cultural and political coalition between Western liberalism and traditional oriental thought. Perhaps no other movie has captured so vividly fin de siècle cultural anxiety, and the personal entanglements it entails, here seen through the lenses of the intellectual class. The contrast between the traditional and modern in Calcutta permeates Ray’s films. At times, it appears as an adversary to his innocent characters (like the eponymous Apu of his trilogy), who suffer the impositions of a changing […]

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After Six Months of Alamo Drafthouse, I Love Going to Movies Again

Brian Eggert — Tue, 26 Feb 2019 23:47:04 +0000

Going to the movies gives me anxiety, and since I see around 150 movies theatrically per year, that’s become a problem. I’ve written in the past about how the joy of seeing a movie in the theater is an experience more often than not spoiled by other moviegoers. It’s actually rare that I see a movie on the big screen and don’t observe some bad behavior forbidden in the unwritten social contract among spectators. This is particularly grating when it’s a movie you’re really excited about or enjoying at the moment, and you’re taken out of it because some patron keeps checking their texts or social media throughout the show—and even if they attempt to do so inconspicuously, it’s still blatantly obvious when a dimmed smartphone appears in a darkened theater. Some people answer telephone calls or talk to each other throughout the movie. Many attempt to whisper, although they haven’t mastered that subtle art of lowering their voice to a decibel unheard by moviegoers one or two seats away. Countless others simply talk, without any effort to muffle their remarks. In these situations, the movie experience is lessened, if not ruined, by an inconsiderate few. As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, […]

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Demystifying the Myth: The Western’s Classical Phase

Matthew Jones — Sat, 23 Feb 2019 20:36:16 +0000

So much has been written about the classical phase of the Western. Genre fans and, for the most part, critics alike have accepted with open arms the idea of a temporally delimited phase in the genre’s evolution wherein its “classical” roots had been established and set. Questions of the actual validity of this common-held notion are often few and far between, and its convenience as a critical descriptor and ideological counterbalance appears to justify its existence. The issue is not the lack of clear signifiers appearing in earlier Westerns across an expanse of films that can readily be understood as of a type of classicism; rather it is the idea of a linear evolution that the genre followed from its earliest origins in literature and the screen to the contemporary era. Even more problematic perhaps is the conception of a circumscribed classical phase birthed in the literature of James Fenimore Cooper and Owen Wister, then carried over to the cinema into the early silent Westerns of John Ford and others before meeting its demise when the genre became increasingly self-conscious and non-traditional in the post-World War II era. Tag Gallagher’s aim at demystifying this conception appeared in his “Shoot-Out at […]

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Musings on the End of FilmStruck

Beau Stucki — Tue, 06 Nov 2018 17:17:39 +0000

It has become trite to observe that streaming services are changing the shape of Hollywood and the movie industry in general. Creators and corporations alike are paying attention—no longer able to ignore the wealth of potential. Long-held rules and maxims about filmmaking are being called into question. Streaming originals are getting ever closer to the prestigious Best Picture Oscar. Studios are growing ever more jealous of their own properties. Streaming changed the establishment; now the establishment is changing streaming. Among the new media giants like a hopeful sapling, the alternative streaming service FilmStruck sprang to life two short years ago. It has made a small flurry of recent headlines after its end was announced last month, its shut-down planned for November 29. With right around 100,000 subscribers, the arthouse and classic movie service was not a threat to any Netflix, Hulu, or Prime—but it wasn’t raking in the dough for anyone either. Its parent company Time-Warner was purchased by AT&T and straightaway the credits rolled. Why did it happen? What does it mean? Is it an end or an adjustment for alternative streaming? With physical media like DVD and Blu-ray approaching obsolescence, and repertory movie theatres almost exclusive to large […]

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“The Hobbit” at 48-frames-per-second

Brian Eggert — Sun, 07 Jul 2013 00:00:20 +0000

Having made the fortunate decision to first see The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey projected in two dimensions at 24-frames-per-second, which have been cinematic standards for more than a century, I loved returning to Peter Jackson’s vision of Middle Earth. This was a minority opinion among critics, possibly because press prescreenings featured Jackson’s new 48-frames-per-second presentation (also known as High Frame Rate, or HFR) in 3D. Although Jackson’s latest technological innovation interested me, I wanted to experience the film on its own, without 3D or some unfamiliar flourish dampening the experience. Since then, I’ve noticed how low the Rottentomatoes score was—in the 60% range—and read many reviews only to find the film was being judged more for its use of HFR than the quality of the filmmaking, with just a few critics able to see beyond the new format, and even fewer still enjoying it. As my original review of The Hobbit was based on a standard presentation, belated as it may be I will now offer my thoughts on 48fps. For the few who don’t know, as stated, cinema has been projected at 24fps since its inception. Jackson chose to shoot and in select theaters project The Hobbit at 48fps to create […]

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