About a week ago, during the time the Telluride Film Festival was in full swing and TIFF was just getting started, I noticed a few tweets and sentiments bemoaning the rapturous responses to films like 12 Years a Slave and Gravity, implying that they would be the latest victims of critics and bloggers overstating a film’s quality before release. Rather than taking the responses at face value and getting excited about the films, the reaction was one of skepticism. This got me thinking, do critics and bloggers have some sort of responsibility to temper their reactions to films for the benefit of those who have yet to see them, lest they become victims of the dreaded “overhype”?
It’s an odd concept to me, that a response to a film could be judged as less than genuine, or over the top, before those passing judgment have seen the films in question. Many cited how they’d been burned in the past by festival hype setting their expectations too high, only to find themselves underwhelmed by films once they actually see them. This is fair, and I’ve certainly had my experiences with it.
Last year I found myself baffled by the responses to Holy Motors, a film that seemed like it critics had stopped just short of calling it the greatest film ever made. But was my disappointment rooted in the film itself, or the response to the film? David Ehrlich of Film.com suggests “If a few people get seduced into thinking a film is ‘overhyped’, that’s their problem,” later conceding his own reaction to this year’s Palme d’Or winner at Cannes “I was underwhelmed by Blue is the Warmest Color, but I would have been even without Cannes. The Palme d’Or just changed the tenor of my disappointment.”
I think I would tend to agree with that concession. But it still begs the question of whether or not the critic is responsible for where expectations land after the fact. Josh Spiegel of Sound on Sight believes it’s a mixed bag that really only affects the conversation within the critical and blogging community. “I think festival hype can both help and hurt new films. The initial reaction to a movie can be rapturous, which only leads the next wave of critics and audiences to greet it more dubiously; thus, if, 12 Years A Slave isn’t the greatest piece of storytelling since the days of Greek drama, it’s automatically a failure. At some point, people criticize festival hype, not the films being hyped. That aside, even that counter-intuitive hype still raises audience interest. Someone might not have heard of 12 Years A Slave before TIFF; now, though, if Critic X praised it to the heavens, that random person may be excited to check it out even if his or her expectations are perhaps too high.”
Perhaps hyperbolic tweets can set expectations too high, but at the end of the day, they’re little more than 140 characters hopelessly attempting to capture a reaction immediately out of a screening. Like any kneejerk response, these things should probably be taken with a grain of salt until actual critical writing gets published. Whether or not a film experiences some sort of perceived backlash within the film writing community on twitter, if just one person now wants to see Short Term 12 because they heard it was a huge hit out of SXSW, than the argument against festival hype is a bit moot.
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2 thoughts on “Monday Morning Discourse: Does Festival Hype Help or Hurt?”
It’s the critics/bloggers who call the awards halfway through the year before other films even begin their campaign in December. I wish people would stop mentioning the Oscars to measure the performance. I’m guilty of doing the same and I’m going to temper my hyperbole going into festival season. Let’s judge the best after every 2013 film has been seen.
If anything, backlash annoys me more than rapturous raves from a festival. While I understand that an opinion coming straight out of a festival screening may be clouded by certain feelings, I believe there’s something very pure and visceral about a reaction coming out of a screening, even if it isn’t the most informed, which is both a pro and a con, but I totally get why some people do get so incredibly enthusiastic about things like that.
The backlash to that hype, on the other hand, annoys me more because those reactions aren’t and are rarely ever informed. It almost always boils down to the person in question responding more to the hype than the actual film itself, which to me is more a fault of the backlasher than the hype. You can’t change or control another person’s opinion, so why let someone else’s opinion, let alone a whole group of other opinions, weigh on your own?
I admit to having these kinds of feelings as well, however, and I normally try to look at a film as removed from hype as I could, if not right after a screening then maybe after many hours of processing the film in my head.
But even I have my limits. I remember completely not being able to get what all the love for Kill List was after numerous critics I knew praised it to the heavens, and it made my general indifference towards it that much more negative.
At the same time, I probably never would’ve seen that movie had it not been for various critics praising it, and it was an interesting enough experiment of a movie that I at least appreciate giving a chance. I really can’t stop other from loving it, so I hardly ever try to resort to “backlashing” it because it ends up antagonizing the people who genuinely have strong feelings for something. At the end of the day, it’s just more opinions, hyperbolic or otherwise, and we shouldn’t let them cloud our own.