Saving Ebert's Hide

I am a film teacher who rarely goes to the movies. This can be tricky because my students all assume that if I teach film, I need to have seen everything. But my schedule does not really allow me to see films in the theatre. I manage to get a little caught up on DVD in the summer, but end up seeing only a small fraction of new films each year. Instead, I read about film. I have a list of Web sites and magazines I read on a weekly basis to have knowledge about pretty much any film in current release. At least then I can talk intelligently about films when my students bring them up in class. For me, I read enough other people’s opinion’s to understand the film and filmmaker, but belatedly form any opinion of my own when and if I happen to see the film.

My students are the opposite. They see film all the time and rarely read anything, other than celebrity tabloid press, about films. Their opinion is all that matters. I do an informal survey in my classes about if they every read any critical responses to film. Most major newspapers and magazines have film reviewers on staff, I state, is this just wasted money? The answer appears to be yes. I have maybe one, seldom two students in a class who read any critical response to film. The film critic, they say, is dying.

This didn’t concern me much. My students are of another generation. It is all about them. They are not film geeks, like me, who lap up the words of Roger Ebert with delight (his nearly year-long hiatus due to health problems was a black time for me). So, my focus in the class has been to explore the opinions of the students. I tell them, their opinion is what matters. For the first paper of the semester, I require them to find a professional, critical review of the film they are writing on and comment on their opinion of the reviewer’s opinion. This has never been very successful. Often, they find rambling musings on a blog somewhere that usually support the student’s views, or that just have a plot synopsis and do not explore the film critically at all. I shrug when I read their papers. “It is about the student’s opinions,” I tell myself.

This semester was different. Frustrated by the quality of the reviews students include with their papers, and suspecting that they only skim the review anyway and say, in the most general terms, I agree/disagree with this reviewer, I showed the students what film criticism could be. I hooked the projector up to my computer and pulled up some professional reviews that we examined as a class. I looked at Ebert’s review of Cloverfield. He was direct in stating what worked and didn’t for him in the film, and since his critique was so pointed, the students could respond to what he was saying. His views fell pretty much in line with the majority of the class, which surprised them. Hearing parents and other adults talk about the film had led the students to think that adults “just didn’t get it.” Ebert didn’t mind the “queasy-cam” style of shooting the film, and thought it supported how the story was being told. Students talked about the plusses and minuses of the hand-held style. Ebert discounted complaints that too many questions about the monster were left unanswered. Students on both sides of the issue stated their feelings. All of a sudden, movie critics were not old, stuffy people who slammed everything good. They were people who loved movies and got to share their opinions with others for a paycheck. And sometimes, according to the students, the critics were right.

For the evaluation papers turned in by this new group, the students explored the opinions of others to a degree that they hadn’t in papers before. They sometimes quoted multiple reviewers. In comparing their views with others, the students become more solidified on the impact that a film had (or did not have) on them. One student quoted the Entertainment Weekly cover story that dealt with Juno and discussed how the character was more than the center of the film, but a real model to female teens. They started looking at a film through someone else’s eyes. I usually get my students there by the end of the semester, and it is mostly as a result of listening to their classmates discuss film. With the reviews, they crossed geographic, gender, economic, and generational lines. They came closer to seeing films the way I do on a weekly basis. If only I could come closer to seeing films, so I could add my response to the mix, like my newbie film students are doing right now. I will be adding Ebert, et al, to more of my lessons and watch the students open their eyes. Maybe I can still save the professional film reviewer.