Reviewers on the wane? ... Snakes On a Plane (pictured) will not be given press screenings
London's film reviewers are fulminating over news that there will be no official press screening for Snakes On a Plane, a Hollywood action movie about - and I'm obviously guessing here - an aeroplane carrying a cargo of dangerous reptiles (quite possibly snakes).
It follows an earlier move to prevent those same critics from witnessing The Pink Panther, and anticipates the similar non-appearance of Neil LaBute's forthcoming remake of The Wicker Man. In each of these cases, the tactic has been interpreted as a sign that critics no longer matter a damn.
Box office evidence bears this out. In recent months both The Da Vinci Code and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest opened to a fanfare of bad notices and then went merrily on to clean up at the cinemas.
What, then, is the point of organising preview screenings, of sending out the invites, of cutting all those complimentary sandwiches? Surely the press officer's time would be better employed organising some fancy red-carpet premiere, or spinning the fall-out from Mel Gibson's latest escapade on the LA freeway.
It seems to be open season on the film critic this summer. First we had the sight of the wicked, chin-stroking villain in M. Night Shyamalan's Lady in the Water, a critic who poses a real danger to the beautiful nymph heroine until Night fortuitously has him torn apart by some kind of wild devil dog near the end of the film.
Then we had the trailer for the Jackass sequel which offers an extended screw-you to those who panned the first film, quoting from a bunch of negative reviews before declaring, "Unfortunately for them, we just made Number Two".
And now this. Locked out of our precious private screening theatres. Forced to line up like a commoner at the local multiplex. Jostled and jogged by children as we try to scribble our learned notes in the dark. By God, it's enough to make one give it up and get a proper job instead.
Hollywood's explanation for this shabby treatment (and again I'm guessing) would surely be to argue that they make films for the fans not the critics. Ergo they would rather release Snakes On a Plane (or Pink Panther, or Wicker Man) directly to the honest, ticket-buying punter than have some snooty scribbler dump all over it beforehand. Put this way the policy almost makes sense. Even so, I fear that they have fatally misread the landscape.
Once upon a time the critics sat in the preview theatre and the public sat in the multiplex and all was neat and tidy with the world. Now it's altogether less straightforward. Yes, the London writers who want to review Snakes On a Plane will have to pay their cash like everyone else (and ha-ha, serve them right). And yet, meanwhile, the punters they find themselves seated beside are also undergoing a strange metamorphosis. Some of them will have a MySpace profile, or their own personal blog. Many will be posting reviews on film sites, and - who knows? - some of those reviews might not be too complimentary about Snakes On a Plane.
So the pundits become the punters and the punters become the pundits until it's hard to keep track of exactly who is who. The irony is that, just when Hollywood thought it had killed off the critic, the reviewing population is exploding beneath its very nose, and their opinions are spread, free of charge, across the internet. The studios might be able to crush a handful of scribblers but a whole planet's worth is a different matter altogether. There are simply not enough wild devil dogs to go around.
