Going round the twist: Bruce Willis and Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense. Photograph: Ron Phillips/AP
Perhaps predictably, amid the rage and anxiety about spoilers that surrounded last week's publication of the final Harry Potter novel, film blogs too have grown vexed by the problem of critics blowing the good stuff in advance. On the face of it, the debate this week was inspired by a piece in the New York Times from Village Voice critic Nathan Lee, who wrote to defend his reviews' habitual spoiling - an unapologetic shrug of a mea culpa that provoked a swift response from, among others, Cinematical and the Moving Picture Blog.
But the issue is, of course, a longstanding bugbear for many film-goers, and with good reason. To me, there can't be many derelictions of duty so derelict as ruining a reader's innocence about a movie they may be fervently anticipating with a casual reference to a key scene - in fact, unless what's under review is an M Night Shyamalan clunker, in which case it may be worth discreetly mentioning that the whole story just prefaces a giant plot twist, I'm not sure there's justification for ever getting into specifics beyond the first act.
Anything else is, at best, amnesia over the existence of a world beyond screening rooms and free sandwiches. At worst, it's nothing less than the product of an ego-addled assumption that the reader isn't really interested in the review because of the film anyway - but in whatever dazzling bon mots the critic offers in relation to it. The spoiler-happy critic is, in fact, attempting to invert the entire creative food chain, to imply that the function of film-makers isn't really to make films, but to furnish them with material for their review - because they, the critic, are the real talent here.
Anyway. Also at Cinematical, there's a terrifying post about the launch of a "screenwriting summer camp" organised by the UCLA Armand Hammer Museum in which a gaggle of career-minded 10-14 year olds will spend three weeks learning the art of the Hollywood narrative and how to turn that killer High Concept into a saleable 90 pages. While part of me is only surprised it's taken until now to open up this particular route for Californian parents to induct their children into the film industry, another can't help wincing at the thought of pre-pubescents tearing down their posters of Justin Timberlake in favour of signed 10x8s of William Goldman and Robert McKee. Still, I suppose it beats having a childhood.
All in all, it's left me hankering for the sour tang of creeping old age and cosmic disillusion, and as ever few figures provide that with quite the panache of Orson Welles - and few Wellesian projects could do so as effectively as his decades-in-the-making-but-never-finished Don Quixote. As such, I leave you with the Bright Lights blog and this hypnotic clip. And I promise not to mention how it ends.
