Everyone's A Critic

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"A lot of people feel the major studios run the critics," says Lisa Dinsmore, a website designer who started Crazy4Cinema.com three years ago. "You read certain reviewers and say, 'I saw that movie and it was crap!'" But will the Internet emerge as the snarky and more reliable alternative? In recent weeks Dinsmore has been kinder than many full-time critics were toward America's Sweethearts and Cats & Dogs. ("For the most part, it's entertaining as hell," she wrote of the latter.) The review pages of Amazon and Epinions are pretty cheerful too. Cyberspace may be famous for its rough and tumble, but for a good many Internet reviewers, it's largely a four-star world.

Ethical standards in cyberspace are also a work in progress. Sites that participate in Amazon's "Associates Program" can earn commissions when people reading their reviews click on a hyperlink to Amazon and buy the product being reviewed. The payments are modest, up to 15%, but any sales commission amounts to an incentive to post favorable comments. Meanwhile, JoeytheFilmGeek and the Flick Filosopher write screenplays, which raises the question of whether they can objectively review product by the same film studios they might hope to interest in their scripts. In her recent rave review of Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now Redux, the Flick Filosopher even mentions having shopped a script unsuccessfully to Coppola's company. Drew McWeeny, an aspiring screenwriter who reviews for AintItCool as "Moriarty," insists that although he too is trying to sell the studios his work, "I'm not going to sugarcoat my reviews" of studio releases. All the same, conflict-of-interest rules and editors to enforce them provide safeguards so that readers don't have to rely on the promises of writers that they play fair.

Meanwhile, though the studios don't own up to the practice, they are frequently suspected of stuffing Internet review sites with raves for their own product that are written by publicists disguised as regular filmgoers. AintItCool founder Harry Knowles says he often filters out reviews from anonymous e-mail accounts, like Yahoo!, because those can so easily disguise studio shills. "Generally, you'll see those reviews come in response to a negative review," he says. "A day later you'll see a review that can't allow itself to be negative in any way possible. There's a fakeness to it. I've printed a couple with the intro 'And this is what the studio wants you to think.'"

The promise of Internet reviewing is that it refutes the old saying that the free press belongs to whoever has the money to pay for one. The pitfall is that cyberspace may go on forever as a place where the vox populi is embedded with vox populiars, where ethical standards are more flexible than the ones it took centuries to achieve, where they have been achieved, in the world of conventional journalism. All the same, conventional journalism can learn from some of the eccentricities of the Internet. Hey--anyone who reads this, please help me meet Warren Buffett. I could use some financial advice.