Tomorrow, Dead Silence, the new horror film from the Saw guys, will open without benefit of advance screenings for critics. It seems like every other week there’s at least one film opening “cold” — it’s amazing how rapidly this has become the norm. Only two years ago it was rare; last year the practice was rampant but still frowned upon by the critical community; and in the first months of 2007, my fellow critics and I have just about given up complaining about it. There’s no point — we’d do little else but talk about cold openings if we were to moan.

For me, chances are excellent that unless one of the handful of alt-weekly newspapers that runs my reviews specifically asked me to cover one of the films that are tending to open cold, I wouldn’t have attended press screenings anyway. Why? For the same reason the studios aren’t screening them: I’d have hated, hated, hated them, and so would the vast majority of other critics. So I can understand the studios’ position on these films: Why go to the expense and bother of a screening if the film is only going to be universally trashed? The intended audiences don’t read reviews, and these films — usually horror movies and juvenile comedies — do about the same level of business at the box office whether they are covered by critics and panned or whether they’re not reviewed at all. So from the studios’ perspective, these cold openings are simply a matter of good business sense.

What bothers me is not the cold openings per se, but what they say about the kinds of films being made today: that they have absolutely no pretense of being anything other than crass pandering to the absolute lowest common denominator. When I hate, hate, hate these kinds of films, there’s rarely anything new or original in the way I hate them — they’re not films that are trying even a smidge of anything new and fail in spectacular ways. They are, simply, retreads of the same sadistic “horror” and the same preadolescent “humor.” And what these movies — and their success, and their cold openings — say about American society really bothers me: that we are bifurcating into a new division of haves and have-nots along lines not of race or class but of intellectual capacity. These films are specifically made to negate the need for any thought whatsoever — and they can only succeed when the lack of any thought at all characterizes a significant segment of the moviegoing crowd.

Now, I’m not suggesting that every film should require an advanced degree to understand, but even just a few years ago, the films we considered pure entertainment, check-your-brain-at-the-door, popcorn flicks still had a level of actual adult sophistication to them: Raiders of the Lost Ark, say. Some critics at the time of that film’s initial release complained that it wasn’t “about anything,” but compared to what is filling multiplexes these days — and drawing audiences in droves — it is downright eggheaded.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
MaryAnn Johanson
author of The Totally Geeky Guide to The Princess Bride
minder of FlickFilosopher.com