Films can embrace bad reviews, writes DONALD CLARKE
A FEW WEEKS ago, Terry McMahon's Charlie Casanova, a somewhat overheated study of modern-day Irish depravity, played at the Galway Film Fleadh. Not everyone liked it, but the film still managed to share the prize for best first feature. Hats off, Terry.
If you want to get some sense of the acclaim gathering around Charlie Casanovathen make your way to the press section of the film's website. Something called Off Plus Camera said, " Don't Miss It!" No equivocation there. An organ entitled LA2DAYargues that the film "pulses with a voracious lust to provoke". Good for it! The really interesting entry, however, detailed the responses of the prestigious Varietymagazine. Here's the quote in full: "A punishing experience . . . Borders on audience abuse . . . Aggressively abrasive."
Now, there are, I guess, three reasons why the film-makers chose this (at best) ambiguous snippet from Andrew Barker’s unimpressed review. Firstly, they may have decided to honestly own up to the fact that some critics were not won over. Secondly, proud of their film’s controversial tone, they perhaps savour shocked responses. Thirdly, they may feel that, plucked from their context, the naked adjectives would look as if they were meant as a peculiar class of recommendation.
Our purpose is not to slag off the canny entrepreneurs behind this low-budget film. With no marketing budget to speak of, the Charlie Casanovafolk must use all available means to promote it.
This business of using quotes from the press for promotional purposes is, however, a peculiar one. Certain periodicals seem to offer particularly fecund slabs of complimentary copy. Rare is the rom-com that fails to include a quote from Graziamagazine on its day-glo poster.
If mention on three-sheet banners were a measure of influence, then the website Little White Lies would be regarded as more powerful than the New York Times. (Perhaps it is. Media moves so quickly these days.) At least the quotes from less prestigious organs generally comprise unedited sentences. The single words plucked from reviews – “Stunning” – positively invite suspicion. Anybody with half a brain will wonder if the journalist actually wrote, “It is stunning that anything quite so awful could be imposed on a largely blameless public”.
Alas, the most outrageous example this writer has yet encountered of context-abuse occurred in relation to another low-budget Irish film. One DVD release of The Most Fertile Man in Irelandcarried the following quote from Mark Kermode's review in the Observer: " The Most Fertile Man in Irelandis every bit as hilarious as its title suggests." But that paper's website shows that Mark placed the word "sadly" at the start of the sentence.
It’s hard to get angry about this. The sheer chutzpah is so impressive you have to applaud it. Anyway, it’s nice to know that somebody somewhere still gives a hoot about the blatherings of print journalists. It may not last.
