Slusher: Even 'wrong' reviews have an important job to do

I should have known from the pretentiously enigmatic title: "Birdman or The Unexpected Virtue of Innocence."

I hated that movie. There, I've said it. I've surrendered my credentials to the Aficionados of Hip Intellectual Pop Culture Mockery club. I have to be careful here, because if I get started on the self-indulgent, cliche-ridden, sophomoric, contradictory, inconsistent, pretend-our-bad-acting-is-intentional-and-we'll-get-away-with-it nature of this naked emperor of a movie, someone will probably have to put a wooden stake between my jaws to keep me from biting off my tongue, and, worse, I'll fill up all my space with a movie review rather than achieving the real purpose of this column, which is to talk about movie reviews - a topic, I should add, which "Birdman" itself makes a target, albeit with the movie's typically shortsighted aim.

I'm worked into this lather by a recent phone call from a reader who felt betrayed by the Daily Herald because our movie reviewer, Dann Gire, gave Birdman four stars. The caller hated the movie. Doing me one up, he and his wife walked out on it, and he wanted us to know how upset he felt to have been so misled.

As an aside, I think the caller should have felt at least as much betrayal from the newspapers, magazines and websites across the country that also canonized "Birdman" (or, as I prefer to think of it, "Birdbrain") and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which gave the movie its highest award for excellence. But he chose to be upset with us. I felt his pain. I was among the last people in America to see "Birdman," and approached it with high hopes because I'd heard it spoken of in such superlatives. To find it to be such an insulting wretch of a work after all this was perhaps more infuriating than the actual quality of the film deserved, but beset with so much disappointment, it's hard not to blame the person who recommended the experience.

But that's also misguided, and it both misconstrues and demeans the movie reviewer's craft, whose purpose is not merely to diminish some of the inherent risk in a person's choice of a movie (or book or play or music album, for that matter) but also to provoke readers' thinking about the work and thereby enhance enjoyment of it. Furthermore, if counting solely on a review to decide whether to see a particular movie, there are so many more things to consider than just the review itself. What did the writer like or dislike? What did other reviewers say? What kind of movies does this critic generally like?

When you take all those things and more into account, you get a better idea of how to use reviews in making your choices - and you actually can have a more enjoyable time comparing and contrasting your impressions with those of a given reviewer. I hated "Birdman," but I have to point out that among my wife and friends who saw it with me, I was the only one who needed to be put into restraints. Each of us is different, and that goes for reviewers, too. The true joy of the arts isn't merely one's own experience, it's in sharing that experience - with those who agree as well as those who don't.

To that end, critics are an irreplaceable asset to enjoyment of the arts, even when, as with "Birdman," they're horribly and pathetically wrong.

Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is an assistant managing editor at the Daily Herald. Follow him on Facebook at facebook.com/jim.slusher1 and on Twitter at @JimSlusher.