Something happens to me every December where objectively bad movies and music suddenly become overwhelming because they’re “about Christmas”. By that I mean I spend all day listening to Michael Buble That’s a Zooey Deschanel album And Netflix has been watching all night long with whatever has been made lately — like, the movie called “Snow Falls” where the hot guys in town kiss.
Thus, recently, I found myself pressing into the 2004 comedy drama Christmas with the Cranks, Streaming on Hulu and starring Tim Allen, Jamie Lee Curtis, Dan Aykroyd and Kidd Malcolm in the middle. Of course I’ve already seen it, and of course the only thing that stuck out to me was “how could a college-aged woman love Ham so much?” (A key plot point, somehow). Anyway, it was okay. It succeeded in doing its job, turning my brain into a snow globe for an hour and 34 minutes.
That was before my fiance, an unrepentant letterboxed snob, decided to look up the reviews for it Christmas with the Cranks And it got a 5 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Five! This means that out of 100 reviews, only five were good. Incredibly low, I thought, for a film I would consider barely watchable. And the reviews themselves were mean: Robert Ebert called it “a holiday movie of stunning horror that gets even worse when the ending goes haywire,” while the Washington Post said it was “a negative whimsy so heavy it threatens to collapse. multiplex floor.”
My first thought wasn’t anger at the critics for tearing down a film 20 years ago that I only spent 94 precious minutes watching.. It was overwhelmingly doubtful that, if Christmas with the Cranks Coming out today, it would receive a significantly better critical reception than it did 20 years ago.
So I looked at reviews for similar mid-budget Christmas movies from the 2000s that are popular on streaming (sick currently the seventh most popular movie on Hulu). Turns out, critics hated a lot of them, too. of 2008 four christmases, Starring Reese Witherspoon and Vince Vaughn, received a measly 25 percent rating and was is called a “Miscast Mess” by Empire Magazine and “abominable“By the parents.
By Ron Howard The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, 49 percent, were dubbed “An unsettling, terrifying, strange movie.” most tragically, holidays, An objective film by Nancy Meyers, despite Kate Winslet’s ending with Jack Black, which was called “soggy, syrupy” and “flattening”. BBC and was Criticized for “Not saying much.”
Do you remember the last time you read a review of a Christmas rom-com that complained that it didn’t have enough to say? I don’t. Because no one expects it They say nothing else. And that’s bad for the current state of pop culture.
Consider the kind of reviews the legions of Christmas movies made for streaming are getting these days. Comedies that capture real A-listers and decent-sized budgets cheerful And The Christmas Chronicles Received mostly positive reviews for being “fun for the whole family”, while having a mediocre romance Christmas Prince, Reading for Christmas, And Hot Frosty Appreciated for being easily passable. An LA Weekly critic to call The wonderfully awful Lindsay Lohan Netflix joint Falling for Christmas “The perfect background sound for gift wrapping, or a good reason for friend-watches and group activities (while having fun and juice).”
If the conclusion is “Sure, it’s bad, but if you don’t plan on paying attention, throw it away.” This isn’t a dig at that particular critic (who, to be fair, only included it as part of a roundup of Christmas movies for 2022). Rather, it’s an indictment of the way we’re now expected to engage with film—and TV and music. It’s now granted that when we click “play” on a streaming platform, that’s probably not the only thing we’re paying attention to.
D Kyle Chaika of New York argued That homogenous, predictable vibe-based “ambient TV” (think Emily in Paris, Dream Home Makeoverand basically any show about food) that users keep watching even if they don’t, is the backbone of the streaming economy. “Like the era before TV, surround television is less a creative innovation than a product of the technological and social forces of our time,” he writes.
If the conclusion is “Sure, it’s bad, but if you don’t plan on paying attention, throw it away.”
The effect has reduced the quality we now expect from our films, television and music. Yet that’s only part of the equation. At the same time that streaming platforms have expanded, so has social media, dramatically increasing the amount of human content that is produced by amateur posters as opposed to creative professionals. Meanwhile, algorithmic social media platforms force-feed their users the most mediocre content Now, we’re also grappling with an endless font problem of AI slop, synthesizing everything that came before it and churning out bad versions.
Bad movies being praised as “good enough” is not just a film industry or algorithmic problem, though. In the late 2000s, social media ushered in an era of poptimism: if critics publicly trashed a popular movie or artist, they were seen as a snob or out of touch with the millions of people who suddenly had the power to express themselves. their own opinion. “Now, when a pop star reaches a certain level of fame,” writes Chris Richards in The Washington Post in 2015“Something magical happens. They don’t seem to get bad reviews anymore. Stars become superstars, critics become cheerleaders, and discussion becomes a consensus of uncritical excitement.”
Optimism isn’t all bad. One of its effects was that critics suddenly had to take seriously the underrepresented views of non-whites, young people and women. But there is also an inherent cowardice in trying to match public taste, for fear of backlash.
Perhaps social media culture has democratized the role of the critic, or perhaps due to the massive decline of local journalism (and writing journalism at large), but today, we have fewer professional critics writing film reviews. Which means critics aren’t Roger Ebert-reviewing-sick Mode as they used to – with one exception. This year’s action-comedy Christmas movie red one, Starring The Rock and Chris Evans, was dubbed “a distinctly joyless execution of a premise” by critics, who mostly seemed annoyed by the huge budget ($250 million) and Marvel-wannabe plot.
The reviews are almost refreshingly nostalgic – a sign, perhaps, that every corner of the media hasn’t evolved into the current state of things: a culture industry where both producers and audiences are more interested in content than engaging with charts, follower numbers and profitability.
I now realize I am part of the problem. I was being treated Christmas with the Cranks Like a filmgoer in 2024: throw something while looking at my phone, then watch its Rotten Tomatoes score as if its algorithm could synthesize all the infinite nuances that a good review entails. I have no interest in suing sick A good movie or not, but reading its terrible reviews reminded me that even the most mediocre Christmas comedy should be taken seriously. We should demand more than just-right films where recognizable stars follow predictably soothing tropes — even when you’re just looking for a brain that turns into a snow globe.
