This is a cursory listing of ways in which the website RogerEbert.com primarily preaches one school of thought through their reviews. That school of thought, whether pejoratively described as woke or generously described as championing identity politics, is not something that many readers and movie fans subscribe to as seen by the comment sections of some of these articles or the differences in Rotten Tomato user scores and critic scores in films where identity politics is an issue.
I am one of those users. I am a lifelong democrat who campaigned on the ground in swing states last year to get Democrats elected to office in the presidential , gubernatorial and senator races but I differ from the reviewers in their point of view. I believe that race, gender, and sexual orientation have significant impacts socio-economically but they can be dangerously overused in explaining and proscribing solutions to the world and this is rapidly pervading the entirely critical sphere to the point where we skip steps in critical thought nowadays.
Here is a list of some reviews that I remembered off the top of my head. I will note that when I tried to find more examples from these ones that came from memory, I found many more even-keeled reviews to the credit of the site
Shang Chi and the Legend of the Seven Rings (2021)-Nick Allen takes a Marvel exec’s comment out of context to frame him as cancel-worthy and gets called out for it in the comments.
Uncle Frank (2020)-Odie Henderson condemns the movie because he prefers films to preach hatred towards anyone who has ever had evolving views towards homophobic people, by refusing to sanction a film in which characters are redeemable (to the site’s credit, two separate reviewers defended against the highly publicized criticism of making a racist redeemable in “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri).”
These people are perfectly in character for the year 1969 — hell, I know gay people who had reasonable family members be as baffled by their life choices as recently as the mid-2000s — and there’s little evidence that anyone but Stephen Root’s character was abusive to the protagonist. Henderson’s scorched Earth policy to anyone who might have ever been homophobic is one school of thought but the review doesn’t really speak to an audience who might prefer other ways of dealing with homophobia.
Isle of Dogs (2018)-Odie Henderson finds Wes Anderson’s cultural appropriation enough of a taboo to keep him from recommending the movie. Henderson is a number of critics that subscribes to cultural appropriation as largely a negative act and Wes Anderson as a guilty culprit. I happen to think cultural appropriation is rarely a sinful act and some popular feminist critics such as Lindsey Ellis agree that it’s been a neutral act and many have pointed out cultural appropriation has been a necessary ingredient of cultural development that has rarely discriminated between oppressor or oppressed.
Ironically, a film like Slumdog Millionaire released before woke thought became mainstream did not face legitimate criticism at all and many including Spike Lee noted that the cultural appropriation goal posts had significantly shifted when Kathryn Bigelow made Detroit in 2017 and was bombarded with (in my opinion, unfounded) criticism for her skin color.
Set It Up (2018)-The review largely stays away from identity politics but Matt Zoller Seitz either implies the film is at fault for failing to note that Lucy Liu and Taye Diggs’ characters faced more obstacles than white characters in climbing the corporate ladder or simply wants to enlighten us about what he believes to be this inequality in society. My school of thought is that race is a macroscopic socio-economic measure rather than a one-size-fits-all measure. Therefore, I would say that it is likely those two met more obstacles than white people, but not a definite and it doesn’t have to be a defining aspect of their character.
Val (2021)-Matt Zoller Seitz continues to display a lionization of POC, women, and LGBT populations and uses straightness, whiteness, and maleness as defining attributes often negatively.
Only MZS can answer this (and I have briefly discussed it with him, to his credit) but I wonder whether MZS would not come down nearly as hard on Tracy Morgan or NBA players of the 90s-00s who blatantly disregarded coaches and made their lives hell. My point of view is that any difficult black actors or NBA players deserve empathy as much as someone like Val Kilmer)
What I don’t understand is what MZS isn’t expecting if he clearly wasn’t a fan of Kilmer and my reaction is if the point of writing a review is to speak to your audience, isn’t the audience for a review on a documentary on Val Kilmer, a group of people who don’t have anywhere near the same level of beef with the guy.
As for the specific beef, Kilmer is clearly showing his ability to be professionally difficult by even putting the Frankenheimer tape in the movie and he lets Oprah have the last word rather than film his response to it. Was MZS expecting him to spend the whole movie talking about what a piece of trash he is? He got throat cancer so he’s not in a great state anyway.
With regard to his marriage, an article as recently as 2019 reported Whalley didn’t allege abuse but rather abandonment of his two kids leaving them homeless. I’d hate to not take her at her word, but it’s clear in the video that his two kids are still talking to him unless everything is staged. It should also be noted that if this is a hatchet job on Whaley, it’s a poor one as he says nothing negative about his ex-wife in the entire film.
If Zoller Seitz were to look at life from Val Kilmer’s shoes (which is the point of this film), he would not define himself as a privileged straight, male. Not all people think of life in an oversimplified dichotomy. He would simply think about his life in its regrets and nostalgia. In a mirror accusation of the manic pixie dream girl character or the magic negro tropes, Val Kilmer is a complete person and doesn’t exist to highlight socioeconomic disparities between minority communities.
Tag (2018)-Glenn Kenny essentially argues that white people are not allowed to have fun unless they signal to the audience that they’re thinking about black oppression while having fun. I had trouble believing this was an actual published review when I read it.
Mr. Corman (2020)-I’d argue that reviewer Roxana Hadadi’s insistence on reading the work through a black-and-white (forgive the pun) lens misses the point of the work.
To me, “Mr. Corman” isn’t a work centered around examining white male privilege. Instead, it’s about a white, male character in a funk whose journey towards being a happier person involves being a more selfless person. In the character’s moral orientation, being a better feminist and ally to people of color is important. I agree with the Hadadi that the show is bland but the “finger wagging” is done by Hadadi herself in explaining how the show should be rather than what the show is.
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