Few apologized to Gibson when The Passion didn’t cause the predicted pogroms. Never having to say you’re sorry is one of the benefits of not “losing control of the media,” to quote Sarah Silverman in her 2005 movie Jesus Is Magic.
Among literary critics, a controversy has been raging tepidly over what purpose reviewing might hold in this age of crowdsourcing. Why rely upon one fallible pundit’s thumbs up or thumbs down when you can access the wisdom of crowds by averaging dozens of ratings, whether elite or mass?
As a 21st-century movie reviewer, I’ve always found this catcall hard to dismiss, which is why I try to only write about movies where I can explain something more interesting than whether I liked it or not. While I take a backseat to no one in admiration of my own taste, I have to admit that the aggregation sites are reasonably reliable.
Consider Mel Gibson’s new crime movie Get the Gringo, which debuted in Israeli theaters back in March but is finally out now on Netflix and DVD here in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Mel plays a California bank robber similar to his tough-guy character in 1999’s Payback. With a car full of cash, he makes a run for the Mexican border like an outback O. J., only to find a large fence has recently been erected. After crashing through, he’s sentenced to Tijuana’s hilariously vibrant El Pueblito prison, a pre-apocalyptic wasteland reminiscent of Bartertown, the free-market dystopia in Mel’s Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.
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