Harsh and Easy

The reviews are trickling in for The Lovely Bones and Invictus – you can check them out for yourself on Metacritic but so far, for me, there is nothing to get excited about in either direction – mostly negative reviews for Peter Jackson’s misunderstood but very very good film, and mostly positive for Clint Eastwood’s Invictus and Tom Ford’s A Single Man, but not in the 100 score range, more like in the 80 range. Critics. Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em. A truer thing was never said. Sometimes reviews matter and sometimes they don’t.¬† They don’t really matter to me personally; no one has the right to tell me what to think about a film. But they do matter in the Oscar race where perception is almost everything. The biggest drag of this year is how many well reviewed “Oscar movies” there have been. A scant few, in fact. Should make it easier but it doesn’t because there are now ten slots to fill.