Obviously, we make mistakes.
I made one last week -- Annabelle Comes Home did not open in local theaters. It didn't open anywhere. It opens this week. We ran our review last week. We're not going to rerun it this week because it isn't a good use of our limited news hole -- the space in the newspaper we reserve for for editorial (as opposed to advertising) content -- to run the same review again.
You can read the review online if you want to. Our critic Piers Marchant liked Annabelle Comes Home OK; he concluded his review this way:
... for a genre not exactly known for its careful restraint, [director Gary] Daubermen gives us a more welcome comeback in keeping with its '70s decor: a sense of impending doom punctuated by a careful reserve, doling out the creeps until they finally ramp up into full-bore bedlam. The ever-smiling Annabelle might seem demur, but that little hostess can throw a hell of a party when she sets her mind to it.
I'm not going to offer any excuses, but I can explain my thinking. I was confused.
The first factor in this confusion was the opening last week of Luc Besson's Anna, without screening for critics. (Lionsgate, the studio distributing Anna, found itself in a tough spot last year after Besson -- known for culty action spectacles like The Professional and The Fifth Element -- was accused of sexual misconduct by nine women, one of whom, 28-year-old Dutch Belgian actress Sand Van Roy, went to the French police in May 2018, accusing Besson of rape.
Lionsgate acquired the U.S. rights to Anna before the allegations against Besson became public; it put the film's release on hold and finally decided to release it with a minimum of publicity.)
We didn't have a review of Anna last week because no one did. No one saw the film in advance. But Piers did send in his review of Annabelle.
Which is a movie about a demonic doll. It didn't open last week; another movie about a demonic doll, Child's Play, did. Which we didn't have a review of because the screenings were too late for our deadlines.
I somehow conflated Annabelle with Anna and with Child's Play's Chucky. Stupid brain. I put it on the budget, edited the piece, and we ran it. And if you wanted to see it, you couldn't find it. Maybe we sent a few confused folks to see Anna. Sorry if we caused anyone any inconvenience.
There was yet another movie with a demonic doll opening last week -- Toy Story 4. (Don't read this if you don't like spoilers, but the doll turns out not to be so demonic after all.)
The review we ran of Toy Story 4 last week wasn't a mistake -- it was by The Washington Post's Ann Hornaday, a fine critic whose work I admire -- but it wasn't what we'd planned either. For reasons I've belabored here in the past, we try to run our critics' reviews in this part of the newspaper. We've got a stable of writers, and I believe it benefits readers to have familiar critical voices with which they can develop relationships.
People tell me all the time that if I like a movie, they know they won't, and that they make a point of seeing all the movies I hate. (Have fun at the Raja Gosnell retrospective, guys.)
While Hornaday's Toy Story 4 review was terrific, we would have preferred to run one by one of our regular in-house folks. But come deadline time, we didn't have one of our own.
I thought this was my mistake. (I know, two in one week.) I thought I'd neglected to assign one.
So I hopped on our wire services, read reviews from other newspapers, and decided the Washington Post's was the best, so we ran it. It was only later that the review I had in fact commissioned showed up (it had been emailed before deadline but never arrived).
So my real mistake was in assuming I'd made a mistake -- I should have checked my notes, see who I'd assigned the review to (Piers again) and asked him where it was. He could have resent it.
It's hardly a disaster. If I hadn't brought it up you wouldn't know anything about Toy Story 4-gate.
But one of the purposes of this occasional column is to let readers in on some of the behind-the-curtain stuff that goes on here at We Be Movies. We are always looking for ways to evolve and do better. As this section approaches its 20th anniversary, we want to continue to move away from reflexively doing the thing we always do because we always do it that way.
We're not going to waste Piers' review. We're going to take it as an opportunity.
I've been thinking about reviving a feature we've tried out a few times before called Second Opinion. As the rubric suggests, it would consist of second reviews of recent films. Piers liked Toy Story 4 fine, just not as much as Ann Hornaday and I liked it. (I'm usually immune to the charms of heart-tugging Pixar films, admiring their craftsmanship and textures while resisting their narratives. But I found myself choking up a couple of points in the third act. If Toy Story 4 can pierce my armor, it is, at the very least, a very effective tearjerker.)
Look for that, and other different stuff, in the coming weeks.
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MovieStyle on 06/28/2019