Sunday, May 6, 2012

Re THE AVENGERS: Puzzlement over Samuel L. Jackson's negative review of film critic A.O. Scott

Superhero films are to the late 20th/early 21st Centuries what the Western was from roughly 1903 (THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY) to the mid-1970s (one could say that Don Siegel's THE SHOOTIST with John Wayne from 1976 was the epitaph for the traditional, non-revisionist cowboy film).

Nonetheless, A.O. "Tony" Scott, film critic for THE NEW YORK TIMES (probably best known for helping preside over the last days of relatively intelligent film reviewing on TV with the CHICAGO TRIBUNE's Michael Phillips), has tired of the superhero genre; although Scott had some mild praise for some aspects of Marvel's THE AVENGERS, the film's co-star Samuel L. Jackson overreacted in the manner of James Cameron howling at Kenneth Turan in 1998 over Turan's pan of TITANIC.

Noting the passage of fourteen years--James Cameron wrote a now-old-fashioned letter to the editor of THE LOS ANGELES TIMES (or at least its entertainment section Calendar), while Jackson used Twitter as his medium of disapproval.

Both Jackson and Scott have a right to their respective opinions. 

But I wonder why Samuel L. Jackson, who has had a long and generally successful film career (and, it's safe to say, made more than one film that A.O. Scott likely didn't care for), felt he needed to wave the "if you don't like my film, you suck as a critic and maybe you should do something else " banner in the Cameron style.

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