I just read a review of the movie "Henry's Crime" where the critic, predictably, played on the riff that "This movie is criminal!"  

How witty. How terribly creative.

When did it become acceptable for critics to be so gratuitously cruel to filmmakers in their reviews?  Ad hominem attacks at specific actors, writers and directors seem to be the norm these days.  Was it always thus?  Perhaps it was.   Or is it the new age of the internet, where Snark is a cheap substitutes for intelligence and wit...where angry people in their pajamas pound away on their keyboards, raging at the world?

The same critics who so savagely pan such a small, low-budget, character-driven movie like "Henry's Crime" are often the critics who give a pass to multi-million dollar flops like "The Tourist" and the "Transformer" movies.  These are films that have the budgets equal to or larger than the GNP of small undeveloped countries.   Yet it's the small films, the ones that filmmakers poured their hearts into, that actors sacrificed salaries and perks for, that struggle just to break even in DVD sales and airplane viewings, that get the most ugly, cutting vitriol from critics who have the power to make or break such a tiny film at the box office.  

These same critics publicly bemoan the lack of small, character-driven films made by Hollywood.  News flash:  there ARE filmmakers making these films.  They have to beg, borrow, and steal to get the money to make these films.  They spend years of their lives struggling to make their films. And because they're small films, with no budget for advertising and promotion, critics can effectively kill them with a few scathing reviews.  Some critical outlets - the New York Times, for instance - do have this power. Thus, the cycle is perpetuated - small character driven films never make money.  So Hollywood rarely makes small character driven films.  And it  becomes more and more difficult for the indie filmmakers - the ones who are already doing it for love rather than money  - to get any support at all.

That, to my mind, is what's "criminal."

I haven't yet seen Henry's Crime, although it was one of the selections at the Woodstock Film Festival along with the film I produced in 2009, "White Irish Drinkers."  I certainly plan to see it.  As a struggling filmmaker, writer and artist, I always go and support the work of other artists, and my friends in the artistic community do the same for me. Hollywood is a cutthroat, competitive word and having spent most of my career working in television and feeling the attendant pressures and stresses, I am grateful for the encouragement and comraderie that my fellow worker bees in the hive are always there to offer.  That's the beauty of film festivals.  While there certainly is a competitive undercurrent, it's possible to let that negative energy go and just enjoy the other indie films, the creative environment, and the wonderful, appreciative audiences.  You undoubtably won't love every film you see, but you always leave with a great appreciation for the incredible amount of work, dedication, thick skin and sheer dumb luck it invariably took, just to get the film from the page to the screen and in front of the audiences for which it was intended.

Reading that review of "Henry's Crime", however, allowed me to feel for another filmmaker the frustration and anger I've felt at reading some of the reviews of our own film.  We have been all over the world with "White Irish Drinkers", and without exception, the audience response has been remarkable.  To watch the movie in a theater where people lose themselves in the emotion; where they jump to their feet and applaud, gasp, cry, laugh - that in itself was worth the herculean effort it took to make a film for $600,000 in 17 days.  In fact, the Woodstock Festival voted us winners of the Audience Favorite award for best narrative feature film.  I'm not saying we made Citizen Kane - certainly not.  And there are plenty of reasons not to like our movie.  Not everyone can relate to it; it's sentimental flavor is definitely not everyone's cup of tea.  Some people are offended by the 4-letter words in the colloquial dialogue.  But overall, it has moved people - enough, in fact, for some viewers to come back and see it a second and third time.  Reading the audience reviews here on Rotten Tomatoes, on our website, and elsewhere, the majority of the responses reflect the kind of powerful positive reactions we've seen in the many festivals and word of mouth screenings where our film has shown.   People FEEL our film.  Many identify with it, perhaps even too strongly.  It is a small film with very small ambitions - a reflection of the very real blue-collar Brooklyn world writer/director John Gray grew up in, and his own experiences coming of age in a family where love and dysfunction competed for the souls of each individual.  The film asks a very simple question - what if the world you know isn't good for you, but it's all that you know?  If you feel you have a talent, do you dare leave behind what's comfortable and risk it all?  Or is it better to make the safe choice, even if it's really not the best thing for you? These are simple questions of a basic film genre, the coming of age film, and from the audience responses we've received in the past two  years, we know we've succeeded. 

Mr. Gray recently spoke to film classes at Drexel University about the making of White Irish Drinkers and said, "To read some of the critics of our film, you'd think I'd committed a crime, just making it."  

Who are these people who wield so much power? Recently, Elvis Mitchell, the highly respected head critic for MOVIELINE, was let go from his job because the director of the audience favorite, SOURCE CODE, busted him on having written a scathing review based on an early version of the script, NOT the final movie. On our own Rotten Tomatoes page, there's a review of "White Irish Drinkers" written by someone who admits he came in halfway through the movie at Toronto (thinking it was something else), and hated it.  Interestingly, our best reviews came from critics who viewed our film in darkened theaters along with our appreciative audiences, the way all films are ideally meant to be seen.  Often, the more powerful film critics actually refuse to see movies in theaters.  They insist on getting screener DVD's instead.  Though most "ordinary" people watch movies on their home sets nowadays rather than in theaters, with critics, filmmakers have no guarantee that the people who have the power to make or break their movies actually watch the entire film, or that they watch it distraction-free.  Are they texting during the film?  FACEBOOKing?  Being interrupted by phone calls or children?  Who knows.   Having judged films and television programs for the TV Academy and Writer's Guild Awards myself, I can tell you from experience, just the fact that awards judges haven't been served their lunch yet can affect their perception of a selection. This alone has helped me accept criticism toward my own work, realizing how arbitrary and subjective an impression can be. 

Then there are the inbred prejudices against certain actors, directors, and genres.  I wonder if "Henry's Crime" suffers from the general critic's dislike of Keanu Reeves, just as "White Irish Drinkers" seemed to fall prey to an overall disdain for television director/writers in general and the creator of the critically dismissed (but overwhelmingly beloved by audiences) "Ghost Whisperer" in particular?   There were many hateful, personal digs at Mr. Gray's background in television as an excuse for what the reviewer loathed about the movie.  David Schwimmer seems to have suffered that same disdain of someone trying to rise above the "television ghetto" in the critics' assessment of his powerful film, "Trust".  Yet audiences responded strongly to all three of these films, in Woodstock and in Toronto.  

Where is the disconnect?

On the other hand, critics can have a wonderfully positive affect on a small film - look at the well-deserved success of "Win-Win" this year - an audience and critical favorite.  I left that film smiling, feeling a new sense of hope for character driven films and their ability to reach and touch the public.  Last year's "City Island" made me feel the same way.  When critics single out and praise small films like these - "Winter's Bone," "Frozen River" - they can raise something that would have gone unnoticed to the status of Academy Award contender.  Critics serve a function, like everyone in the business of art and art-making, and in cases such as these, they can be downright heroic.

One thing I have learned from this experience, however; gratuitous cruelty and sneering disdain has become the new discourse of the world.  It can crush an independent film at the box office, as it has crushed so many we've seen fail theatrically this year.   

Yet the audiences are the ones that count.  Two women in tears, coming to speak to us after the Philadelphia premiere of "White Irish Drinkers" on Friday. "I loved this film.  That was my life on the screen."  One little old man, standing up and literally shaking his fist, "How could the critics have panned this film?  This isn't a film.  This is real life!"

That's why we do it.  We have to remember that.  As much as it hurts to be publicly savaged by the likes of someone who thinks it's witty to call a movie with "crime" in its title "criminal",  that's the price we pay for the privilege of doing what we do.  We have to remember that we are in the storytelling business in the first place because we want to reach people, to make them feel.  We want to share our own joy and pain and reach out to others so that both filmmakers and viewers feel a little less alone in the world.

No amount of hateful, bitter words on the page can take that blessing away from us.