We’ve now had expressions of protest from both the violent and non-violent wings of the anti-bad-review movement. The Hanover State Opera’s ballet director Marco Goecke confronted the Frankfurter Allgemeine ballet critic Wiebke Hüster in the theatre foyer and smeared dog excrement in her face. Now the comic and movie actor Seth Rogen has shared his views on criticism in an interview with Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO podcast, declaring how upset he was at bad reviews for his films The Green Hornet and The Interview. “I think if most critics knew how much it hurts the people that made the things that they are writing about, they would second guess the way they write these things. It’s devastating.”
Sure. Many critics are as innocent as children about the effect their negative writing has on the people involved, just as they do not dare to dream that these mythologised stars are actually reading their good reviews – that these A-listers, so far above them in the media firmament, might, for a fraction of a moment, know who they are. My own view is that the people who owe critics the most are the ones who hate them the most. Hollywood blockbuster players, whose career self-worth has nothing to do with broadsheet-press school reports, shrug at bad notices.
