Walk or look: Our critic sticks to “emancipation”.

It was fascinating to see how my good colleague Valerie Complex described slavery in her review of the Antoine Fuqua/Will Smith drama liberationalmost walked out of the film, not because it was unworthy, but because she found the depiction of black suffering and death almost too much to watch.

In the end, Kompleks stuck around. But her critique ended with perhaps the most moving request I’ve ever seen from a critic. “There has to be another way to tell these stories,” she wrote.There must be another way.”

Wow.

Sometimes, if you take movies seriously enough, you actually have to look the other way. Even the good ones – perhaps especially the good ones – can be too intense or too direct or too emotionally disturbing for a thoughtful viewer.

So very occasionally you have to go outside. Many, I know, consider this a crime against film. After all, every movie is someone’s baby. Rejecting someone, or appearing to reject them, is tantamount to a public insult. And it’s rude to fellow viewers, to say the least, one that can only be mitigated a little by sitting in a seat near the exit when you know a potentially overwhelming experience is about to happen.

But it happens. At least for me it does.

I’m pretty sure the first one I vaguely remember was in 1984 Wall Street Journal at the time and felt it was my professional duty to deal with it A Nightmare on Elm Street. I had been holding out for about twenty minutes at a theater in or near New York’s Times Square, then I stumbled out gasping for breath. Clearly, my distaste has not harmed Wes Craven or the makers of hundreds of horror movies that have since made many hundreds of millions of dollars. It just wasn’t for me.

A few years later I had a less forgiving encounter with a much better photo, that of Jonathan Demme The Silence of the Lambs. When I saw the film in a Santa Monica theater, it was well on its way to winning the Oscar for Best Picture. Everyone knew it was great. But my son was just over three at the time, and I developed an unfortunate habit of seeing the world through his young eyes. Seen through the filter of innocence, I could not bear the presence of so much evil. At the peak, maybe five minutes before the end, I broke down and ran for the exit. I’m shy

Probably my funniest strike happened in 1994, back in Santa Monica. My wife and I had a good relationship with Nikki Finke at the time. So the three of us decided to go see Quentin Tarantino’s pulp fiction. In the middle of one of the more insane scenes, Nikki bluntly proclaimed, “It’s rancid!” She stood up, walked down the aisle, and marched out of the theater. We followed, if I remember correctly, six or eight other customers.

Nikki is now deceased and so are Tarantinos Once in Hollywood (Violence and All) has become one of my favorite movies. Imagine that.

There was another madman in 2005, this time on Warner’s property. I was then New York Times film editor and I managed to get out of a very private preview of the James McTeigues V for Vendetta. The advertising apparatus, of course, exploded. But I just couldn’t handle it. So I stepped aside, and The times ran a nice sample piece edited by another editor.

All of which reminds me that we’re still on the cusp of the Great Walkout of 2022, with November’s third-lowest ticket sales in 24 years (unadjusted for inflation, which would dig the hole even deeper). This comes after a similarly poor performance in September and October, and despite a continued push from Marvel Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.

Unlike my good colleague Valerie, audiences seem reluctant to stick with it after sampling the seasonal fare.