The following has happened many, many times in my moviegoing life, and especially before I got into this racket: I’d read a bunch of shitty reviews of a given film, but I saw it anyway and…surprise!…it turned out to be not only half-decent but surprisingly good here and there.

This led me to wonder what kind of stick had been shoved up the asses of the critics who panned it. What was their basic malfunction? It gradually hit me when I became friendly with several critics in the late ’70s and beyond that some are “friendly” or appealing enough on a colorful personality basis (in terms of exuding actual human qualities one of my favorite critics was Andrew Sarris, with whom I spent three or four hours on a road trip in ’77) but some of them are just snippy, snarly pricks. If not overtly then on some kind of buried, deep-down basis. (This is not a psychological examination piece.)

The critical shitstorm that clobbered (but failed to seriously injure) Green Book is one example of this.

My first viewing of Peter Farrelly‘s Oscar-winning film happened at the 2018 Toronto Film Festival, and the crowd didn’t just approve and applaud — they adored it. But along came the prick critics (many of them wokeys) and before you knew it Green Book was a movie that not only needed to be disparaged but killed. I didn’t “think” Green Book was a nice, agreeable, feel-good thing — I knew it was that. I’d felt a rousing connection in the presence of hundreds of Toronto filmgoers.

Nobody ever claimed that Green Book was some kind of historic masterpiece, but it was fine as far as it went, not to mention charming and likable and undeniably well-crafted. But the pterodactyls in the critical community used every weapon in their reptile arsenal to draw blood, which led me to recall a line that I once heard William S. Burroughs say before a microphone: “Some people are shits.”

I came to a similar conclusion two years ago while reviewing Stephen Frears‘ The Lost King. “The people who’ve trashed this film are really and truly rancid,” I wrote, as The Lost King “is a good, personable, middle-class British film…not a comedy but amusing here and there…I completely enjoyed its company.” I didn’t care for a couple of aspects (the ghost of Richard appearing to Sally Hawkins) but to use a misstep or two as a reason to completely dismiss it is just vile.