The Anti-James Brown

You’ve got to hand it to Gambit Weekly film critic Rick Barton: he manages to make other film critics look like hard workers. In a job where all that’s asked is to see movies and write intelligently about them, Barton fails to do both. He’s the least hardest working man in show business.

The average critic often sees two or three movies a day, which considering how shitty most movies are qualifies them for combat pay. Barton, on the other hand, seems to see one a week, unless the New Orleans Film Festival waddles into town. Then he sees three.

As a New Orleans media insider, I'm privy to the work habits of and the requirements for all of Gambit's writers. Barton's are unique. The first secret I'll reveal is Barton actually watches the movie he's reviewing in a theater. The second is the least hardest working man in show business has a week to come up with his musings on the film.

With seven big days cleared to write his review - here comes the third and final secret - Rick goes high-tech, pulling out his Bart-o-matic reviewing machine, a miracle of engineering that manages to generate the same review for each movie. Once the coils turn red, the device spits out a lede. This is invariably a profound observation on the human condition. So for his review of Notes on a Scandal, Rick kicks things off by noting that we live in a “mobile society.” For Dreamgirls, Rick reflects that “celebrity is the bane of American culture.” For Blood Diamond, Rick crawls out on a limb with his point that “all over the world, innocent people are caught in the middle of violent power struggles.” And so on.

Then the machine works on the plot summary, a dull-as-dishwater retelling occasionally enlivened by the machine’s riotous stabs at vigorous writing. (I've heard the Bart-o-matic takes days to put this together, but that's okay since it ultimately comprises 90 percent of the review and saves Rick the trouble of telling us in any detail why a movie is good. Most movies are really, really good in Rick’s book, by the way.) There’ll be plenty of space on this blog for cataloging these flights of fancy, but today I’ll share with you this passage from the Blood Diamond review: “And Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou) is a local villager who dares to dream that his 12-year-old son, Dia (Kagiso Kuypers), will grow up to be a doctor.”

I believe I can fly

I believe I can touch the sky

I think about it every night and day

Spread my wings and fly away

I believe I can soar

I see me running through that open door

I believe I can fly I believe I can fly I believe I can fly

Okay, I added the R Kelly lyrics, but I’m gonna’ dare to dream they were, uh, flying through the Bart-o-matic when it spit out that sentence.

Only at the bottom of the review do we get Rick’s bottom line thoughts, but the Bart-o-matic insures these are as trite as his off-the-rack comments on, like, life, man. Sometimes these judgments come to us in a language that looks like English, but somehow isn’t. To wit, from the Blood Diamond review: “the plot is unconvincing all the while the action sequences and unresolved stab at romantic convention rob the film's seriousness of much of its weight.” Easy for Rick to say!

Look, I know free weeklies don’t pay well, so you could argue Gambit is only getting what it pays for. But when I worked at a free weekly in New York, we couldn’t stop people from begging us to publish their movie, stage and whatever-else reviews even if we had guns. Most of them were horrible scribblers, but not all. In a city with a supposed surfeit of great writers (cough-overrated-cough), you’d think Gambit could find someone to rotate reviews with Barton the way it did before Katrina.

Then we’d at least get two different reviews a year.