You do it. I do it. Critics do it. The Academy does it. Everyone's doing it.

When Michael Jordan came back to play for the Washington Wizards, outside of a late-game block on Ron Mercer, no one was fooling themselves by thinking this was the number 23 of Chicago Bulls days. Yet, unlike in sports, where a good player has a bad game and it's clear to all, perhaps because there are less concrete numbers to be compared, in movies, the reputations of reportedly great directors often is enough to hustle good reviews and favor for not-good films.

THE SYMPTOMS

Deception and four stars. Hype and two thumbs-up. Oscars. Speaking sideways about ass-backwards productions. Over-zealousness confuses the present with the past. Name obsession. Selective memory. Recommending watered-down, tepid retreads of once-vital themes from years prior. Believing a great director always produces at the same level as was made his reputation. Telling people to watch Day for Night.

REPORTED OUTBREAKS

Kubrick's Clockwork Orange (America's foremost bloated director dumbs down violence in a tedious 2 hour exercise of superficiality); Hitchcock's Rebecca (Melodrama and distilled characters replace Hitch's usual suspense); Coppola's Apocalypse Now (A ludicrous and vain third act actually manages to outdo all the pretentiousness that came before it); Bergman's The Seventh Seal (How do you say "heavy-handed" in Swedish?), etc.

THE DIAGNOSIS

When I was younger, my parents decided to do the California thing and one night served my sister and I gardenburgers. Not being told what we were eating, and thus instinctively thinking it came from the meat of some gracious cow, we ate with the usual spirit. Half-way through dinner, my mother broke the silence and revealed that what we really were eating was more veggie than bovine. Too-hungry to really react one way or the other, I kept on, but my sister sensed something was up. Whereas previously she had been enjoying her meal, now being told it wasn't what she believed it to be, she rejected it quite immediately.

This is a similar response--if opposite in direction--that follows the line of thinking as those who would wish to rationalize a great director's bad movie(s). Not knowing the full identity of the product before her but liking it, upon being told that it was of a characteristic running against her usual sensibilities, she protested. Likewise, not knowing the full of identity of the product before them but disliking it, upon being told that it is of a characteristic aligned with their usual sensibilities, critics and audiences often accept--perhaps it doesn't work always at quite so blatant a level, but it works. No one wants to have their artistic idols, those heroes of the cinema, disappoint them, so we justify Gangs of New York because we like Mean Streets, and we justify Brazil because we like Monty Python. Then it goes deeper. We justify Thin Red Line or Gosford Park because we like the idea of comebacks, or we justify Juliet of the Spirits because we like the idea of surreal foreign films. Next we justify Mulholland Dr. because we like David Lynch's name, same as we justify Shrek because we like Speilberg's legacy. Then we justify The Graduate because we like nostalgia and justify Leaving Las Vegas because we like the nearby independent movie theater. That is to say that certain well-received films attain their status not based on the film's actual merit but rather thanks to a handful of names and reputations, genres and subtitles, smoke and mirrors. You don't really like it, you just like the notion of it. And on that off chance that there is a negative reaction, there's a tendency to ignore it within the context of the director's more favorable career. How many people talk about Popeye?

Once a film is evaluated in the framework of a director's career or some other sinister influence, unfiltered opinions are few and far between. Open and candid is replaced by guarded and self-conscious. If ignorance isn't bliss, it sure is honest.