I’ve come to like 'em lately.
Not the "1"s and "2"s so much–they’re often as boring as the "8"s, "9"s, and "10"s, but the "3’s and "4"s are pretty good, and the "5"s and "6"s are often full of insight, wit, and some sharp critical analyses.
I suppose it all depends on what you go to reviews for–I read them after I see a movie, sometimes as I’m seeing the movie, and I often learn from them, or get my own ideas confirmed about problems and weaknesses.
For example, I just watched “Silence of the Lambs” for the umpteenth time, and thought how implausible it was to cage Lector in a room and send two armed officers up to feed him, with both entering the unlocked cage at the same time, and no closed-circuit TV monitoring the cage. A recipe for disaster, and I was pleased to read that several negative reviewers pointed out exactly this implausible event, as well as several others I hadn’t noticed before.
Same with “Kind Hearts and Coronets”: I thought it was slow, improbable, and silly (I hadn’t seen it in over thirty years) and when I looked at the 4 and 5 reviews on imbd.com that was the consensus the reviewers had reached. Far from a classic, it was a piece of fluff, and not worth my time in watching it. I would have erased it from my cache of recordings anyway, but I take comfort in knowing that I wasn’t simply in bad mood when I watched it, but rather in the company of some other film viewers.
I recommend the negative reviews to anyone who values his time in watching movies.
No doubt it needed a car chase scene and some animation.
It hasn’t aged well. Or I haven’t.
It was outrageous, in its time, perhaps, but now it’s mostly a historical artifact. I found the characters artificial, poorly motivated, and the murder sequences lacking in wit, almost perfunctory.
They’re really quite edifying, the 3s and 4s, even when I like the film. The people who write these mostly negative (but not disgusted or appalled–those people tend to write 1s and 2s) reviews are articulate about what they didn’t like, and quite detailed.
I often learn quite a bit about the films from these reviews. Someone on imdb wrote an excoriating review of A HARD DAY’S NIGHT, which I had quite enjoyed when I first saw it some 50 years ago, and again when I saw it in VHS format, but it definitely doesn’t hold up as a witty, thrill-a-minute comic romp as much as it does, for me, as an early music video. The songs are still good, but the story is kinda dumb and the acting is 90% mugging. The plot line is silly, and a lot of the 3s and 4s confirm my current judgment. Watching it was mostly just a sentimental pleasure.
I also saw MAN ON FIRE today, the Denzel Washington thriller of a decade or so ago, and found the 3 and 4 reviews enlightening. Some found it racist, some found it poorly cast, some crudely filmed, and while I didn’t object on any of these grounds, I could see what they were saying. I recommend reading the 3 and 4 reviews, if only to see where you agree and where you disagree.
This thread doesn’t seem to attract many replies, but I keep reading the negative imdb reviews and getting edified. I’ll give up this thread if no one but me’s really interested but I come across some good stuff there.
For example, there’s a “3” review of TAKEN with a fascinating idea: transpose the plot of TAKEN to Russia , turn Liam Neeson into a Russian ex-KGB type who finds out his daughter’s been kidnapped on a trip to the US by the mafia, and he flies over to get her back etc…
This seems like a wonderful idea to me, one actually worthy of filming. Would we be able to root for a Russian good guy in that spot? Would our patriotic loyalties outweigh our sympathy for the Neeson character and his daughter’s plight?
Odd interesting perspective, I thought. I come across a lot of interesting ideas combing through the negative reviews on IMDB (plus a lot of incoherent crap, of course.)