I assume a lot of critics don’t evaluate art based on its quality, they evaluate it based on how it compares to what they consider good art to be. Which isn’t the same thing.
In my experience, recommendations that come from putting in your own favorite movies are better than critics choices many of the time.
or critics will like something because they’re “supposed” to like it.
As the late Jean Kerr once wrote “critics say ‘this play is awful. Why is that?’ Ordinary people say 'this play is awful. Why was I born? '”
She was married to noted play critic Walter Kerr.
A nice illustration of the difference between a reviewer and a critic.
A reviewer would approach it as ‘these characters were insufferably annoying. One star.’ If I follow that reviewer, I’d know their likes and dislikes are similar to mine and I can safely dodge that bullet.
A critic would be more likely to consider that although Beavis and Butthead are horrid creations, the intent of the movie was to extend the existing TV franchise, appeal to a particular demographic and social outlook and so on. Their judgement of the movie is then about how successfully it achieves those objectives and does so in either a new and interesting way that people who might not otherwise follow that genre should check out, or by repeating a well-worn formula.
Having seen Beavis and Butthead on video in pre-internet days because it was in the store’s Staff Picks section I would have welcomed the advice of both trustworthy reviewers and critics before I made the same mistake again.
I imagine that critics feel about movies the way we’d feel about our favorite food if we’d been eating it three times a day for years. Consequently, any movie that’s the least bit different seems better to them than those of us who haven’t seen so many movies.
If you can’t sum it up as “Die Hard” on a plane/train/ship, the critics will like it more than I might. I thought this was why “The Crying Game” and “Being John Malkovich” were rated so highly by critics. I thought they were good, but not as good as the critics seemed to.
I remember when I was young, I read John Waters’ review of “Mask” and he *hated *the plot element of the boy with a hideously deformed face falling in love with a blind girl. I thought it was clever.
Supposedly, people who saw this early film of a train pulling into a station found it thrilling.
On their TV show, Siskel and Ebert were reviewers, there to help you decide whether or not to go see the movies they reviewed. They gave a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” but also showed clips to give a flavor of what the movie was like, and said something about what you could expect if you went to go see it.
In his written pieces, Ebert was more of a critic, analyzing a movie for what it said and did. (Maybe Siskel was too, but I haven’t read his writings.) Ebert, in his written review of Beavis & Butthead Do America, explains why he thinks it’s a good movie because of, not in spite of, how insufferably annoying the characters are.
Reading such a review might not make you like the movie, but it might help you understand why other people do.
Ebert got the characters/show, at least in the big sense. B&B were a lot more subversive that a lot of people realized at the time. Yeah, they were crude, rude and obnoxious, but they were also deeply satirical of society and pop culture of the time, and made a pretty fair amount of biting commentary on many issues, including holding B&B up as exaggerated examples of the ignorance and stupidity causing problems in our country. Nobody was ever supposed to identify with B&B or celebrate their stupidity. Even as college students, whenever a B&B quote would come up, they were always in the context of something dumb that someone had done- either as mockery, or sometimes self-criticism.
Regarding Beavis & Butthead, remember that Mike Judge, who created the characters and the show, was later responsible for Idiocracy, which shared some of the same themes about ignorance and stupidity.
I have to wonder if the timing of this post has anything to do with Martin Scorcese’s comments that the Marvel Comics movies are not “art” o “Cinema”.
Because the arguments people are making here are similar to the arguments people are having about his comments
And “Office Space” – idiots at work.
I agree with the OP. I hate critics and think most of them have long crawled up their own ass to smell their farts and hear their own voice echo.
But I’m in a bad mood right now.
Try watching a YouTube clip of “Dr. Pimple Popper” and not pull away at the last second.
It is what I liked about Ebert as well. Gene Siskel did a fair job of this as well. Though he gave Roger hell for giving Benji: The Hunted a thumbs up while giving Full Metal Jacket a thumbs down.
And I agree with Gene. FMJ is a great movie and Ebert was insane to give it thumbs down.
There is a difference between a critic and a reviewer. People who are obsessively passionate about movies, like me, enjoy reading critics. If you just like to go to the movies like any normal person, you’ll probably prefer a reviewer. I like both styles. Depending on the individual and of course the movie.
TLDR: there’s nothing inherently bad about film criticism, it’s just a style not everyone likes. Find a reviewer who’s style you like and stick to them. Or read crowd-created reviews, like rottentomatoes.com
Ebert was also wrong about Taste of Cherry, Blue Velvet, and I Spit on Your Grave.
Roger Ebert had a column in which he answered questions from readers and one asked why a particular serious film only got two stars while another, more frivolous film got four. He explained that he wasn’t comparing the films to each other but to other films of the same type. So he might have been comparing the Benji film to other family films while comparing Full Metal Jacket to other, serious films.
Duplicate post.
My biggest problem with critics that you don’t see average joes do is the overwhelming desire to tie their reviews in to recent events and thus give movies a low score for reasons entirely outside their control. I remember when certain movies were given low scores in the aftermath of 9/11 because for whatever reason critics then thought films with anti-American elements weren’t worth watching. Similarly today any action movie you can somehow tie in with a recent mass shooting with also get a low score, despite the fact in a decade from now nobody will know what the hell you’re talking about. If you hate a movie because it’s story sucks, that’s perfectly fine to say but then throw in the Pulse Nightclub shooting as a reason to give some generic action movie a low-score because you don’t like to promote “gun violence” so quickly.
Movies are a product of their historical context. You can’t separate them.
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Give it a thought…
