Zach Snyder presents Twilight of The Phantom Menace & Robin and the Crystal Skull syndrome

Okay this has kind of been on my mind as I've kind of looked at imdb reviews and youtube and even some more high caliber film review sites. What is in dissecting a bad movie? I really think that the internet has created a sense of cynicism and snobbery in (amateur) film criticism.

What spurred this discussion? Roger Ebert's review of 'Thor' which is less a review of the film and more of an exercise in sarcasm. I honestly think that Ebert has become a golden standard for film reviewers and many amateurs try to match his style of reviewing. I myself am not exempt from this as my imdb reviews kind of have an Eberty tone to them. I seem to think though that Ebert's brand of film reviewing has become the standard in more ways than one. The sarcasm is evident in so many internet reviews. I ask is it really needed?

Bad movies don't hurt anyone and not everyone has the same definition of good and bad. There have been titles out there that seem to unite a great deal of people in their hate(hence the title). I am not out to defend the ilk of Twilight, TPM, or Batman and Robin but go to imdb or the vlogs and these reviews are really interesting to read. It seems as if some of the bad reviews of these types of films are made as if to prove some sort of superiority complex. Imdb has a filter and youtube for the most part does not in the comments sections which adds four letter spicing to the critical comments. I wrote an unfavorable comment about the film 'Magnolia' which I realize I am in the minority of not liking and a youtube user wrote back '**** you, get back to watching Twilight' or something to that effect. It's as if sometimes more stock is placed in the 'universally' bad titles than the good ones.

Do people group together in attacking bad movies? It's not like a rifftrack sort of thing though because sometimes these reviews get way out there and in the case of youtube where there is no filtuer they can get mean. Why?

 

I am not out to defend the ilk of Twilight, TPM, or Batman and Robin

There's the foundation of the problem, at least in my eyes. I don't like Twilight. I hate it. Despise it. I think it's done so many terrible things for the literary and film industries. I'd never defend it. But I'd never badmouth it, either, at least not in the form of a critique or a review. Why? Because somebody likes it. We need to eliminate this assumption that everyone knows such-and-such is a bad film. Everyone knows Nicolas Cage's career has been going downhill since National Treasure 2. Everyone knows the Prequels are terrible. Everyone knows the third Pirates film was a disgrace.

Eliminate this self-righteousness and get back to basics. Movies are supposed to be enjoyable. Everything else is extra. When reviewing a film, I wish people would focus less on trying to sound like their assessments are "right" and up-to-date and just focus on the heart of what film is all about.

Yeah, it's evident that snobby reviews have become the fashion. Why, I don't know. But it certainly has negatively impacted the enjoyability of the film experience. Which is a shame, really.

 

Eliminate this self-righteousness and get back to basics. Movies are supposed to be enjoyable. Everything else is extra. When reviewing a film, I wish people would focus less on trying to sound like their assessments are "right" and up-to-date and just focus on the heart of what film is all about.

Yeah, it's evident that snobby reviews have become the fashion. Why, I don't know. But it certainly has negatively impacted the enjoyability of the film experience. Which is a shame, really.

Right on the money. This general issue has been on my mind for a year or two now. I'm glad there's a thread addressing it. I'm just burned out on reading this kind of stuff on the net. Making a bad movie is not a crime, but a lot of people on the net seem to act as though it is.

At the core of this is the way so many people state their opinion as a fact which either means they don't understand the difference between an opinion and a fact, or they are so egotistical that they think their judgement is infallible and should be used as the yardstick for all others to reference, which is absurd of course.

I like Zaz's use of "YMMV." It covers a lot and respects other people's views while acknowledging we're all entitled to like or dislike what we please.

The fact is that the Twilight films found a HUGE audience. The Star Wars prequels were supported by the public to the tune of over 2 billion dollars worth of tickets sold. The box office gross may not automatically indicate quality, but it sure the hell indicates POPULARITY. I can only assume SOMEONE liked and enjoyed them.

A LOT of critics HATED the Wizard of Oz when it came out. Gee, that debate has settled down a bit. People are still entitled to dislike the film to this day, but I think it's a little late in the game to try and say the movie didn't work. It' survived the test of time. And I think that may be the case with other, more contemporary films as well.

 

Isn't that the crux of the matter though? If in my humble opinion--and yours--we're all entitled to like or dislike what we please, then the same must also be true about writing about it in public media - in a blog or newspaper or internet forum or Facebook or Twitter. I don't open every post I write with the phrase "in my humble opinion" because that's already a given. If I state it with the certainty of fact, well, everyone knows all we're talking about is a movie, not something important.

If reading a negative, sarcastic, cruel and condescending review about a movie you like pains you, don't read it.

No one was physically harmed watching TPM or reading negative reviews about it. Obviously, there was a lot of mental distress 11 years ago from some of the people who really, really wanted to like it, but didn't, or from those who really, really seemed to like it, but kept reading people's complaints.

None of the mental damage surrounding TPM was caused by the movie. It was all caused by the inner mental life of the people reacting to it, and the people reacting to other people's reactions. But just because some people are so sensitive about certain movies doesn't impose a duty on other people to respect those sensitivities.

It's like when someone tells me "my pet peeve is _____." So what? Why should I care about your irrational personality tics? I try never to bore people by warning them about my pet peeves. Movie fandom is very analogous to this.

 

I think there's a flipside to all this, too: frequently, if you don't like, for instance, The Phantom Menace (which I find myself in the particularly unpopular position of finding the best of the prequels), you're accused of just being on the bandwagon, because it's cool not to like it, or worse, of having some sort of ridiculous agenda or of being an idiot who doesn't "get" it. There is a kneejerk loathing for certain films, but there's also a kneejerk reaction that is unfair to those who legitimately dislike them. As with so much of discourse in any arena these days, it's very difficult to actually discuss a thing without it turning into a shouting match between two people/groups who absolutely refuse to find each others' points reasonable.

Eliminate this self-righteousness and get back to basics. Movies are supposed to be enjoyable. Everything else is extra. When reviewing a film, I wish people would focus less on trying to sound like their assessments are "right" and up-to-date and just focus on the heart of what film is all about.

Yes, movies are supposed to be enjoyable. But I've been noticing this weird thing wherein reviewers are extremely fickle about which films they apply it to. I can't count the number of times I've found a movie, even a moderately well-reviewed movie, too insultingly stupid or otherwise loathsome (as in the case of Wanted) to be enjoyable even on a brainless actioner level, and have been criticized for being too critical and not just enjoying the stupid . . . and then we get to things like, for a recent instance, Thor, which it was clear from the start is a commercial project, but turned out to be a solidly enjoyable entertainment, and is being snarked by some of the big reviewers -- Ebert, Scott, etc -- for not having higher aspirations, for being too commercial. It just seems arbitrary.

 

I found the Prequels disappointing, but they weren't bad the way Twilight or Batman & Robin are actually bad movies.

There does seem to a thing where it's cool to just universally love or hate a certain film, reviewers are entitled to their opinions but I think often pick on the wrong reasons to hate on a movie. I read a recent poor review of Pirates 4 and one of the negative comments was that everyone was trying to double-cross each other all the time. Er.....hello, they're Pirates! That is what Pirates do! They're all for themselves and will try to stop each other.
Some reviewers just have a bias towards certain genres too it seems.

 

My experience is that with certain movies that are popular to hate and ridicule, you have reviewers nitpicking on every little detail in the plot and dissecting it to a level of scrutiny that would never have been applied to anything else. When that happens, I find it petty. If you wanted to do that with every movie out there, about half of them would disqualify.

 

This is also definitely the case. When reading Ebert's reviews of science fiction, fantasy or horror films, (or just about any film with gruesome violence, or just about any film which doesn't have a simple linear narrative) which are often amusing but also often endlessly, pointlessly digressive, I wonder how long it takes him to come up with enough snarky filler to write a full-length review of a movie about which he has nothing much to say.

 

This, dammit, a thousand times this. No one forces you to read movie critiques (Well, usually, sorry film majors), and there's nothing wrong with disregarding critical consensus and seeing a movie anyway. I find Roger Ebert's case particularly funny, as whenever he pans something really big everyone leaps on this "RAWR RAWR ROGER EBERT BAD RAWR" internet hate train and reacts as if he just got up in your face and insulted your mother. What, did you work on the film in question? Do you have a personal stake in how it gets reviewed? Have you, by way of Roger Ebert panning popcorn movie X, lost money? No? Then chill out.

 

The flip side of that of course are the countless movies that were smothered in critical praise on release but are now all but forgotten and largely unwatched.

The one thing we all agree on is that the taste of critic is fickle, and one thing I've noticed about many of them, and Ebert in particular, is that he doesn't apply his own rules with consistency. His body of work seems to follow no rules of internal logic. But that's taste.

When Ebert gets it right, he nails it with simplicity and deadly accuracy, as in:

Ebert explains in a few short paragraphs exactly why Ghostbusters is going to be recognized as a blockbuster comedy classic for decades to come. Moreover, he serves up a template for why big budget effect-driven plots, paired with just about anything, so often fall short of creating a movie worth watching.

The problem we have as Star Wars fans is that we love a genre where failure is far more common than success, and we get defensive and bitter when it gets pointed out to us.

 

No, Ebert is not consistent; he's angry. (Especially for someone who wrote "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" a film of surpassing awfulness). That said, I'm with him on this subject; these super-hero movies cost the moon, and they.are.all.the.same. Most of them are unwatchable if you want apply logic, and I suppose he has seen too many. He is keeping himself awake by doing the comic writing review, and more power to him; I'll probably enjoy reading that more than I will seeing the film. (And yes, when I was younger than ten, I liked "Thor" comics a lot. I confess).

I don't know that they 'don't harm anyone'. They employ a lot of people, true enough, but the end is nigh if they don't find a way to attract more than one quadrant of the movie-going audience to theatres. I think he means that Branagh can do better, which is perhaps arguable. Branagh is no longer as ambitious as he once appeared to be.

 

Invariably I think that the sheer number of films Ebert and the like see (12-20 films per week, every week, every year) will inevitably lead them to become extremely picky over what they do and don't like and how they react, particularly in regards to films like Thor etc. which they feel don't bring anything really new to the table.

Is this fair? Probably not, but if I was in the same position I'd probably be doing the same thing.

 

I think that's a really good point. How much you like a given genre film may depend a lot on the date you step into it for the first time. If you aren't old enough to have seen Superman the Movie or Batman in theaters, if the superhero movie genre began for you with Spider-Man or X-Men, then some of the stuff in this new batch of superhero movies might actually seem, heaven forbid, novel and original. I'm old enough to have seen 4 superhero franchises get off to a nice start then self-destruct: Superman, Batman, X-Men, Spider-Man. Now we're on a cycle of reboots: Superman reboot: FAIL. Batman reboot: SUCCESS! X-Men reboot? Spider-Man reboot? We'll get to watch Iron Man and Dark Knight fall apart next. The odds for the third sequence in the Dark Knight franchise are not good, if history is any guide, and it always is.

So yeah, it's hard to blame Ebert, or me, for that matter, for being a bit weary. Obviously, I loved it all when it was new to me.

 

My personal problem isn't with Ebert but rather his style of reviewing a "bad" film. Ebert is obviously what people look to as a film critic and so his standard has influenced how people review films they think of as bad. I think Ebert is a magnificant writer and essayist but his reviews of bad films are full of sarcastic filler which is being emulated by a great deal of people. ANd so instead of articulating why a film is bad you get cynical retorts.

 

This.

 

This is a great thread and there's more to say on all this.

I confess that I often get quite snarky in my reviews, whether of bad movies or bad albums or even Star Wars books in my EU thread. I mean, I think I have a duty to be entertaining when I write, so I try to be witty about it. But I think that it's a good point you make about something being nothing more than sarcastic riffing; I always try in my reviews to sort of articulate why I find the work in question to be founded on some kind of faulty premise or something.

So, you know, for instance, I make snarky comments about Wing Commander in my review in this forum, but I also try to express why exactly I think the film doesn't work. A great example of how to do this kind of review right is the classic RLM review of TPM; it's hysterically funny, but it also makes its serious points very well and you finish the review having laughed a whole lot but also understanding, in a very serious way, the ways in which the reviewer feels that the movie making process broke down on TPM. That's kind of the gold standard in this kind of thing for me.

Also, I don't care about the 'test of time.' The Wizard of Oz is still a bad movie.

I suppose I could riff on how it is a crime to make a 'bad movie.' Does anybody care?

 

I'm game.

 

I get what you are saying Rogue and I appreciate the need to review films on a more personal level. I've noticed though as I read through Ebert and many of the IMDB reviews that they follow the anecdotal essay format rather than an analytical film review. I like to know why someone does not like a film and sometimes sarcastic filler fills the reviews.