Movie Critics

There is a certain phenomena where when someone learns to do something well, they suddenly enjoy it less from others.  Chefs, for instance, many times have a hard time eating food from those that aren't professional because they can spot all the flaws in their meals.  This happens with movie critics.  Often times a movie will come out and audiences will love it while the critics will revile it.  Just take a look at just about any comedy movie that comes out on Rotten Tomatoes.  You'll soon find a pattern that the audience loves them but critics generally don't.  Another genre you can see this in is the horror genre it seems.  Movie critics that know what they're talking about generally will blast movies over plot, character development, and the way actors interact with each other and the audience.  They focus a lot on the energy of a movie.  This is all well and good but many times movies have plot holes, bad acting, or bad character development but these things may not matter to the artistic desire of the film makers like in comedies and horror flicks.  Many times the critics can't get past the idea that a movie couldn't care about certain areas to focus more on the laughs/screams of the audience.

Other times we have films that somehow are able to rise above this and become critically acclaimed.  Sharknado received an 82% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes...to put that into perspective, that puts it higher than Pixar's Brave.  I don't know how it happened but it did.  You also have a different effect because of critics' better understanding of the art behind movies.  This effect helps critics love movies that audiences don't like.  Receiving 93% good ratings with only a 39% audience approval, this movie was one that critics loved, yet viewers really didn't like.  Thus there are movies that critics love for their art and quality, yet sometimes despite all that, the viewers can't see that and instead see a bad movie.

This is all well and good, but we run into a problem both with cooks and critics when they act like they know what they're doing yet don't and they're loud about it.  Take for example the cook who is merely average yet believes no one can cook better than he, and when he tastes your food, he immediately starts to tell you how to improve it.  That's not a pleasant experience.  The other problem are movie critics that believe they know how to critique a movie, and yet their critique has nothing to do with the movie, introduces personal biases, or just plainly gets the movie wrong.  Take for example one reviewer of Wall-E.  Her critique starts off in the realm of believable, but then she crosses over into talking about how Wall-E is fatphobic...and then never explains what she's talking about.  The rest of her review is basically a copy paste of some article about how Disney is racist, evil, etc.  While her review started off seeming that maybe it was a legitimate review it soons descends into an incoherent rant which is half based on the fact that Wall-E is a film produced by Disney.  The amusing part is that Wall-E was produced and created by Pixar, not Disney.  Yes it is owned by Disney but it wasn't Disney employees creating that movie, it was Pixar.  Here's an example of a bad amateur movie critic.  She doesn't even know how to truly watch and critique a movie on it's qualities, and not her own biases.  It's not limited to bad negative reviews, but I've seen bad positive reviews of good movies even.

There are other examples that I've seen and the rise of the blogger and facebook culture has brought waves of these amateur critics to an international audience and to my attention.  My advice to all you critics out there is to learn about what you're critiquing.  Don't come over here telling me how bad a book I've written when you don't even know what the word plot means (extreme example).

Anyways, I guess my rant is over.