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Are film critics losing sync with audiences?

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Re: Are film critics losing sync with audiences?

#381

Post by sshagent »

pc2g4d wrote: post #259

Film critic reviews are the Hacker News of the film world: nerds nerding out. I once went out with a woman who was highly steeped in film criticism and such. I think she volunteered as dramaturg at a theater company or something like that. We watched "I'm Thinking of Ending Things" together, and I thought it was the most dismal, dispiriting, horrible movie I'd ever seen. Afterward she opened my eyes to how a critic w…

This is giving me some flashbacks to starting a course at college on Film Studies. I left after a few weeks, the constant over analysis was too much. Let me enjoy (or hate) the movie is please. It does seem weird to me that the creatives involved would put so much effort into things that the bulk of the population won't interpret.

Re: Are film critics losing sync with audiences?

#382

Post by yakubin »

noisy_boy wrote: post #379
yakubin wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The movies you listed fail in a different way. There are plenty of explosions and fight scenes in The Last Jedi and Captain Marvel. What they do share is that the main character is an underdeveloped Mary Sue, without character flaws, without weaknesses they must overcome. They're just made awesome from the start. It probably stems from the inability of current Hollywood to portray female characters as having any weak…

> What they do share is that the main character is an underdeveloped Mary Sue, without character flaws, without weaknesses they must overcome. Regarding Rey in context of The Last Jedi, did we watch the same movie? She was basically a mixture of having doubt and uncertainty and being troubled for the large part of the movie. Only in the confrontation with Kylo, we see her inner strength but even that was tempered wit…

She never lost a fight. She's never shown to have any moral flaws. Compare that to Anakin who lost plenty of fights (thereby also losing parts of his body) despite being an overpowered character; he was also arrogant and impatient. What moral flaws does Rey have?

Doubting yourself and then winning at everything doesn't make you relatable. It makes you like that colleague from school who was stressed out before every exam, saying for sure they're gone fail, proceeding to have straight A's from every one of them. When you hear them doubt themselves next time, you don't empathise with them, you say "oh shut up".

Re: Are film critics losing sync with audiences?

#383

Post by plucas »

drnonsense42 wrote: post #378
Gareth321 wrote: post #365

Yes, absolutely. From Rotten: Mulan - Critics: 73 - Audience: 47 The Last Jedi - Critics: 91 - Audience: 42 Captain Marvel - Critics: 79 - Audience: 45 It's clear that audiences - and you can read this as "people who like movies and are willing to leave a review" - and critics are miles apart. This prompts the common retort: "so what?" I continue to argue that the purpose of movie critics, for many decades, has been…

Yikes. Call me philistine, but seeing that Last Jedi score peels the scab off the idea that there is any intellectual value remaining in their job. I’m not sure about the critics of yore, but, as all of your scores evince, I am drawing the impression that modern critics either 1. self-select as part of group of certain demographics or 2. deliberately pander to that group of certain demographics “as the wind heads in…

Maybe you're aware of how Rotten Tomatoes scores work, but in case someone reading this isn't: the score is not some average of individual scores like IMDb uses (I think), but just the _proportion of critic scores that are positive_.

So, if a film has 100x 2.5/4 star ratings from critics and 50 1.5/4 star ratings, it would have a Tomatometer score of 67% (100 positive of 150 ratings).

Re: Are film critics losing sync with audiences?

#384

Post by Gareth321 »

yakubin wrote: post #371
Gareth321 wrote: post #365

Yes, absolutely. From Rotten: Mulan - Critics: 73 - Audience: 47 The Last Jedi - Critics: 91 - Audience: 42 Captain Marvel - Critics: 79 - Audience: 45 It's clear that audiences - and you can read this as "people who like movies and are willing to leave a review" - and critics are miles apart. This prompts the common retort: "so what?" I continue to argue that the purpose of movie critics, for many decades, has been…

The movies you listed fail in a different way. There are plenty of explosions and fight scenes in The Last Jedi and Captain Marvel. What they do share is that the main character is an underdeveloped Mary Sue, without character flaws, without weaknesses they must overcome. They're just made awesome from the start. It probably stems from the inability of current Hollywood to portray female characters as having any weak…

>What they do share is that the main character is an underdeveloped Mary Sue, without character flaws, without weaknesses they must overcome. They're just made awesome from the start. It probably stems from the inability of current Hollywood to portray female characters as having any weaknesses at all, that would be heresy. The result is that it's hard to empathize with and care about the main character. They don't have any dimensionality.

I agree. This seems obvious. So why can't these sophisticated critics see this and rate the movie accordingly? They're obviously using a completely different set of criteria to rate movies, and entertainment is far down the list.

Re: Are film critics losing sync with audiences?

#385

Post by onpensionsterm »

stackbutterflow wrote: post #303
bananamerica wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a film major. I wrote about film on print for quite a while. This was not in the US. I did want to prescribe, but not to the masses. To other crítics, to the pedantic purists that thought Bruce Lee was unimportant and Spielberg formulaic and uninspired, and that unless your name is David Lynch anything American is worse by default. People who thought anything with emotion was trash for the masses. And I was there…

A counter argument to your Shakespearean argument, movies are made once, recorded once, and can then be viewed anytime anywhere. Whereas a play exists at one point in time and space. It has to be remade in every city and every year.

But how many films are essentially just Hamlet or The Taming of the Shrew?

Re: Are film critics losing sync with audiences?

#386

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

wolverine876 wrote: post #331
Lyapunov_Lover wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree that critic reviews are inherently prescriptive. Major blockbusters rely on cliches for the same reason that supermarket chains spend ridiculous amounts of money trying to get every store to look and feel the same: people find familiarity comforting. But to people who watch thousands upon thousands of movies this gets astoundingly boring. Take any hobby. Literally any one of them. The people who are really…

> Why do people die from erotic self-asphyxiation? Because we have a compulsion to escalate and to push things further. We need novelty. We need new stuff. We go mad if it's just the same thing over and over. At least that's true for most of us. Not everyone takes it all that far, but when you invest a significant amount of time doing one thing in particular, you're always going to want to take it to greater heights.…

The brain is a data compression engine and it's designed to ignore/"not enjoy" anything too repetitive and predictable.

You can get novelty from more extreme experiences and from complex experiences.

Franchise movies tend to go for more extremes (more characters, more CGI, more superficial complexity over an unchanging core), while art movies aim for complexity, implication, depth, and weirdness/unfamiliarity - to generate appealing unfamiliar cognitive load.

Critics are usually looking for the latter while typical franchise audiences (teens/twenties) are looking for the former.

So yes - there's going to be a disconnect. It's very hard to see a franchise movie through the eyes of a 15 year old when you're 60.

Re: Are film critics losing sync with audiences?

#387

Post by drnonsense42 »

goto11 wrote: post #377
Gareth321 wrote: post #365

Yes, absolutely. From Rotten: Mulan - Critics: 73 - Audience: 47 The Last Jedi - Critics: 91 - Audience: 42 Captain Marvel - Critics: 79 - Audience: 45 It's clear that audiences - and you can read this as "people who like movies and are willing to leave a review" - and critics are miles apart. This prompts the common retort: "so what?" I continue to argue that the purpose of movie critics, for many decades, has been…

> This leads us to today, where critic reviews are functionally useless for the broad audience This is rather over the top, since the article clearly shows reviews and audience ratings does correlate, especially towards the top. But it is always interesting with movies where the difference of opinion is starkest. Note that the "audience ratings" does not always correlate with the average audience. Especially with div…

They haven’t sufficiently demonstrated correlation for me. I think the last chart demonstrates it’s a lot more complicated. Just one example… How many obscure art films are there with highly-selective audiences which receive perfect critical scores and perfect audience scores that mostly serve to add bias to the correlation? The movies we’re responding to- which could easily be a list of movies many average joes “care about”- shows negative correlation.

Re: Are film critics losing sync with audiences?

#388

Post by drnonsense42 »

plucas wrote: post #383
drnonsense42 wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yikes. Call me philistine, but seeing that Last Jedi score peels the scab off the idea that there is any intellectual value remaining in their job. I’m not sure about the critics of yore, but, as all of your scores evince, I am drawing the impression that modern critics either 1. self-select as part of group of certain demographics or 2. deliberately pander to that group of certain demographics “as the wind heads in…

Maybe you're aware of how Rotten Tomatoes scores work, but in case someone reading this isn't: the score is not some average of individual scores like IMDb uses (I think), but just the _proportion of critic scores that are positive_. So, if a film has 100x 2.5/4 star ratings from critics and 50 1.5/4 star ratings, it would have a Tomatometer score of 67% (100 positive of 150 ratings).

Yes, I’m familiar- score is not the most accurate word choice in this case, although I stick by my point.

Re: Are film critics losing sync with audiences?

#389

Post by bin_bash »

goto11 wrote: post #361

The people rating movies on IMDB are not average audience members though. They are movie geeks and enthusiasts. But compared to professional critics, there is a significant difference because they still pre-select moves to watch based what they think they will enjoy. A movie enthusiast might have seen all science-fiction movies in existence but never a french new-wave movie. The professional critic on the other hand…

> Fans loved The Force Awakens because it was exactly the same formula as the original Star Wars. Critics were less enthusiastic.

The Force Awakens has IMDB of 7.9 but RT is 93%. Audience scores are lower than critic scores.

Re: Are film critics losing sync with audiences?

#390

Post by WelcomeShorty »

I know from first had experience why that difference is, at least in the realm of classical music reviews.

The critics are professionals, the audience is not. The observations of critics are based on years of experience and written for a large audience with their real name associated with the piece.

The audience can (nowadays) vent their options too. Mainly anonymous and for the better part describing their personal feelings about the experience.

Not saying the one is more useful than the other, just that the origins and intentions are completely different. I like the fact I can easily access both, and sometimes even compare the two (Rotten Tomatoes for example). But I do think the two scorings addressing two different issues.

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