[quote]csulli wrote:
[quote]four60 wrote:
Most of the paid critics did not enjoy it. Most of the public enjoyed it.[/quote]
This is why I am wondering what the point of most movie critics is nowadays. In general they seem to share virtually no common opinions with the public at large, so who do they benefit?
No offense Kahuna. In all honesty you’re better than any of the people I read about getting paid to review movies rofl.[/quote]
No worries friendo, you’re largely right.
A critic’s intent is to dissect the good and the bad of the movie from a somewhat specific but mostly general selection of categories that gain or lose priority determined by the director/producer and genre. I try to come to a conclusion based on things like Direction, Script, Set Production, Cinematography, Casting and Acting, Character design, Scene Significance and Genre Relevance/Conformity. Those are most of the big generalities that I tend to cover a film by, and they’ll serve me a basic idea of how good/bad it is as a whole, but then I filter it through things like budget, director experience (with both film-making and the genre at hand), the director’s intent and his personal opinions about what he’s made. Taking into account all of those second ones, they may gradually draw my opinions on the first set of categories into a slightly different territory. Sometimes the good will be a little worse in retrospect (the cast potential and chemistry making up for weak direction), and sometimes I will give the bad some more leeway (the cinematography being off due to a shallow budget).
A lot of the time us critics tend to play by logic and analysis when faced with a film and throw our instincts on a back-burner when some cheesy attention-drawing bullshit shows up (Michael Bay explosions anyone?). Sometimes a mass audience will do the exact opposite. Each party will get annoyed at the other for doing so, and rarely will either party swap sides too frequently. There are some films that I may rate a little lower as a critic that I appreciate greatly based on instinct, and a lot where the brilliantly made and wonderfully crafted films may seem boring outside of a state of analysis.
A shoddy director can rely on a shitty, yet loud movie to draw in profits even if the thing itself isn’t really anything at all from a logical perspective and most of the less experienced or not very passionate audience members will fall for it, that’s why M. Night Shyamalan and Michael Bay are still working. In reference to Man Of Steel, some of the spoilers I’ve heard do sound a little iffy, but the vast majority of people did like it and I don’t expect such a huge amount of people to jump in that direction with the hype so huge if it’s a bad movie, but I’ll really have to see it for myself and try to balance my logic and my emotional instinct before I come to a conclusion I feel is right (which I should do soon if I have the amount of time left over that I expect today).
Most of the time the critic will serve the more passionate and analytic of the audience, along with those involved in film-making, most notably the directors and producers of the films, but the distance between critical outcome and commercial outcome stems far and wide based on a different perspective of view. Anyway, I’ll probably jump more into this after I’ve seen Man Of Steel, I’ve been a little vague and there is a lot more to cover on the difference between an individual critic and a general populace’s reviews.
