I’ve long, very long, been fascinated with critical opinion.  My first strong experience with critical reaction must have happened in the early 80’s with the Siskel and Ebert movie review shows (they went through various names but originally were called Sneak Previews and then At The Movies).

Being a HUGE movie fan (still am!) and in those pre-internet days, it was a thrill to see someone talk about a film that wasn’t in theaters yet and offer not only clips from said film but also an opinion on whether it was worth seeing or not.

I didn’t have a favorite between Mr. Siskel and Ebert, often finding myself agreeing with either of them regarding any particular film.  It was all too clear from watching the show they loved movies yet they were not shy to tear a feature down if they felt it wasn’t worthy of being seen.  They didn’t always agree, and sometimes their disagreements were incredibly entertaining on their own, regardless of what I would think of said film.

One of my favorite disagreements involved an episode from 1987 wherein Mr. Siskel and Ebert reviewed both Benji: The Hunted and Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket.  To Mr. Siskel’s shock, Roger Ebert would give a “thumbs up” to Benji: The Hunted and a “thumbs down” to Full Metal Jacket.

Mr. Siskel couldn’t understand how Ebert could give such a review and their snipping about that issue extended through the episode and went into their video recommendations…

Anyway, the reason I point all this out is because in this day and age and with the internet, everyone can present their opinion on any particular subject, quite literally, to the world.

Today there are hundreds of “professional” movies (and book, etc.) reviewers out there.  In the movie business, rottentomatoes.com allows the public at large to see a snapshot of what the reviewers out there, along with audiences, think of a film on average.

But it does lead to certain questions, questions that Ben Yagoda at Slate.com checks out…

The Reviewer’s Fallacy: When Critics Aren’t Critical Enough

I have to say, the headline itself strikes a nerve in me.

If you’ve followed this blog for any length of time, I’ve noted that when I was younger (and perhaps taking a cue from the likes of Mr. Siskel and Ebert!), I was a fierce critic of films or TV shows or books.  I loved them, mind you, but I was very keen to spot what to me were the flaws in these works and arrogant enough to think that if I could spot them, the people who made said film/TV show/book/song etc. should see them too and should have fixed them before releasing them to the general public.

When you think like that, there are very few works of film that one thought of as masterpieces and, even those I felt that way, I further felt had some kind of flaw but the overall work was so good that the flaws didn’t bother me.

As the years passed and I started to work in comic books, I realized something that the younger me didn’t: There are myriad roads taken before a product is released to the general public and sometimes what is released is the best thing possible given time or budget or any other constraints.

To put it bluntly, I mellowed out.  Suddenly, the flaws that were so glaring in works seemed far more trivial.

Yesterday, I reviewed the film Atomic Blonde.  I liked the film well enough, it held my interest through its run time, and featured several explosive and inventive action sequences.

It also featured a plot that was mess, an attempt to be clever and show various characters being duplicitous but ultimately wound up being either too confusing or just plain silly (a mild example SPOILER: Why does Charlize Theron’s character still bother with James McAvoy’s character when she knows he called the police on her when she went to a certain subject’s apartment to investigate?).

In the past, I probably would have been absolutely vicious with such a film and yet, as I said in my review, I ultimately liked it well enough despite its problems to offer a recommendation.

While I’m not a “professional” film critic, Mr. Yagoda ponders why certain critics offer high praise for movies which ultimately land with a thud to audiences.  He offers some examples of films that met with plenty of praise but ultimately didn’t thrill audiences.

Though he doesn’t do so, I suspect a prime film for consideration on the schism between critical “pro” and audience would be Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

While The Last Jedi is clearly a box office smash, the disconnect between critics and audiences is sharply pronounced, with critics in general loving the film while audiences were sharply divided.

Still, that’s the nature of art, isn’t it?  There will be those who love things that others don’t.  Perhaps at times we’ll let our own likes and dislikes cloud our reviews but in the end, whether we choose to see something or not, we do so nowadays knowing more about the work than we have before, for better or worse.