Are negative reviews biased?
 

There's some science showing that a negativity bias is hardwired into us, so lately, I tend to take negative views with a grain of salt, unless they provide intelligent criticism. Mindless negativity can be entertaining, but I don't think it's particularly intelligent.

Re: Are negative reviews biased?
 

Mindless anything is pretty much garbage, negative or positive. Not sure what point you are trying to make, but I don't think it is particularly cogent?

Not sure, I find that negative reviews tend to focus on one thing they dislike (e.x. the CGI Dwarves in Snow White) rather than the whole film. And that people tend to hone in more on negativity than they do on positivity.

I guess you could find examples of mindless positivity or "gushing", but I personally don't see that as often.

It's true that people tend to focus on the negative traits of a thing strongly even if 90 percent of the thing is positive. It's the whole fly in the ointment thing. In the case of the Snow White remake, I think the cool reception has far more reasons than just the CGI. If that was the film's only issue, then few people would continue to shell out big money for the one millionth Marvel thing. When you have a remake that spits on and mocks the themes and archetypes of the beloved original and have a staring actress who goes around bashing the canonical and cherished original film, arguably Disney's most prolific, important, and foundational property... yeah that's a bad look and who'd want to support that?

Re: Are negative reviews biased?
 

I think the best option is to find a few sources you trust and stick with those. Like a certain reviewer or podcaster or something. If you know the kinds of movies that person likes and maybe find you have the same tastes, then those reviews will mean more.

At the same time I find number scores to be useless...giving a movie a "7" doesn't mean anything unless I know why. Sometimes you'll read the reasons and find them very silly. Or, worse, you'll realize the reviewer brings in outside politics or some other bizarre reasoning for down-rating a movie.

Re: Are negative reviews biased?
 

I find it's best to just find a few trusted reviewers or podcasters who you often seem to agree with and just focus on their reviews. When you find your opinions often align with that person, then the review means more. I don't get much from random users slapping number scores onto stuff, especially when you read the review and found they nailed it for flimsy or political reasons.

I guess you could find examples of mindless positivity or "gushing", but I personally don't see that as often.

Yes, but if a movie is really good, then a review is going to be gushing. I don't get how this is a bad thing.

Re: Are negative reviews biased?
 

One of the signs of our polarised times is that people tend to review based on how much the movie reflects their political or social views. It happens for both negative and positive reviews but the negative reviews tend to be more heated than the positive ones.

That's very true. I know it's much funner for me to write a scathing negative movie review than it is to write a glowingly positive one. The hardest review to write for me is when I feel mediocre about a movie...It's much more fun to bitch about something you hate in a movie.

That's true too. But we can't go to far into that as we have a no political rule here so I can't elaborate.

Negative reviews from folks who have actually watched the movie are one thing.

But review bombing is very widespread now, and it seems to be getting worse with the movies that get hate for reasons having nothing to do with the actual artistic merits of the movie.

Re: Are negative reviews biased?
 

Of course they are biased. If I put on my one-time pro statistician hat, I have issues with the idea that "everybody is above average" or that All TV Sucks. That seems to be the philosophy for movie reviewers, like on a 0 - 10 scale, every movie is above 6. We have 1-5 star scales, 1-5 popcorn scales, but rarely is anything a 1, much less a zero. It's exacerbated by the fact that, when I see a movie, I check comments and reviews first and do NOT see what looks to me to be the bad ones. It's been years since I saw an Adam Sandler comedy and that's not an accident. I'm paying for tickets and I just don't need that, so, the best Sandler movie is a 1 and that's only because the projector didn't catch fire and force an evacuation.

Since there's no good science in ANY of this, we might as well do what we've been doing for a long time, which is to pick reviewers who seem to mirror our own opinion and just go with that. Certain people here seem to mirror my taste, so I check their comments first.

Objectivity is just a comforting illusion. For me, at least, seeing a new movie in a theater especially, is a night out with some food and drink. Somebody will have to be paying me before I start seeing and reviewing movies that do NOT look like I'd like them.

SOURCE?

As Holden Pike said, by the same token, vacuous ass-kissery and zombie-esque "I APPROVE OF CURRENT THING" commentary really doesn't add anything either.

You could say it's about as broadly unhelpful and insubstantive as saying "People are naturally negative, therefor we should be skeptical of negative reviews."

How about you drop the shallow heuristic and operate under the assumption that any given review IS unintelligent and insubstantive until it demonstrates otherwise? As opposed to ascribing positive reviews the benefit of the doubt and negative reviews an alleged "bias"?

Just my incredibly negative opinion.

Some interesting articles that agree with that premise.
What Is the Negativity Bias?

Our Brain's Negative Bias

Understanding Negativity Bias: Why Your Brain is Hardwired for Negative Thoughts

Is that an objectively true claim?

Yeah.....maybe. But then, that's just MY opinion.

If so, then it also appears to be objectively true that.

1. You exist, objectively.
2. Opinions exist, objectively.
3. There is a particular content belonging to set of "skizzerflake" and also the set of "opinion" which exists objectively.

If so, however, that particular opinion must be wrong, at least as an absolute. If so, this raises the tantalizing prospect that we might speak confidently of some objectivity in the world.

Actually, if you define "objectivity" as devoid of personal preference, emotional attachment, and see it as a uncontaminated, carefully measured view of Truth, I'd argue that it doesn't even exist for humans.

In regard to movies, we might approach it with some strictly defined criteria but since anything pertaining to art needs to appeal to emotions and preferences, the truly objective person would probably only be able to vouch for something like an instructional video on something dry like how to fix a broken blender, with a cast listing and a run time.

My personal example, in the movie world, would be westerns. I don't like them, I got burned out as a kid and have no interest in seeing another one. Ergo, any review I'd post about a the best western ever made would be contaminated by my aversion to them.....sucks, just horses, saloons and guns.

We're all somewhere on that continuum for movies, a rank order of preferences, perceptions of characters, tired plot lines, genres, etc. Yours are probably different from mine. Objectivity is a myth beyond the most basic of measurements.

Fortunately, it need not be "devoid" of sentiment in terms of it's actual endorsement. The content of the claim itself is not "contaminated" by the sentiment which motivates it's endorsement. Rather, we are motivated, in part, to endorse true claims and the basis of sentiment (e.g., our gooey desire to state true claims). Although the philosopher is, etymologically, a "lover of wisdom," this does not mean that the content of wisdom (i.e., the objective status of a true claim, the philos) depends on our love (sophia) of it.

There is no more escape from objectivity. Language is assertoric. It states how the world is. The content of the assertion doesn't matter. What matters is operation of subject, predicate and copula, basic grammatical structure which assert that the "this is that" / "X is Y." Our beliefs which underwrite our assertions also reflect our incorrigible faith in objectivity. You, for example, seem to "really believe" that it is objectively true that no claim is objectively true. That's fine, but your believing it is attached to your sincere attachment to a world picture which is "true" regardless of whether we believe it or not.

The great paradox of language is that, in motion, it is always simultaneously objective and subjective. Language is assertoric (it purports to tell us "how it is"). Language is also sermonic (we use it to try to get other people to see the world the way we do, to align our subjective endorsement or rejection of a claim - "Hurrah!" or "Boo!" - into intersubjective overlap).

That stated, I think you might apply considerable pressure to the idea that the narrow activity of film criticism can be objective in the way that a mathematical or scientific proof can be objective. I think you probably have me on the ropes there (i.e., the rest of your post). Aesthetic relativism, however, can be consistently maintained. Cognitive relativism tips over the whole apple cart.

I would argue that it's slippery. I can be fairly "objective" when I use an agreed upon ruler to measure the length of an object, or tell who was the US president in 1923, but anything about history, especially interpretations of it, as a professor once put it, "depends whose ox is being gored". We can probably agree that Calvin Coolidge was president in 1923, but was he a good president? Drama, biography, politics especially, just keep making the slope get slipperier. Even when honorable people try to tell a story, devoid of opinions and attitudes, some of that always creeps in, even over something like the choice of events that get narrated.

No doubt about that.
We should have a care to segregate epistemology and ontology. Ontologically, whatever happened is what "happened to happen." We might argue as to whether the ontological situation of the universe (i.e., what happened) is subjective, but this tumbles us headlong into an abyss of incoherence, because contradictions become actual. If I believe the Battle of Hastings was in 1066, then it was in 1066. If another believes that it occurred one million years prior, then it did.

Epistemically, our difficulties do not involve "overwriting reality" by remaking it, rather epistemics speak to our poor illumination of it. There is either small tea pot orbiting Mars or there is not. Tea pots are very small and Mars is quite far away, so we cannot say with 100% certainty that there is not such an object. History is incomplete. Witnesses are partial. Records are destroyed. Transcribers err. Reigning orthodoxies bully heterodox views. That stated, we are still left with world about which we might be right or wrong (or of which we may have a "better" or "worse" understanding). Objectivity still exists on this view, it is just that our understanding is not perfectly objective.
Our epistemic gradations of

the conceptual (certainty),
the scientific (high confidence in many cases),
the political and moral (low confidence, but marked by some deep value commitments),
the aesthetic (low confidence, but informed by enduring patterns of human preference, intersubjective standards) and
the appetitive (purely subjective)

offer us continuum of confidence available in a subject matter. And we should note that our subject matter is usually composite / overlapping (i.e., there are scientific claims which can be made describing a "film").

Some footholds are sturdier than others, but the only relevant question is "can we still climb"? If we insist on absolute safety before our ascent we will never even summit a local hill. If we throw caution to the wind, on the other hand, we are likely to find more brightly colored corpses littering Mt. Everest. Thus, there is always a discussion to be had about what we can expect to pull off. I maintain, however, that the objection that "nothing is objective" leaves us forever trapped at the bottom.

Also, there are degrees of confidence that vary between modes of thought. Description is more secure than interpretation. Interpretation is more objective than evaluation. Mild evaluation is easier to presumptively demonstrate than strong evaluation (e.g., "the best film ever!!!").

Some of us climb an easier path. Some of us seek lower peaks. Some us us climb without safety gear. Some climb solo. I agree that in the realm of aesthetics, there are countless free-climbers who have failed spectacularly, falling off the cliff face (the upside is, that most of us survive the impact of failing in an aesthetic free-climb of Bergman).

In aesthetics, our discussions often seem almost hopeless. And yet here we are.

An objective review is just a synopsis.

Basically.


This objective/subjective thing really seems to trip people up.


Apparently, also what the function of a critic is, who it should be stated would be absolutely worthless without their subjectivity.

And, no, just because I might be saying subjectivity is mostly the whole point of a review, this is not a claim that criticism is purely subjective (although it obviously sometimes can be), or that all critics are created equal (because they are not)


Even though a critics opinion is based upon their subjective experience with the film, they can and usually then will reference all sorts of objective things like reasoning and logic and knowledge about the films technical aspects as they try to explain or argue their point. They might also invoke all sorts of things they have learned about the history of film or that specific director or the subject the movie is about. And then they might even dare to make an educated guess as to what the makers of the film were hoping to say or what they wanted us to feel, and then use some of the above more objective techniques to bolster their case that the film accomplishes this.


So while the experience of watching the movie and then rendering a verdict on its quality are all mostly subjective, there are all sorts of objective measures they can use to reinforce their opinions, instead of simply drooling 'I like it cuz I like it'


It's almost like it's an actual skillset or something.

And even if someone isn't particularly skilled at criticism, a review is mostly useful when it has clarity. If you know why the reviewer liked or didn't like a film, it helps you to decide how much their review does or doesn't apply to you.

I'm very grateful for people who are skilled at criticism, but I also appreciate all the "amateurs" who take the time to lay out their response to a film.

Epistomology.....Ontology......Is there a new movie being released about Martin Heidegger?

"Epistomology" is new one on me, however, my epistemic vantage point is impoverished.

At least I spelled Heidegger correctly. Once at least.

In television...yes mostly because of the sample size. In film it varies I feel like positive reviews are more biased than negative ones in that people work aggregate sites to elevate special interest films. A film like Hacksaw Ridge will get 84% while Till will get 96%. Now was bias in the negative reviews or was it in the positive. 1 out 7 people not liking Hacksaw Ridge I can understand, 1 out 20 people not liking Till seems incredibly dishonest.

I went to see Megalopolis because of it's mixed reviews and it was going to be on IMAX and I had the open slots on AMC Stubs. Snow White has the same mixed scores but I'm going to skip it because I don't have an open spot to see it. I have 2 open slots for 5 films (Bod Trevino Likes it, Locked, Black Bag, The Penguin Lessons, and Princess Monomoke). I picked Death of a Unicorn because even though it didn't get glowing reviews I know with horror the percentages are often off.

What it comes down to is credibility is something too good to be true it likely is. The job of any film fan is to be discerning and understand what the tool of critics reviews are...a tool

I cut-and-paste "Schwarzenegger" last name 99% of the time. That one is one misplaced letter away from apparent hate speech.

A synopsis is not a review.

Re: Are negative reviews biased?
 

>A film like Hacksaw Ridge will get 84% while Till will get 96%.

These percentage systems are a bit of a joke. Rather than just giving us an average of the actual scores people give the movies, they give us an average of how many had a positive review? A movie could get 7's and 8's and get listed as "95%" by these metrics...which is intentionally designed to make people think "It got 95 out of a 100!" From the very design, it's a review system intended to deceive.

And that's not even getting into how they convert reviews into numbers...

Hey, it's Mr "I Walk Alone" once again showing up to air his grievances against.... biopics?


Surely thats what he has a problem with, right? Biopics are the worst.

Like has been stated just above, the problem with RT scores are pretty clear. At this point this is basically gospel for anyone who has even peeked under the hood of how their numbers work. So it should never come as any surprise when any mid ass crowd pleaser scores really high. The tomatometer is designed to reward these kinds of films.

But the fact that an issue is being raised between a movie with 96 percent (Till) and one with 84 percent (Hacksaw) is an absurd place to try and mount an argument. Seriously, 12 percent on rt is a negligible difference. Both of these movies are probably extremely average in possibly very similar ways and that's why BOTH of them rank so highly.

But sure, let's poorly cherry pick some more reviews from a completely worthless website to make our point against... biopics

Re: Are negative reviews biased?
 

Kids get sad. Adults also get sad. But if you asked each of them why they're sad...who would give you a more lucid and insightful explanation? Who would be talking about the nature of grief and how to deal with emotions when they're irrational, and who would just be crying?

That's the difference between good criticism and bad criticism or, if you'd rather, between criticism and mere opinion. Sure, everyone's got opinions, and everyone experiences the same kinds of emotions. That doesn't mean they understand their emotions or opinions equally as well as anyone else.

If you thought Till was a biopic that tells me you never bothered to see Till. For a film to be at around 85% that would mean 1 in 7 didn't like the film for some reason. But a film that is at 95% means it's 1 in 20

You're right, I didn't see Till and probably never will. Your point being? I'm talking about how Tomatometers aren't accurate reflections of anything, and I don't require seeing any movie ever to make that pronouncement. Not even these specific kinds of movies you seem to have such a constantly phobic reaction to (I guess it wasn't biopics after all)


And I read your math the last time. It's a negligible difference no matter how many times you repeat yourself. It means twelve more people out of a hundred potentially shrugged and said 'i guess it was okay'. It doesn't mean anything. But I guess to you it's a real issue for.... reasons

Re: Are negative reviews biased?
 

I just skimmed the thread, the lesson learned is: RT sucks:D I don't know why anyone bothers going to that site it's as ridiculous as the Ranker site. If one must look up review ratings just go to IMDB, nuff said.

I only repeated myself once, it is awfully funny how one will be given reasons and then casually act like those reasons don't matter or that they simply do not exist. One would think that you would have to pick one of the two positions.

Well now you are definitely going to have to repeat yourself, because I have no idea what you're saying here.

Re: Are negative reviews biased?
 

Oh-oh, thread closing coming in 1,2,3...

Since you're counting up instead of counting down, does that mean the thread won't be closed after all?

Ha:D

I'd posit that "objective review" is an oxymoron, to the extent that opinions are not fact and a review is just a synopsis unless it contains opinions.

Re: Are negative reviews biased?
 

There's a whole lot of synopsis-reviews at IMDB, they retell the entire movie from beginning to end but the reviewer never gives their own opinion. I hate those kind of reviews. Then there's the subjective synopsis wrote in a flippant tone, 'Two guys take a road trip and stuff happens.' I hate those too.

I'd posit that some reviews are more subjective than others.

Reviewer A announces his standards in advance, standards which are widely recognized and respected among fellow critics, and offers reasoning and evidence in his review, detailing how well a film meets those standards.

Reviewer B has no standards apart from feeling the moment. He arbitrarily links events from his own life to what he sees on the screen (e.g., he had an abusive father who worked as a chef and so will randomly give negative reviews to cooking movies). This critic only tells us how he "feels" about a film, and has no interest in providing his reader anything more.

Both critics might serve as a useful frame of reference for us, to the extent that we might make ourselves familiar with their taste. However, with Reviewer B, we can only report THAT the liked or didn't like a film, whereas with Reviewer A we can not only offer an account of WHY, but a why which includes a justification (i.e., reasons).

HYPOTHESIS: To the extent that we can mark a useful distinction between Reviewer A and Reviewer B, we may also reasonably speak of "objective criticism."

Re: Are negative reviews biased?
 

> Then there's the subjective synopsis wrote in a flippant tone, 'Two guys take a road trip and stuff happens.' I hate those too.

Maybe stop reading amateur reviews? At least professionals know how to convey their thoughts about a movie.

The only objective criticism I can imagine would be the factual one like if the makers of Pearl Harbor had the Japanese attack happen in July of 1940, or the American response being with jet aircraft. Granted there are degrees in this, once a movie is made, dialog is written, plot lines made quick enough for a run-time, fiction creeps in one iota at a time.

Beyond that, it just keeps getting to be more a matter of preference, like how did an actor portray a character, especially a fictional one, that nobody else has seen, not to mention a historical one.

Everybody brings an opinion to the task. My wife doesn't like war movies. I don't like westerns. Attitudes color everything we do, in spite of our claim to objectivity.

You're still thinking absolute categorical terms. Is reviewer A more or less objective than reviewer B?

Always nice to have a post that sends us all back to ground zero where it once again needs to be repeated that absolutely no one is making a case for purely objective movie criticism.


It's already been repeatedly addressed that this is not a thing.



But sure, let's just keep walking in circles. That's always a fun thing to do.

As I always say: yes, everything is subjective, no, you cannot prove or disprove an opinion. But that's not a Get-Out-of-Being-Informed Free Card. Because you can still be more or less thoughtful, more or less intelligent, within your subjective experience.

Example A: "This film was tense. The director used tight shots and handhelds to constrict our view and create a documentary-style feel. Subtle strings and conspicuous pauses ramped up the tension."

Example B: "This film made me nervous. I don't know why."

Are these both equally subjective? Or is one grounded in a mix of fact, theory, and cinematic knowledge that renders it far more useful, informative, and insightful than the other?

Also, let's just assume everybody's a reasonably intelligent adult who understands subjectivity and doesn't need to have it explained to them, let alone more than once. If your contribution to a thread is just to remind people that things are subjective, it's probably not worth replying. You can and should assume that, unless the OP sounds wildly ignorant of even such basic things, that's already being accounted for and the question is being posed within that understanding.

Calling this constant move towards claiming everything is subjective, therefore everything is equal, a "Get Out of Being Informed Free Card" pretty much sums up my frustrations.


Because that's sure how it's starting to read. Everything just becomes real easy if we can throw our hands up and say, oh well, nothing matters anyway, so why should we even try.


It's honestly not all that unlike those who believe we really live in the Matrix, and how this absolves them of any of their bad behaviour because "nothing really matters, maaaaan"


It's all basically grade school nihilism being trotted out as an intellectual stance. But it's really all just kinda embarrassing.


But I'll settle for "Get Out of Being Informed Free Card" in the meantime. That's the cleaner way to put it.

Still, this is an important sort of therapy. Our subject matter is difficult. It does not admit of simple answers we can find in an almanac or simple Google search. Subjectivity not only feels threatening, but is like working with high explosives. We sometimes despair of the possibility of reasoned discussion in these matters. We sometimes cheat, by trying to escape a challenge by igniting the explosive
We sometimes equivocate about subjectivity in the attempt to gain leverage. We sometimes feel so strongly about an opinion we proceed as if it were purely objective.

And there are different stances we may attempt to justify. You appear to see an exercise which lacks epistemic justification, at bottom, but which still admits of intelligent/intelligible meandering. We will never arrive at our destination, but the journey itself admits of the conditions we will never attain about an aesthetic claim. I see the quest a bit more hopeful. I see it as partially objective as aesthetic questions as aesthetic claims tend to break into sub-claims which vary in terms of their level of objectivity. I think we can, at least withing certain intersubjective frames, aspire to arrive (at least momentarily and provisionally) at the best warranted regarding an aesthetic claim. In short, I see hope for the destination too.

If the question keeps popping up, it seems we must challenge ourselves to refine our own answers. That stated, it's for the mods to dictate when the perpetual question derails a conversation.

Re: Are negative reviews biased?
 

The only honest opinions are uninformed opinions. If one spends time reading all about the movie and what the director/writer was trying to achieve, then one taints their own opinion. Shooting from the hip is the most sincerely honest form of reviewing.

No more biased than positive reviews. Both toxic negativity and positivity (Which in itself carries a negative tone ironically enough) are hideous roadblocks when it comes to criticism.
The only types I regularly can't stand are the ones relying on condescension (Trying to shame you into liking/disliking something) and those more preoccupied with complaining about others' opinions than voicing their own.

Agreed on both those points. I also can't stand a review totally built around someone's own personal political/social views which usually involves chastising a movie for not catering to their own world viewpoint.

I'm down with mentioning subjectivity as a caution against certainty or overbearing opinions. Appeals to humility will always be thoughtful and welcome. But appealing to humility works best as an addendum to a thoughtful opinion, rather than a substitute for one.

Yeah, and we can work with that. "Objectivity exists" and "we should discuss as if objectivity can exist" end up looking pretty similar in practice.

Yeah, that's basically where I'm at: I see it popping up a lot, from the same people, in the same way, and I think at a certain point it's just being obtuse. Let's assume people are not stupid and that the question is being asked from within the super obvious caveat that basically everyone is aware of.

I'm not sure I agree. If something makes you mad, but you stop and consider and it lessens your anger...is your response more or less sincere than just lashing out? I don't see snap judgments or reflexes as synonymous with sincerity, because the thing that makes us who we are is not our first emotional reaction to something, but what we do with that feeling. Do we analyze it, rationalize it, indulge it, etc.

I also don't think that a first reaction is any less tainted than the informed one, it's just that the ways in which it's tainted are unconscious and harder to identify or unpack.

I agree that someone can end up outsourcing their opinion by just reading other people's and parroting them, however. That's just a pitfall of criticism that people have to guard against.

It's a personal preference of mine not to over analyze my own reviews as I end up being caught in second guessing my own thoughts. I guess I'm more the stream of consciousness type poster. But yes I can see what you're saying.

I don't often read reviews of movies that I'm going to watch, I usually prefer to go in blind. Actually I don't read many reviews at all but if I do I will sometimes read a smattering of 10/10 reviews at IMDB then a few 1/10 reviews before deciding if I want to watch a movie that I'm undecided on. I will mentally throw out the overly bombastic reviews and the reviews that only say fluffy stuff like, 'I love it, everyone should see it' or conversely the 'It sucks don't waste your time' type of reviews. Parsing through a few 10/10 and 1/10 reviews that are written in a way that they convey what the person thought of the movie often gives me enough info to decide if I want to watch that movie.

Re: Are negative reviews biased?
 

Earlier today I was thinking about why I can strongly dislike a movie, then watch it again years later and end up loving it. My reason for that, more often than not, is that I had expectations of the movie that weren't met. Not meeting one's expectations is a sure way of being disappointed which then can lead to a negative review.

I actually do the same thing! At least, it was a rule of mine not to read any reviews of a film I was going to review, but that usually extended to forming my own opinion about a film before reading much/any in the way of other people's opinions. The only exceptions being if I genuinely wasn't sure whether to see something or not and needed to get a sense of things.

But yeah, I very much agree with this part. :up:

For me it usually comes down to whether the movie is good enough for me to enjoy it despite disagreeing with the message, such as the story, quality of the acting, production values, etc. The reason I hate the God's Not Dead movies for example isn't just because I disagree with their messages, they're really poorly made and completely impossible to enjoy unless their preaching has you going "YES! AMEN, BROTHER!".

It's also about whether it contradicts what has been set up/shown before or not. You can feel kinda tricked if you felt like it was saying something particular about an issue, but then at the end it seems to be something completely different instead. Such as the "beauty is on the inside" films that still have the protagonist altering themselves just to be liked at the end.

Learning things doesn't obstruct honesty. Listening to others isn't a contagion. An honest opinion isn't really worth protecting if it can only exist in quarantine.

Acting like anything that isn't just a pure and uninformed shot from the hip is somehow less authentic as a point of view is like saying a hotdog is less honest if you add condiments to it. It doesn't make a lot of sense, because the hot dog is still there. It hasn't gone anywhere. But it stands a chance of being improved if it is allowed at least the chance to acknowledge the existence of mustard.

Yeah, absolutely. I've never read a review that was NOT "contaminated" by personal preference (I do NOT like westerns, no matter how "good" they are, etc), so it's not unlike whether you like iceberg or romaine on your salad; there's no right answer here. The pretentious thing about some reviewers is how they think that THEY are the arbiter of cinematic truth. They know that the only good salad has iceberg.

There certainly are degrees in this. Some reviewers, especially me, have seen more movies, have a broader knowledge and are better writers. Given that, at least one stated purpose of movies is entertainment and given that cost considerations mean that, economically speaking, it needs a broad audience, a producer has to at least give some crumbs to the fans of Adam Sandler movies or people who don't like westerns. Those folks pay the bills.

Agreed. With those extreme message movie cases, I'd be giving the film the finger, which would then move to the off button on my remote.

Agreed there too. So many people will complain about a movie with a predictable ending. But if it's a good movie with a good ending, then being predictable is satisfying. Flip side of that is a film that does, like you say, trick you in the end by flipping what was going on all for the sake of being tricky. Yeah that bugs me too.

I was just outside gardening and thinking about how people relate differently to different reviews and opinions. I came to the conclusion that we all tend to seek and or approve of those opinions that we share ourselves. In your case you would have a tendency to favor reviews that reflect your way of thinking as you stated above. Me, I will tend to favor reviews that are similarly written to the way I would write a review. There's no wrong or right way to approach reviews as we will inherently believe our own beliefs on the subject are the correct ones.

Never have two words been more telling.

Absolutism is the problem here.

You are entertaining the idea that objective criticism is not really objective unless it is 100% objective.

Consider your next words,
The contamination metaphor is quite telling. You appear to subscribe to the "one drop" theory when it comes of objectivity. If there is any subjectivity, it seems, it is entirely impure.

However, this is the sort of theory that only makes sense to a Klansman. Look at the DNA of almost any person society would call "white" and you will find all sorts of ancestors. Nevertheless, there are plenty of people who are called white, identify as white, are officially coded as white by the government, are accused of having the privileges of whiteness, etc. No one is 100% white and yet there are plenty of white people in the world.

The irrationality of the position is revealed when we consider that it is not symmetrical. Why not assume that one drop of white blood erases blackness? Isn't it curious that we don't hold "subjectivity" to the 100% requirement (arguing that it is not really subjective unless it is absolutely subjective)?
Right, you admit that there are "objective" details in a review, but maintain that these have nothing to do with the quality of the film, right?

You are committed to a world-picture in which no other answer is possible. You are an aesthetic relativist. You don't believe in beauty. We might say that you are an "atheist" when it comes to beauty. You only believe that people have impressions of beauty. You are of the sort described by C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man in a section titled "Men Without Chests." You take it for granted that there are no aesthetic truths to be found (this is your ontology), so you cannot escape from the conclusion that only objective aspects of criticism are the "iceberg lettuce" (i.e., the mundane facts that supervene upon the illusory impressions that something is "really" there).

Just as an atheist cannot definitely prove that there is NO God to be found anywhere in the cosmos, the aesthetic relativist cannot definitively prove that there no such thing as beauty. Rather, their first move is to assume that there is no such thing! And if your world-picture does not allow for a class of objects, there is NO way you could ever makes sense of finding an example of that class of objects with existential import within that worldview (as this would be a contradiction in terms). Your ontology is a self-fulfilling prophecy. We don't have to take sides in the dispute to see that, at bottom, taking sides is all your ontological commitment amounts to. Is it any wonder that you have reported never finding something that you assume from the outset cannot exist?

Of course, I can no more prove to you the existence of beauty than I can prove to you the existence of God, right? And to enter into my world-picture would seem be just another question-begging exercise, right?

If neither of us can say, however, the proper stance would seem to be beauty agnosticism, which would mitigate your stance to "beauty skepticism." If so, there may be objective aesthetic criticism -- objective NOT just in talking about the "lettuce," but the beauty of the salad itself. And this would force you to say "I don't know." And if you don't know, you must allow that we might, on occasion, be talking about something more in art.

This may not seem fair to you. Shouldn't I admit that I cannot prove any such thing as objective quality about exists (i.e., that I can only assume it)? Isn't it the case that I can only say that art criticism is objective about the lettuce and has an unprovable void as it comes to the quality of the salad?

I don't think so. Here's why.

1. We can ground aesthetics in human biology, grounding it not in the starry heavens, but our form of life. Beauty may lack true cosmic significance, but art criticism is NOT the view of the universe, but rather the view of human looking at the universe and their place in it. If there are objective human universals as regards the experience of art, this is all we need to have an objective conversation about the salad (at least as humans experience the dish).

2. We have the resource of intersubjectivity. Subjectivity is hopeless because opinions are like elbows, everyone has two of them and they bend as that person pleases. Intersubjectivity, however, is not the same thing as "cosmic objectivity." Rather it is a local objectivity which offers us a criterion of correctness outside of the self. Thus, we have community standards, expert standard, norms, expectations, etc. We have a network of shared experience which prevents aesthetic judgments from falling into the cracks of "purely isolated idiosyncratic responses to art." To the extent that we agree about any aesthetic standard, we may have a locally objective conversation about art relative to that standard. No, not a cosmically objective discussion (arguing about meaning from the point of view of the universe assumes that the universe has a point of view we should worry about, a question which is large and cannot be settled either way by tiny creatures like us), but one which is intersubjectively grounded such that the entire discussion doesn't reduce to merely squawking about entirely appetitive responses. In short, to have a rational discussion about art, we only need to have two people (no more, no less) agree about an artistic standard and apply that standard to an artwork. And by that standard there is plenty of weak objectivity to be had and the bugbear of subjectivism may be put to rest.

If you demand cosmic answers, maybe there is no objectivity to be had. But this is a bit like saying that there is no such thing as "true love" unless we find some instance of perfect, cosmically eternal, uncorrupted, uncontaminated "pure" love. I can only shrug. I find the imperfect love of humans to be real enough.

All it takes to believe, at least somewhat, in the idea of beauty is to actually listen to people when they describe or try to explain their relationship to it. When they point out to you where they see it. Why it is important to them. And this absolutely would also include those who speak of God or Gods.


You just have to listen, regardless of what one's own personal beliefs are in the matter. Whether something is or isn't real, is or isn't provable, is secondary to just listening.


Which is always going to be too much for some people.

I think you're reading WAY more into my comments than I intend. All I intend is to say that all reviewers go into their task with preformed attitudes, my attitude about westerns being a case in point.

You are probably right, but it's my conclusion that this is exactly the problem.


It's also my conclusion that art is the solution to this, since at its best, it offers a window into the experiences and ideas of those who aren't us. When done well, it engages us in ways that allow us to see the world differently. To not get locked into our head. To feel and think about others and to consider the decisions an artist has made, and what they are trying to say to us.


But then threads like this come around (constantly) and remind me that, nope, people are just going to keep going back to what they already understand and empathize with. And then when others try to engage with these things on a deeper level, where we actually explain to others what we think is being said in the film, and how they appeal to our emotions and empathy in different ways, it gets constantly shut down with accusations that talking at length about these things 'is just about ego'. Or that every opinion is created equal, and that knowledge and articulation is borderline superfluous, so why even bother with the struggle to say anything at all of substance.


Not necessarily. It's real simple what I'm looking for. I'm looking for people to tell me something worth actually sitting back and considering. Anything. Please. Disagreements are fine. Just....let me know something beyond "I liked it. It was well made and fun".

And if you're someone who doesn't want to go much beyond that, you do you, but please, it would be nice if those people stopped butting into these conversations to contribute absolutely nothing by saying 'you know none of this matters, right?'. And then proceeds to tell us all about the dinner they ate after the movie just to prove their own point.

Right. But it's always nice to see people put in a little effort, right?

And this is the bias we all have which needs to be shaken up as often as possible, because it's a horrible stance to have. All of us need to have our beliefs challenged. It's not ego that drives debate (although of course it's always there to some degree), it's in fact the opposite of this. It is about the need to have our egos humbled. To reconsider our established ways of thinking. But I guess for some, unfortunately, it appears that disagreement is tantamount to some kind of forum terrorism, to be avoided at all cost because it interrupts everyone patting each other on the back for getting to the end of a film and still having the energy to give it a numerical ranking out of ten.

And as far as I'm concerned, this aversion to debate, is exactly where the problem with ego comes in. When people think it's wrong to have what they say challenged, that is an ego that is getting too big for itself.

Also, just on the level of what I find engaging, it just so happens to be incredibly boring when everyone is just constantly agreeing to disagree. I can just as easily do that sitting here alone with my cat.

I'm not reading in, I'm just reading.

Objectivity is just a comforting illusion.

I'd argue that it doesn't even exist for humans.

anything about history, especially interpretations of it, as a professor once put it, "depends whose ox is being gored".

I'd posit that "objective review" is an oxymoron

Let's not equivocate now and shift between what people agree is "trivial-but-true" (no artistic evaluation is purely objective) and your more interesting claim (it doesn't exist at all!). Don't let a private intention deprive us of the challenge presented by your public words.

As Yoda has noted, our conversations here are frequently delayed and derailed by this spicy take. Reasoned conversation in a domain must deal with the objection that reasoned conversation is impossible in that domain. So many people here assert this idea that it shows a real need to clarify what we're doing here. If our discussion can serve as a sort of therapy, I sincerely hope that I can give confidence to those who seem to sincerely believe that our conversations about art here are, at bottom, ultimately pointless. Alternatively, if the objection proves correct, that applies pressure to those who claim to be doing anything remotely objective here.

Moreover, you deserve praise for offering some nice moments here. The lettuce vs. the salad thing was nicely put! If our discussion of the value of art has merit, we cannot meekly point at the objective status of a few components of the argument (e.g., the year Coolidge was elected president), but we must justify the evaluative components of the argument (establishing, following your same example, that Coolidge was a "good" president). Also, your repeated contamination rhetoric illustrates the asymmetry of the objection, clarifying the vulnerability of the "it's all subjective stance" (i.e., it only torpedoes a presumed "absolutist" when it comes to objectivity). More than this, it reveals, a likely conflation of the very idea of "absolute" with the idea "objective." That which is objective need not be absolute. The asymmetry of your objection hints at a likely cause of the problem which is so frequently derailing our conversations (i.e., we're setting the bar too high because we are mismanaging our categories). In short, you have provided some valuable input here.

Nah, the iceberg lettuce wasn't a good contribution. Not when tied to this notion that if a critic is pro iceberg lettuce, everyone is supposed to be as well. That Armond White's got brownshirts working for him, or something.


Im finding this fear that critics might somehow take over the opinions of people if they are ever taken seriously a little bit weird. Admittedly, I've definitely read reviews that have altered my opinion after reading them, but it's only after interesting points were made, or things I might not have noticed are brought up. You know, the kind of things that are supposed to change minds. But this idea that suddenly I'm going to be Bodysnatched by Ebert's crap review of Blue Velvet if I ever read it, is silly, if that's what is being implied.

Re: Are negative reviews biased?
 

In regard to the original question...."Are Negative Reviews Biased?", I'd like to see a yard stick for how we determine bias and negative. Having spent some of my work life testing things like that, I know that it's not an easy question because, the question itself has built-in bias...."when did you stop beating up your partner?".

All reviews are biased unless demonstrated otherwise, my attitude about westerns being a case in point. If you like westerns, don't ask me to review one.

My other alternative would be to abandon all semblance of objectivity when it comes to movies. Either you like it or not, in either case, for entirely personal reasons. I like old, cheesy horror movies. Explain to me why I'm wrong.

When I'm wearing my art hat, that's the way that universe works. Like it or not; you may want to express a reason, but basically, you just don't like it or you do. That has a level of honesty that appeals to me. When I read movie reviews, I generally look for a critic that has agreed with me in the past. I'm buying a ticket and and want to enjoy the evening. I'll write reviews of movies I don't think I will like when somebody pays me for the reviews.

Except some people's reasons clearly have thought and insight behind them, and others are obviously about them and not about the work in question. See my earlier example about asking a child why they feel something versus asking an adult. Do you take a toddler's opinions as seriously as their parents or grandparents because it's all "subjective"? I doubt it. Just as I doubt anyone here feels angry or sad or happy and just goes "welp, guess I just feel this way now, no use thinking about why or learning anything from it."

I wonder how many people actually know what "subjective" means. It means arising from the subject. Literally nothing about that precludes discussion, analysis, or critique. It means you feel how you feel and nobody can gainsay that feeling...but they can reveal whether that feeling is formed by understanding and thought, or not, a question which exists and applies just as much to subjective things as objective ones.

Yep...exactly. What I'm skeptical about are claims of objectivity. Our common use of the word is as a pole to subjective, which seems to pick up the odor of unreasoned and completely personal (e.g., my attitude about westerns).

We all come into discussions with attitudes like that. Most people I know don't like old horror movies. I do. Why? I don't know, but what I do know is that everybody has something like that in their brain and often they're not even aware of it.

One of my strong suspicions about humans is that often we decide on things and then come up with the rationale. Logic is an interesting tool, but like hammers, which can drive a nail or crush a skull, rationalism often starts with the conclusion and then invents the reason.

I like that and would add: What is the yard stick for an informed reviewer? How intelligent, well read and informed does one have to be before they qualify as an 'expert'.

Like wise what is the yard stick for deciding what is 'a shoot from the hip' reviewer? What does that even mean? Probably different things to different people. I get the feeling that maybe we're not all polar opposites on this thread's topic but are responding to different elements within those questions that might not be obvious to other persons reading this thread.

Maybe this thing you are incapable of explaining, is something others are capable of. I dare say, it's almost like this is something some people have a talent for and others don't. Or have spent time learning about, while others haven't. Or they've bothered to actually do, while others don't even try.

But everyone's opinion is equal, people.

Now if only we could tackle that great mystery of the universe: how some people like Westerns and others don't. Someone call Leonard Nimoy, stat!

Where are you seeing those claims? Doesn't seem like they're in this thread.

This thread mostly seems to consist of people saying over and over that opinions can't be subjective, even while several people directly reply to them to say yes, we know, but who cares, we can still critique subjective thoughts . At which point they are inexplicably told yet again, slightly rephrased, that opinions are subjective.

"I don't know" and "I can't know" are pretty different. Unless, of course, you throw up your hands and decide not to investigate or try to understand things because they're subjective, in which case everything you don't know about it automatically becomes something you can't know about it. But that's a choice.

I point you again to my analogy about children. Either you value a child's opinion of art/aesthetics/whatever the same way you value an adult's (doubtful), or you already agree in principle that within subjectivity there are still stratifications of insight and thoughtfulness worth distinguishing between. Which is it?

Maybe so, but for the purposes of evaluating the opinions themselves, rather than the internal workings of the people expressing them, it doesn't really matter.

@crumbsroom I have some clarity type questions, if you don't mind answering.

You've mentioned that an 'informed reviewer' is a better reviewer than someone who 'shoots from the hip' when they review a movie. What I think you're meaning when you say 'informed reviewer' may or may not be what you have in mind. So according to you, what is an informed reviewer? Conversely what is an uninformed reviewer.

I used the phrase shoot from the hip reviewer to describe myself, what do you think I meant by that, how do you interpret it?

I think two great stumbling blocks are the conflation of "objective" with "absolute" and the failure to recognize the role of the intersubjective. A rule might be objective without being absolute (e.g., it is a good objective rule of thumb to slow down for yellow lights, but if someone is bleeding out in your backseat and the streets are clear, you should punch it). A rule may also be absolute and subjective (e.g., I have no tolerance AT ALL for iceberg lettuce in a salad). If we're agreed about my preference regarding iceberg lettuce, that preference may inform our immediate conversation (e.g., what sort of salad should we order?). Relativism offers more wiggle room than pure subjectivism.

Your (somewhat less ambitious) stance still offers us a rational test, coherence. Whatever standard a critic invokes is a personal commitment. Thus, if your elaborated and avowed standard admits of measurable (i.e., objective) features (e.g., a good salad won't have iceberg lettuce), we can (minimally) inquire as to whether the critic is consistent with their own standards. And this means that even your minimal view ("let's just try to understand each other by sharing") offers prospects for evaluation.

I don't remember the specific context of where I mentioned 'informed reviewer', but I would imagine it would mean just that. Informed. They have experience with things. They know stuff. They have tools to articulate what they think about in regards to the movies they watch.


As for what they should be informed of, it could be all sorts of things. But, in this context, I would think having seen a lot of movies would be the most obvious thing they should have an awarenesss of. But even that would be conditional in all sorts of ways. For example, a person who only writes and thinks about horror movies, doesn't necessarily need to watch any movies that aren't horror (although, I would still argue, they would probably be better reviewers if they also had some knowledge of other genres). But a person who writes about all kinds of movies, should probably watch a little bit of everything.


But really, I'm just talking about basic stuff here. Any information or experience that the person writing the review can pull from in order to make their point about what they are saying about the film would count and qualify as being 'informed'. Obviously though, not everyone would be equally informed.


As for what an uninformed viewer is, it would be the opposite. Those who have never learned much about what it is they are talking about. They probably haven't seen that many movies, or they don't know anything about film history, or the technical side of moviemaking, or different philosophies behind film criticism, or maybe they haven't learned the kind of writing tricks that allow one to articulate their thoughts, or they don't have much life experience or curiosity to learn about others, or don't know very much about history or philosophy or sports or cars or whatever it is a movie can be about.


Now it of course doesn't mean you would be an uniformed viewer if you aren't a scholar on all of these things....but you certainly need to know some of them.


I assume writing your feelings on a movie down, straight from the gut and without too much intellectualizing. Which is fine.That's mostly what I do as well. But even in regards to writing about things almost purely emotionally on how you responded to a film, the more you know about things, the better its still going to be.



For example, as a straight from the hip kinda writer, do you think you write better reviews now, after watching lots and lots of film noirs? Or do you think you were just as prepared to write about them after the very first one you ever saw? If you think there is any difference at all in your old less informed opinions from your new better informed opinions, this would mean you essentially agree with me. Even if you are writing straight from the hip and seem to be under the impression that being informed of things somehow makes you a less honest reviewer.

I didn’t read a single thing in here but I give this thread a

Crumb...First, thanks for the explanation. I can now see we probably agree more than we disagree on the subject at hand.

I think we both initially disagreed as we might both felt somewhat taken back by the extreme opposite viewpoint (that neither of us was actually espousing).

I see you as a learned educated person with deep literary exposure maybe even a degree or two in the literary field, maybe you posted that or maybe it's your avatar but take it as a compliment. I imagined that you might be thinking it's a slap at educated people that the idea that a review written by a layman should be considered equal to one written by an academia.

Myself I imagined the inverse, I thought you were saying uneducated laymen (like me) can't possibly write a review of equal worth to a review written by a more educated person. Of course now that you've clarified your position I know you weren't implying that.

Honestly my reviews seem to be getting crappier and lazier as I go, though sometimes I knock out a good one. But that's just me and my waning interest in writing and one can't really extrapolate anything from that other than 'Citizen needs to try harder':p But yes I would agree with you that knowing something about film noir and having seen more than just a few noirs gives me and or the reviewer a better chance of having a more relevant opinion, than say someone who didn't even know what noirs were.

Re: Are negative reviews biased?
 

Let me clarify that I would never consider "university educated" and "informed" to be synonymous with each other. Or that someone who dropped out of highschool as not being that.


To be sure, there is obviously knowledge to be learned at places of higher education, but I saw no evidence that people working towards degrees were ever necessarily that much better informed or intelligent than anyone else. In fact, lots were pretty unimpressive in that way. I certainly didn't learn very much during my time at university, or any school, really. I hardly ever even made it to my classes. Got zeros in a couple of them. Was mostly at the campus bar, staring at a wall and waiting for my friends to get finished with their classes that they dumbly bothered going to.


Whatever I've learned in life has mostly been by watching movies and watching people and talking. It's why I advocate for art so heavily. Everything you need to know is in that, and it doesn't costs tens of thousands of dollars to get.

Cool I like ya better now! But now you need this guy as your avatar...

Re: Are negative reviews biased?
 

Re: straight-from-the-hip. I think a really important distinction is what happens after. I don't mind reviews coming from a gut feeling or an initial reaction. I mind the posture that just takes those things as-is and isn't interested in discussing them.

Far from being against expressing an immediate reaction, I think those are some of the most interesting and useful things to analyze after the fact. Not too long ago I had an unpleasant emotional reaction to something, but I didn't know why right away. My emotions had processed something before my rational mind had...but once I'd made the connection, it all made sense. It was interesting. And it wasn't either-or, where I felt one way at first and then another after I'd intellectualized or rationalized something away. I had a reaction, thought about why I had it, and then understood it better, in a way that validated it rather than contradicted it.

Basically, it's about the process more than the result. It's about critique being a beginning and not an end. "Just" liking something is fine. But treating that reaction as this mysterious, unknowable thing that you don't even think about, or regarding as cosmic happenstance or something...that crosses over from humility about subjectivity into straight-up boring incuriosity.

Correct. I've banged this drum in other places, but sometimes you can know someone's reasoning (or lack thereof) is at fault regardless of whether their conclusion is.

So it goes with subjective opinions: "I just like it" is fine if you're just trying to kill some time and get through life. It's not so fine if you regard cinema as an actual art form, and it's definitely not fine if "I just like it" is something you proclaim on an enthusiasts' forum...more than once...phrased as an ostensible critique of people who maybe like to talk and think about why they do or don't like those things. This, too, is the result of a lot of cross-talk and miscommunication: failing to note the implication in deciding to communicate your preferences publicly, or treating them as things you merely thought until some mean overanalytical person reached into your head and started asking you to account for your feelings. That, of course, is never what's happening on a forum. It's more like they stood up on a milk crate and loudly yelled "TOY STORY 2 WAS PRETTY MID" and then seemed taken aback when people started asking them to explain themselves.

Differing opinions have a lot of natural impasses, and we reach them pretty often. But the coherence test you're talking about is still worth getting into. If someone "just likes" one thing and doesn't like something very similar, and can't distinguish why, then there's a pretty good chance they just saw one in a bad mood, or because of some reason specific to them but completely external to the work. And unpacking those kinds of things and at least attempting to account for them (even though we can't fully or perfectly do so) is, essentially, the point of criticism.

And if someone doesn't wanna engage in actual criticism, cool. But that probably precludes the proclaiming of same.