Reviews and Ratings Discussion

I don't want to get too deep into it as I'm not articulate enough to do the topic justice and it's a bit adjacent to the discussion here, but I've found myself increasingly wary of the extent to which the marketing and discourse around impersonal, mass-marketed corporate product seems to weaponized these token gestures to diversity and progressive values. Pinkerton uses the example of the F&F series, which I've found especially offensive in that regard as the majority of the non-white heroes are some combination of poorly written, poorly acted and shown to be completely incompetent. And I've seen cases where people have been accused of being bigots for not gelling to recent Disney properties (The Last Jedi, Raya). To be fair, there are a lot of people who dislike these properties for awful, bigoted reasons and I don't want to downplay the very real problems around that, but I also don't appreciate being painted a bigot because I had a complaint about a movie with this much money behind it and that attracts this much attention.

I can also generally acknowledge the skill of an artist or performer even when I don't like them. My general go to example of this is the band Rush, who I think are pretty great musicians, have a completely original sound, and I actually have a lot of respect for in many ways, but I just don't ****ing like them. So, yeah, I think it's always good to make a note of these sorts of things, to at least acknowledge what you think the artist is getting right. But I just don't think there should be any obligation of the critic to find the work valuable, or rate it well, if it either leaves them cold (like yourself with Tolstoy) or if you actually think what they are doing is predominantly lousy beyond the talent (like myself with about 90 percent of Eminem's work).



Now, if you are someone who only really responds to art on a formal level, then sure, it makes total sense if you want to praise something you don't personally like that much because it checks all of your boxes in that way. But I am someone who finds formalism very secondary to what I view the meat of art, these being ideas and emotions. If I was a practising critic, it wouldn't make any sense for me to give someone a pass simply on virtuosity, because it wouldn't be remotely representative of how I feel about them. Just like I refuse to kowtow to the notion that works of obvious amateurs, who have no formal training, can't contain great amounts of beauty regardless of how ****ty they are in many regards. I will rate these kinds of works infinitely higher, than something that is obviously more formally accomplished. Because, in a nutshell, I'm not interested much in the notion of art being something that can be 'taught to be done well'. I believe in instinct, and taking the chance of doing something wrong, in the hopes it conveys something beyond your limitations.



I forget what critic once said this, but their line about what they believe the role of a critic is goes something like "A man walked into the cinema. And I was that man". The point being, I am here to articulate only what I got on this particular trip to the theater. Anything else, would be parroting what I think I am supposed to be saying (ie. this seems an awfully well crafted movie, so I guess I have to approve of it), which for my sensibilities, is the absolute enemy of why I read any kind of criticism for. I want to know who the critic is. I don't want to know what they think they are supposed to say



So, because of this, the whole notion of trying to come to some kind of consensus just seems very wrong, considering what I view the function of art to be.

What is the significance of a film being the most technically proficient (assuming we could come to consensus on what such a thing means)?

I guess, more deeply, what is the point of art? Isn't the point of art to engage its (human!) audience? Or perhaps to intentionally repel them? Or do do something to evoke an emotion?

Eminem being able to rap faster than anyone else according to a stopwatch is something that I can agree marks him as technically dominant in one area of his craft. And good for him, seriously. But I don't think that makes his music more interesting or more of something I want to listen to. If anything, I might listen to that fast verse and go, "Yup, that was really fast."

But what is the impact of that on his music as art? What is the value of criticism as a technical checklist if nothing in the criticism has any relationship to the experience and enjoyment that the reader might get from it?



This thread is now an Eminem appreciation debate and there's nothing anyone can do about it!!!


If Cardi B was as fast at rapping as Eminem, would that somehow make her pussy-centric hollering good music to you or suddenly better or more worthwhile? Does Eminem using his technical prowess to *checks notes* write a cringe-y diss track about Machine Gun Kelly somehow make that any less painful?

I'm not debating whether or not some people are technically superior to others. I'm saying that technical accomplishment is only one piece of what makes art great. And, as Crumbsroom says, there are great artists who intentionally push back against the structure of what is considered technical accomplishment.

Again, if a critical review just amounts to a checklist or a cold attempt at objective ranking of technical elements, I'm just not interested. It matters what a movie is about. It matters how a movie goes about it. It matters what a movie is trying to evoke in the viewer. It matters how different people feel watching it. Art can have different value to different people (such as my example of asexual viewers and the film Straight Up), and I think it's weird to want to run away from that fact in the pursuit of being "objective".

Again, this is a mischaracterization of what the framework is after. The ability to show a solution path for a problem is not an unmeasurable metric. Quite the opposite. There are a lot of ways that bias is built into schooling (and the framework cites some of these, such as using language acquisition as a metric for sorting students into tracks that may not match their mathematical ability). Teachers often (usually unintentionally) reward product over process. I really saw this with my student teacher this year. Going back to my fraction example from the previous post, if you only value the answer you would come away thinking Child 1 gets fractions and Child 2 doesn't, when actually it is quite the opposite.

A worse way that this shows up in writing and, dear God. So many students come to me with writing that is technically proficient (grammar, spelling, claim followed by evidence/reasoning) but deeply soulless because they have been molded to cookie cutter structures in the name of technical ability.

In good education, technical skill is embedded in the work, but is not the be-all end-all of it. Teachers will always value technical skill, because clarity of communication depends on it to a degree. But the over-emphasis of technical skill also does a disservice to students.

If what people love doesn't matter, then what's the point? I thought about Moonlight for days after watching it. And on both an emotional level and a technical level (because I LOVED the lighting in those night scenes on the beach). La La Land left me cold emotionally, and I would need a really good reason to watch it again. Awards can be based on whatever they want to be based on. I don't want "Best Picture" to be synonymous with "best use of camera movement".

I disagree. People who have something powerful to say AND a powerful way to say it will always be in demand. I probably have 100 books in my classroom about kids on thrilling adventures. But there is a good reason why Hatchet and Bud, Not Buddy are literally falling apart at the spine. We talk in my class about "goosebump" lines in poems and books, and students understand that there is a craft to how those authors achieve those moments. What is thrilling is when students independently attempt to emulate and build on techniques.

I thought that Moonlight displayed technical skill and heart. Again, it's about the combination of those things, not one being elevated entirely and ignoring the other.

So going back to my fractions example, you would give the student who got the right answer (with flawed methodology) points, but not the student who got the wrong answer (but with conceptually correct methodology)?

Again, I think that most reviews/criticism acknowledge both! I am really struggling to think of any film review I've read recently that spoke only about the "human" elements of a film and completely neglected to discuss the technical elements. Maybe you have an example, but I don't.

Dismissing and de-emphasizing are not the same thing.

It is really frustrating to see the framework being interpreted at such a ridiculous extreme. It's like people think teachers are out here going "Oh, you think 24 divided by 6 is 9? Well, if that's how you feel, then okay! Gold star!!".

I would also argue that sometimes in science the "right answer" IS a matter of opinion, because sometimes people in a certain field are blind to their own biases. Like, I don't know, coming up with a generalization and then realizing, OOPS, we only studied this phenomenon in one demographic. A great example is answering the question "How do you know if someone is having a heart attack?". For years, the "correct" answer to this question (and the one that is still widely circulated) is a list of symptoms in men who are having heart attacks.

This is a lot but I have a few reactions that I'd like to share with you and we can talk about them.
One is that I do think there is such a thing as bad art. I even saw some today. A painting so bad it stopped me in my tracks and made me ask the person who owned it what the story was and she actually told me that she was drunk when she bought it and when she sobered up she didn't know what the hell to do with it it was so bad. Her husband had banned it from the house and she agreed so she hung it in her office almost as a joke and since then not one person, according to her, has ever had any comment about it other than that it is just bad. BAD. Lacking merit in any way that anyone can conceive.
This is also sometimes true in film. Because sometimes a creator not only lacks craft but also lacks content and also lacks soul. Or lacks any one or even two of these to the degree that the third cannot overcome it. Let's face it, Dogs Playing Poker is hardly the nadir of art.
As for virtuosity, I would say this. Virtuosity is not necessary for art. In fact, sometimes it gets in the way. And many virtuosos lack content and many virtuosos lack soul and many lack both. But that doesn't mean that have skill with the language of your art is inherently bad. Nor does it mean that virtuosity can't or shouldn't be appreciated on its own or certainly that virtuosity should not be appreciated when it is in the context of content and/or soul. Sometimes, rarely I'll admit, but sometimes, the fluency in the language of an art that virtuosity affords can lead to or be employed in service to, poetry.
I don't have much to say about Eminem.

Then

Well, the likelihood is, is this is probably a bad piece of art. But then the question can't help but arise, would it be bad to everyone? Can we presume that everyone who has an inkling of interest/knowledge in the history of painting would completely reject it? Possibly. Or maybe at least close enough that we are unlikely to ever worry about running into such a person and contending with their contrarian streak.



But even then, isn't their a remote possibility that this artist is significantly ahead of the curve in some invisible way? That its ugliness isn't dissimilar to the distasteful garishness of the Fauves? Or that its ordinariness isn't the same as a something found in early Pop Art? Or that its seeming lack of representation isn't unlike all those Abstract Expressionists who dared to rejected realism? Or that its redundancy or pointlessness isn't maybe a close cousin to the Dadaists? Or maybe that its committing some other unspeakable crime against current art orthodoxy, but is in fact, breaking new ground we aren't considering because we are so put off by how wrong and crappy it seemingly is?


I think any absolutism in proclaiming something 'bad art' has to always be viewed with at least some skepticism, no matter how bad the work in question might at first appear. History is littered with misunderstood works that were ridiculed at first. The story of Van Gogh's garbage art career maybe the most famous of these, but we shouldn't assume it was an isolated case. It has likely been the same fate also suffered by an unforseen number of painters who never managed to break out of complete obscurity (which begs the question, does cutting edge art only matter once it has been legitimized by the established intelligentsia....sadly, this is probably almost certainly the case)



And, even if we can somehow universally accept that it is a legitimately ****ty painting, who is to say someone still can't get something of value out of it anyways. My girlfriend subscribes to some 'terrible art' thread, and I am at times in love with paintings that are being exclusively ridiculed. Not ironically love them. Literally love them. This doesn't necessarily mean I'm correct in thinking its good, and it would be very easy to make arguments as to why I might be silly. But it should give some pause if I could articulate what I think is beautiful about it. It should also make one wonder why anyone would want to disenfranchise that feeling of mine as illegitimate. Because, ultimately, how can it ever be wrong to like something (contrariwise, I think it can definitely be wrong to dislike something, but that is a separate argument).


Now, don't get me wrong. I've definitely railed against a few things as being of negligible worth in my life (and no, I'm not talking about The Conjuring or Baby Driver, which I rail against for different reasons, not that they can't be considered good by some). But in those cases, usually in similar situations as yours, where I am at a garage sale or a thrift store and some horrible still life is sitting on the driveway with a 25 cent sticker on it, there are a lot of assumptions I am making about the rest of the world's aesthetic tastes, both past present and future, to call it absolutely, undeniably bad. All I've done by this is just close my mind to the possibility somebody, somewhere, could see something I don't in it. And why should my glib opinion of it negate theirs (considering if anyone actually shells out that quarter to purchase it).

In the very least, newer filmmakers can learn from that, it is visually compelling (unless it’s consciously torture porn which aims to disgust, but not relevant here). The significance is that we celebrate craft.

Well, this is a good question! Not being sarcastic here. Yes, it would. I’m not a fan of anything he’s done recently, but when I went to watch Venom (a mistake), the only thing noteworthy from there was his theme song, which was, again, technically impressive and had said wordplay and all the hallmarks of a technically accomplished rap song. Even though, no, it wasn’t saying anything interesting compared to his stuff on Iraq. So I do think that if Cardi B were a master of the craft, I would listen to her music every now and then. Plain and simple, yes. This is why I occasionally check out Nicki Minaj, though she also overdoes ‘girl power’.

I’m sorry that I didn’t reply to that, meant to. Neither of them would get full marks and that is fair and correct. I would penalise the child whose working out was correct but not the answer more than the child whose answer was correct but not the working out. I would take more points away from the child who made a mistake in his approach.

But neither would get full marks, that would have only been possible if the craft/technicality/working out and the answer were correct. It’s actually a good example because in maths tests (in normal/traditional ones, that is), you don’t get excused for having the wrong answer of your working out is correct, you still get marked down.

So the idea that you don’t ‘get marked down’ for less impressive craft compared to another, more technically competent film, because you have the right ‘working out’ (a soul, a human-centric narrative about underrepresented groups etc) sounds like a field regressing to me.

Well, see, this is where I see the issue. What on Earth do you mean by ‘soulless writing’ (at school, if I remember correctly!). ‘Soulless’ is not an objective metric. I think it is unfair to bring it into conversation. What about psychopaths? I’m dead serious - people/students who are neurologically wired not to feel. How are they supposed to put the emotion they don’t feel into their work?

A simpler example. Let’s imagine that you have a foreign student. Say, from Italy. Say, they are fluent in English, native level.

They have to write an essay on the Irish play Translations by Brian Friel. They didn’t have a choice in the matter. This is a core text.

The thing is very heavy on the Protestant-Catholic/Unionist-Republican conflict in Ireland. Now, the student does all the possible reading, both what was provided and beyond. She knows the dates, the names, everything.

But she has never been to Ireland and cannot possibly appreciate, on an emotional or human level, what a HUGE deal the Irish conflict is to this day. Bit like Macron at G7.

So will you mark her technically excellent, well-researched essay, down because, I don’t know, she didn’t delve into the feelings of the characters deeply enough, or explain how the Irish conflict emotionally impacts her? Is her essay not perfect (not full marks) because she doesn’t feel anything when it comes to this conflict? Unlike her classmate who grew up in Northern Ireland? She had done her research but she feels nothing about these things and it comes through in her essay.

That’s fair enough, but someone else will say Moonlight left them cold emotionally and La La Land didn’t. Which is exactly why I’m arguing that whether something left someone emotionally cold or warm is not a helpful metric.

Yes, but I think what you’re describing is a bit of an ideal situation. From personal experience, including in education, I think shifting the emphasis away from one will mean less value/attention/importance is given to the other. The girl studying Translations will be disadvantaged if she is expected to add the human element/her emotional response into the mix and if she will be ‘marked’ on that.

Anyway, this was truly very interesting, but I kind of think the topic has exhausted itself. Would be thrilled to keep reading, but think I’ve kind of articulated my side of it.

Is this an issue of empathy? Or sympathy?

Empathy, I think, that’s pretty much the definition of ‘psychopath’ - lack thereof. My point is that a lot of genius creators score low on empathy.

Making ‘humanity’, which is obviously dependent on empathy, a prerequisite for a successful work of art (or academic piece, as Takoma and I are discussing) is unfair to those who don’t ‘feel’ on a neurological level. There are far more such people than is usually assumed, if you take into account Asperger’s, autism and so forth. Quite a few of them become brilliant artists/creators. They will be disadvantaged by a metric that values the ‘humanity’ of art.

Anyhow, I’m not making that argument because of psychopaths. Not at all. It was just one of the examples. I’m making the argument mainly because ‘humanity’ is a slippery slope.

I feel the same way. On the one hand, you have these vaguely patronizing and practically cosmetic attempts at signaling diversity that carry no substance in themselves, or worse may even embed more deeply subversive stereotypes. As cynical as this is, it's unsurprising from a corporate POV, where all logic boils down to branding and marketing devices. (As I mentioned in another thread on Hollywood diversity, an overt devotion to almighty demographic data, combined with this corporate tendency to superficial marketing, increases the likelyhood of the industry to think in primarily stereotypical terms about their audience as a normal mode of business.)


There's a really funny Key & Peele sketch about the allegedly progressive but subversively conservative notion in modern pop music about sexual exploitation = feminist liberation. Sexual liberation is certainly a feminist notion, but in terms of empowerment, the power is still clearly held in the hands of the corporation, not the product...I mean, the women involved. This should be the real takeaway fro the recent re-evaluation of Britney Spears. The irony is that, for much of her 1999-2004 peak, audiences were assured by the industry, including obedient critics, that Spears represented this kind of sexual empowerment. What was somewhat obvious then, and quite clear today, is that Spears was being abused by a parasitic, exploitative system. Rinse and repeat for today's pop stars. But to call it out for what it was then for Spears, or today for the fresher lambs, will invariably get the kind of pushback typical of the poptimist defenses mentioned in the FC article. Poptimism seems less about protecting women and more about protecting the Simon Cowells of the world who thrive on cheap pop product and those eager young "hopefulls" willing to shill for popi.


Of course, the music industry has long been crooked as a denegenerate gambler's legs after March Madness. (Check out a book called Hit Men, which lays out many of the mafia connections through the 60s-70s.) But it's funny to me that the poptimists in the FC article would call out the "indie" movement of the 80s-90s as being particularly exclusive, when, in fact, they were largely rejecting a lot of the kind of cock-rock dogmas that poptimists like to levy onto boomers. From riot grrrl to queercore to house, the most inclusive music of that era was on "indie" college radio, not the pop radio (ala Debbie Gibson, Rick Astley, New Kids) of the same period. But maybe they just don't remember, they seem young.


Taking it back to the topic at hand, what this all amounts to is a genre of critics who are largely more like grocery clerks than critical analysts or lucid wordsmiths. Their job, as they see it, is to be part of the promotional system of entertainment product. They don't write reviews, they write ad-copy, designed for blurbability. And they're also tasked with regulating and checking any actual criticism from more thoughtful minds which may arise to remind the sapient mouths that there may, possibly, be alternatives available to whatever the newest, freshest, fountain of youthiest hot relevent obsessive-compulsive crumbclusters of culture that the these critics can convince you that you're lost and unloved if you haven't even clicked and liked all of the associated streams and threads before this sentence ends, what's wrong with you anyway?!?!?!?! Binge, my pigs!!!! You're taking money away from moderately talented faces if you don't.


I think I mentioned the AV Club as of recent? Bwew.

None that I'm interested in.

So if I am reading this right, those in the audience who do have naturally occurring empathy, and who can't help but have this affect their response to the film, need to overlook it in their analysis because it is unfair to those who don't have empathy?


But then if you take a hypothetical case of those who presumably have disabilities which might prevent them from becoming proficient with, let's say, a musical instrument, and so instead are forced to use their empathetic skills to express themselves, still have to be judged on their technical virtuosity because it's objective? And criticism must be objective (this is of course not even beginning to get into how a number of the supposedly objective metrics of what constitutes virtuosity change as time goes one and art evolves)

Incidentally, I've known a few people "on the spectrum" who are quite lovely people. They may have a neurological disadvantage when it comes to relating to other people, but it's not an impossible task for them to accomplish these connections, and, more importantly, it doesn't prevent them from desiring human connection and understanding. To call these folks "unempathetic" is a slur against their obvious good will.

I would argue that yes, everyone should be judged on proficiency alone. Adjustments can be made for people to play with different ailments, up to a point. And as I am myself on the spectrum, no, don’t see that as a slur, sorry.

Well, I guess what I was saying and expounded on more later in my post is that sometimes, no often, art is produced by someone who has neither skill, nor imagination, nor, as you put it, soul. They just wanna make a painting. Jesus are there some garbage paintings hanging up around my workplace even as we speak. Or, for example, I have attended some open-mic nights that require all original music and the musician in question has no ear for hooks, no talent for lyrics, and nothing interesting to say. Art was technically created but it was bad art, often just painfully monotonous and/or awkward to sit through. Lots of people wanna play professional sports but they're not actually any good at it and may even be painfully un-coordinated and unathletic. The same is true with art. To say that no art that is created is ever bad (and I'm not saying that's exactly what you're saying but you're sort of submitting that because some great art was misunderstood or ahead of its time or whatever that it's possible that no art is just bad), well, I'm not sure what adjective I would use to describe that position but "unrealistic" is one thing that comes to mind. Especially given that we only remember the misunderstood or ahead of its time or outside the norm art that survives because it actually did contain greatness or at least some quality. For every one of those there are probably thousands that are just forgotten or never really seen at all because they were just, well, bad.

Maybe not a slur, but a misunderstanding of the subject. "Psychopathy" is not recognized as being on the autism spectrum. Psychopathy, as a term, refers to a number of personality disorders, rather than neurodevelopment disorders. The distinction is key: "There is a common understanding that ASD is a developmental neurological disorder, while BPD is more associated with adverse environmental factors, such as emotional deprivation, abuse and trauma in childhood." There are some people who have a comorbidity of both disorders, and an overlap of certain symptoms, but there is no essential connection between them. Most people on the spectrum do not have personality disorders, and most psychopaths do not have a diagnosed neurodevelopment condition. Some people have both, and some of the emotional and social symptoms between the two overlap.



So it's simply incorrect to associate psychopathy and the autism spectrum as a given. It's also incorrect to suggest that a person with a neurodevelopment condition cannot alleviate these symptoms through various therapies. One of the definitive traits of a psychopath is their clinical resistence to therapy, making it one of the less treatable mental disorders. Empathy, however, is more of a value than a neurological trait. Many people on the spectrum engage in therapies to enhance their empathic capacity. The difference with the psychopath is that they would not choose to, and that's also a crucial distinction.


We should appreciate neurodiversity (much like ethnic diversity?) as a factual matter of human dignity. It requires empathy to accomplish this.

Even proficiency is at least partially subjective though. How would the general populace in the time of Renaissance, where artists were just beginning to attain almost pure dramatic realism, consider the proficiency of Monet, who warped and smeared realism in the name of what he personally felt towards the landscapes he was painting? It would basically have been considered heretical to all of these brand new revelations that were just being discovered in painting and sculpture. Monet would have looked like an absolute amateur in that context. He would have been viewed about as proficient as a child.



And there is no reason to think that audiences today don't have a similar resistance to acknowledging the proficiency of artists who are currently pushing the boundaries of what art can say or do. Historically, this has always been the case. Revolution in art is virtually always viewed with skepticism or even outrage at first (and sometimes for a long time after).



The root of the problem of finding an objective truth in art, is that not even academics can really even come to a basic agreement on what arts absolute function is even supposed to be. Is it pure talent? Is it a reflection of the real world? And abstraction of that world? Is it conceptual? Can it only be beautiful or can it revolt? Does there have to be something undefinable and/or soulful about its greatness? On and on and on. And if we can't agree on something as basic as this, how can we agree on if it is doing it well?

At what specific point is a shot well lit?

NGL, I kinda wanna see some of the paintings at your work.*


Back when I was going into the office, they had a bunch of "ironic" pieces up (I.e. a neon sign that read "Text Mess Age") that I guess were supposed to cheeky but, if like me you hate your job, just added insult to injury with their blatant mockery of the workplace experience.*

I apologize if this comes across as harsh. Partly what I take issue with has to do with the effort among the professionals who work with spectrum disorders to de-stimatize the more anti-social presumptions surrounding their patients, amplifying a negatively-reinforced social inhibition. I noticed that the wiki pages for 'psychopathy' and 'anti-social personality disorder' do not include a single mention of autism or the spectrum. I felt I should make this clarification, because I feel that the spectrum shouldn't be used to normalize psychopathy.