Humans need something simple
"Need" is a curious word. Go to any fast food restaurant and you will find large patrons announcing to a clerk, "I need a double-cheeseburger." Most of these patrons do not need a double-cheeseburger, and would, in fact, be better off skipping them entirely. Ditto for our "energy needs." 99.9% of human history occurred without use of electricity. Today, however, we speak of our insatiable (exponentially growing) appetite for electricity as our "energy needs." Perhaps what the planet needs is less energy production. Last time I checked, we need the planet, so it would appear we might need the opposite too.
Humans want many things. We want fast, fun, cheap, simple, easy, and good. Alas, this combination is elusive. One of the many things we desire are desire are "simple" measures of quality. Such measures tend to come up short in the "good" department.
J.S. Mill would reject Bentham's reduction of hedonic calculus to a single measure, offering a qualitative test by which to measure higher and lower pleasures. Today, modern analysts have offered "multi-criterial analysis" as a way out. Critics tend to follow their nose, resulting in heaps of words pointing us at a thicket of ideas. This is not necessarily what we want, but what we want does not always admit of an easy reduction to a number.
EDIT: For those keeping score, that's only three paragraphs dedicated to a single word.
Movie reviewers are experts.
Are they? What school accredits them? What guild assures their quality? What government agency oversees them? So many "experts" are in the hip pocket of the studios that the Tomatometer is basically broken with viewer opinion frequently leaning in the opposite direction of critical opinion.
Our insistence on simple, convenient, and fast has gutted what little expertise we used to have in criticism. As the meme goes, "this is why we can't have nice things." We can't have, by and large, expert criticism because we want simple criticism. Once more through the star-bellied rating machine.
I saw my movie last night because everything else was a 3 and the one I saw was a 4. That's all. No need to know HOW it got to 4.
Well, if you don't need to know HOW it was selected, then you might as well use any arbitrary method. Flip a coin, roll a die, pick the DVD that slides farthest down the stairs. I'd wager that you would have better adventures if you strayed from the flock. In my own time as a film reviewer I was exposed to films (sometimes with little to no outside materials) that I would have never watched otherwise (dumb-sounding title, not my genre, hate that actor, etc.) and I was much better for this than for using the weak well-witching method of the aggregate unitary mathematical measure of the enjoyment of others (7 monkeys out of 9!).
Ratings are merely your assurance that you will get a cheeseburger. If you're familiar with your raters (individual or collective) and they give you a mushy number "4" signaling adequate quality, you know nothing more than that the film should be "OK." Odds are it mildly appeals to conventional taste.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with a cheeseburger and cinema is a veritable Burger King (i.e., have it your way). However, I suspect that the annoying "want" of impatient people to have simple numbers does harm when it becomes a fetish, the way, the measure, the number. The tyranny of mediocrity.
I love that Minio unironically loves
Starcrash. I love it not only because it is a hilarious choice, but because it shows that Minio stands apart from the pack. I hope we all find a film that we can passionately argue for as much as Minio, but if we stick with the herd we will never find our own
Starcrash.