Are negative reviews mostly by generally unhappy people these days?

Ha, best post so far.

I think creators are getting further and further away from the magic that once was. Soon movies will be nothing more than TED talks.

Movies made during WWII but not about WWII often did have happy endings, same with movies in the 1930s escapism movies were popular. But during the war and especially after WWII more darker, foreboding films like noir became popular as they reflected a more somber mood in the world.

WWII films made during the war often didn't have happy endings for every character. Often a main character is killed in the war. I've been watching war films nightly and I'm surprised at how brutally honest WWII films were back in the day. That's because the audience knew people were dying everyday in the war and most of them knew someone who had been killed.

I think it's a myth that WWII films were often "happy endings, something inspirational, maybe a song or simple escapism, followed by a patriotic logo." The most patriotic/heroic films (that I've seen) were made by the Soviet Union and Britain. Most Hollywood films at the time were amazingly balanced.

I like to see more period war films from Imperial Japan, Occupied China, Nazi controlled Germany & Fascist controlled Italy, but those are far and few between.


*Some of the best WWII films I've seen are British and Soviet made.

Some people find relief in escapist films. Others find relief in seeing more starkly realistic films as it makes them feel less alone in their (accurate) assesment of the shitty state of the world.


But, also, using art exclusively for relief would be ****ing awful. Living with our heads planet further in the sand is only yet another way nothing ever can possibly get better (even though you can probably argue it never will anyways)

The opposite is true. In objective terms, people are happier than ever. Of course, there's the flip side to it - depression seemingly sweeping more people than ever before. But just as it is now, our lives nowadays are much better than those of our ancestors. On average, we're much better off and we've seen more movies. This gives us the idea that we know more than we really know. Everybody's a film critic these days. Film-rating sites are thriving with unique users presenting their own "style" of rating films, their dismissive reviews, and their radical takes. It's as much another way of
showing yourself as anything else. People create whole personas and rate films according to them, or just copy some other user and follow their opinions verbatim. That's basically how circlejerks begin.

It'd be reasonable to never talk about the worst things. This way we wouldn't be giving them and their authors the floor. Saw a bad film? Don't talk about it! This should be enough of an anti-recommendation. Nobody talking about bad movies is the way to go. Nevertheless, when people see a bunch of fanboys overrating a film, they usually chime in and don't waste words on saying how much they hated that film.

That criticism has many sides. The obvious one is that Marvel movies are anti-cinema. No, I'm not saying they're not movies. I'm not saying they're so avant-garde they somehow change the way we think about film either. No. They're just the antithesis of everything that made film art for so many decades. They're a product. A piece of consumerist fast food you eat and forget. But above all, they're terrible movies. They're AWFUL and they're getting EVEN WORSE by the year. I think more and more people are starting to notice they were taken over by a sort of mass hysteria, championing a taco as if it was a 5-star dish. And that taco now stopped to even give them that instant gratification. Its taste is just bland. And it's not because those people ate too many tacos. It's because the people who make tacos decided that they can release the most stinking piece of trash out there, and there'll still be people willing to see it.

Well, the thing is all your ratings are relative. The first few films you ever see are hard to rate because you don't really have anything to compare them to, but the next few get compared to the films you had seen before, whether you realize that or not. Of course, exposure to too many masterpieces can make you fail to appreciate movies that are 'just' great. But the opposite is also true. If all you had known were Marvel films and you thought they were, say, alright, a Tarkovsky, a Walsh, a Bresson, a Lang, an Akerman, a Tarr, a Bergman, etc., etc., etc., will feel like a revelation. All of a sudden you watched something so much better that the Marvel film you used to think was alright now smells of crap.

Yeah, I had seen that comparison somewhere else. The difference in quality is humongous, though.

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Look, I'm not judging you - after all, I'm posting here myself, but maybe, just maybe, if you spent less time here and more time watching films, maybe, and I stress, maybe your taste would be of some value. Just a thought, ya know.

Would also mention films that help correct a skewed or imbalanced view on a subject, or perhaps offer a modicum of catharsis when dealing with grief etc. Those are the ones that tend to stick with me in the long run.

You aren't the first person to stop by that has a bizarre preoccupation with equating the quality of a film with its box office numbers, and you probably won't be the last. It's odd, because consider the following list of films, all of which didn't do well at the box office, while still being of obvious good quality, many of which have stood the test of time, and some only gaining in popularity over time:

Blade Runner - basically my favorite film of all time, and considered by many to be one of the best and most influential science fiction films ever made. Did terrible at the box office and with critics at the time, as well.

Blade Runner 2049 - A sequel to the previously mentioned film, which was much better than it had any business being. Sure, Villaneuve can't seem to do wrong, so I figured it wouldn't be bad, but I have seen it several times, and find it to be an excellent film. Did poorly at the box office.

John Carpenter's The Thing - Excellent flick, one of my favorite horror films, and regularly appears near the top of "Best of" lists in the genre. Did poorly at the box office.

Children of Men - I saw this multiple times in theaters, but that wasn't enough to keep it from being considered a bomb. Now a very well-respected sci-fi gem with some groundbreaking cinematography by El Chivo himself, Emanuel Lubezki.

Fight Club - Now a cult classic, but did poorly at the box office.

The Iron Giant - Now considered on of the best animated films ever. Was a huge flop at the box office...

The list goes on! The point being - the quality of a film just isn't determined by its box office numbers, not even a little bit. How about we stop trying to make a clearly incorrect and silly point that it is?

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It's a tale as old as time. Company makes a lot of money on something cheap, then they reproduce the results with more money which nets even more money. They rinse and repeat until they start loosing money. And then they blame their audience for not "getting it"

We now call this the Marvel Equation

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"This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined." -Baruch Spinoza

Marvel didn't start off cheap, though. It was an investment and they did a good job with that investment. Every other studio that has attempted a massive "universe" has failed. Everything tied together with Infinity War and End Game.

What is super depressing about this fallacy of equating box office success or failure with the quality of the film, isn't simply that it's wrong.


It's because it is so unbelievably easily refutable, like you just did (and we could go on and on), and yet people keep saying it.


Which means that people are literally putting zero effort into their arguments. Like, literally not a single ounce of though. It's as grossly dumb as it gets.


And yet, somehow, these sorts are always the loudest and most inflexible with their opinion.


It's almost like they are incapable of learning new information. Even when it is low hanging fruit information like this.


It's embarrassing. Modern discourse should be ashamed of itself

It's not simply "wrong," but rather a weak sign. It is evidence. It just isn't definitive, being neither necessary nor sufficient to establish a strong claim of quality. However, it's not a "zero" either.



If we are looking to pool available evidence about film we haven't seen,

we might see that a film is doing killer box office over a few weekends. That IS a promising sign. We can see that people are paying money to see it, which implies that they like it, which implies that there is a preponderance of public opinion in favor of it. If people are paying money over a series of weekends, then this shows that the film has "legs" and that the success is probably not just a matter of marketing hype.


It is good to see that a film one has hopes for is performing well at the box office. It is bad to see that a film film has hopes for is performing poorly at the box office. Let's not pretend that this isn't so and that box office returns are meaningless and out of court entirely.


Your subjective experience of a film may not reflect the generally positive intersubjective response indicated by strong box office returns. After all, the Spice Girls sold more albums than the Beatles. On the other hand, if a lot of people like the experience of "X" and you are a "person," then there is also a statistical likelihood that you will like it too.


If everyone I meet in a new town tells me never to eat at Mother's, but that Comfy Cafe is great and I have no further information either way, I will have some justification in hitting the Comfy Cafe first and learning a bit more about Mother's before I chance it.

This sort of evidence is suggestive and defeasible. As you note when other information is available and enters the picture, it doesn't really work to keep crowing about box office returns. What if there wasn't any competition? What if the film had an intense marketing campaign? What of returns drastically dropped off after word of mouth got out? What if the returns simply reflected some background cultural condition, a cause apart from "quality" that was driving people to the theaters (e.g., protest, ironic viewing, the obligation of the faithful)?



As I have said before, films are not "pure" works of art. They are financial investments. A film that fails to make money has failed the intentions of investors. If you want to paint pretty pictures in your garage without a care in the world for delighting an audience or making a buck, that's fine. Movies, however, involve multiple artists, unions, distributors, marketers, etc. Films are made for audiences. If some pays for your product, that's an endorsement.



Box Office matters.

No it doesn't

Gary Larson was once compelled to apologize for one of his comic strips - captioned "Hell's Video Store", the entire store is stocked with nothing but copies of Ishtar. He hadn't seen the film, and when he did he actually enjoyed it. It's not one of the greatest films ever made, but it's by no means a bad film. Certainly doesn't deserve to have the reputations it has.

I once went through a Top 100 at the Box Office for a year I chose at random - 1980 - and found that many of the best films were near the bottom, and near the top were the likes of The Blue Lagoon, Smokey and the Bandit II and Stir Crazy. Box Office returns give you absolutely no clue as to a film's worth - when you read through a top 100, you'll find it's a mix of good and bad throughout.

Yeah, I really think that honest and popular don't go hand in hand

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You speak as if a film's "worth" is an objective feature that we might find with a scientific instrument or Google search. Regrettably, we cannot.



Determining the "worth" of a film is like constructing a raft at sea from floating bits of debris that, more or less, "float" when it comes assessing quality. We use signs, local agreements, background assumptions, traditional standards, anything we can use to cobble together a presumptive case for or against the quality of a film.



One of these "clues" is Box Office performance. The film makes a large sum of money (intensity), especially over a series of weekends (duration), this is a sign of quality. Sure, there are weaker films with box office numbers stronger than some of your favorites. So what? It's not an absolute sign. It's not a guarantee. On the other hand, it's not a bad thing either! Tell a director that his/her movie is doing well at the box office and s/he won't despair that this is no proof that the film has achieved anything of worth. Rather, they will be happy. They want people to go to the theater. They want them to spend money. They want them to be happy enough with the film to spend many millions of dollars watching it. That is, strong box office performance is a promising sign. Stop pretending that it isn't.



But for the most part, you will find films that are entertaining. If people were not entertained, they would not pay for them. Whatever else films are, they're entertainment.

Yeah, that's not gonna work for me. A film's worth isn't some unfathomable mystery that can never be found, and if it could be through some kind of app then that would be regrettable, not the opposite.

If people are paying money over a series of weekends, it means normies are swarming to see something they've been mouth-fed through ad campaigns or other normies' opinions. Sure, the public opinion might be this or that, and that might even encourage other normies to go and see the movie. But any person who truly sees cinema as art doesn't give a hoot about what your average Joe thinks. Your average Joe doesn't think cinema is an art and so the chances they'd champion a disposable piece of trash only because it worked quite well as a companion to his popcorn digestion is quite high.

For producers - absolutely. For filmmakers - unfortunately, too, because they know that if this isn't the case, they'd have smaller chances of getting another film made. But true auteurs HATE money at their heart. They HATE they have to whore for that money and give up their artistic liberties only to appease some idiot who happens to have money and a rabble of instant gratification-seeking Joes.

I have an issue with comparing film (a form of art) with food/drink (a form of consumerism, and utility). But continuing with your example, what if you were a coffee gourmet and the majority of people told you Comfy Cafe is better but a bunch of other coffee gourmets told you that Mother's is better?

I think the main driving cause is people wanting to get entertained, and this is fair. The thing is the quality level is so low now, and the entertaining movies look and feel so bad, that people who know a thing or two about cinema would rather stay at home and rewatch a classic.

You're again seeing films as utility first, art second. A lot of classical music or painting was made for money, too. But that doesn't stop them from being "pure" art, eh?

Painters need to eat and pay bills, too. I think that any artist is tortured by how important money is. Box office matters inasmuch as money matters. But money always corrupts art. And so do outside forces (producers asking to change something, people on the internet having particular expectations from the sequel) that impact the work of art of auteurs who just want to project their pure visions from their heads onto the screen. The vision is never 100% pure because other people will always be involved, but the idea is to soil it as little as possible.

Anyway, fame corrupts souls, too. So does money. Think of all those artists who went to America to start making worse movies. Stars who got famous and started losing it. Paradoxically, the luckiest are artists who are poor and who can hardly make their art, who have to slave for every penny to make their film. Because their resolve to actually make it the way THEY want it is the greatest. The moment an artist starts thinking "What do I do to make the audience like it?" is when they've betrayed themselves.

Your casual assumption that box office offers NO sign of quality requires that you (personally) have a very clear and strong understanding of film quality, such that you can easily dismiss a class of evidence out of hand. I submit that you do not possess such a deep Platonic understanding of film quality such that you can dismiss how the masses vote with their dollars. If millions of people tell me "it's good" by the act of spending hundred of millions of dollars, I am going to pay some attention to that. Only the most insane elitist would entirely disregard the response of the general public.



And again, I have only argued that box office is one source of evidence and that it is defeasible. I have offered no reduction of some automatic "A is an infallible sign of B."

All this does is establish your contempt for the common person.

At the end of the day, the paying audience is THE audience. And if they're not pleased, the industry suffers.

I submit that the longer a film performs well at the box office, the more evidence this is the mists of marketing lifting to reveal how audiences actually appraise the film. You, on the other hand appear to chalk it all up to hype.
Again, all this does is establish your contempt for the common person.

Again, this art is made for them. The industry is trying to sell them tickets. If the art does not work them, that's a problem.

As a broad measure of that thing called "entertainment," the average Joe can be called upon to report if the juice was worth the squeeze. Maximus can ask the crowd, "Are you not entertained?!?" and if they are, the movie Gladiator will turn a profit. It's a question that cuts through the bullsh*t. You're either willing to spend fifty bucks to see it or you're not. They're quite literally putting their money where their mouth is. Internet commentators, on the other hand, have "hot takes," memes, and the vocabulary they remember from their film appreciation class or favorite YouTube essayist.
Let's not call them whores. Let's call them "film workers." I've heard it said that film work is real work. Wouldn't you agree? Now, you may hate the fact that you're a film worker, but that doesn't change the what you are, so wear something pretty. Make something pretty. That they have to please millions of Joes (should we call them "Johns"?) is not a "bug," it's a feature.

Again, if you want to do private art that you never share and hold out a cup to gain your income, that's fine. However, if you propose to earn your living as an artist by making art, then you'd better find some Johns willing to pay for your services.

This isn't whoredom, it's the whole point. Art is supposed to resonate with us, connect us, inform us, enrich us. It is communal. It circulates. It is made for the culture in which it circulates. 99% of that culture is made of the very people you hold in contempt. The point of the art is to serve culture, to be part of the dance of inter-influence, the unending stream of symbol use. It is not the private province of some self-appointed genius who holds the outside in perpetual contempt.

Enter into that stream, release that artwork to the public, and it will be judged. Sometimes this hurts. Sometimes an artwork is rejected or (most painful of all) never even noticed. Sometimes an artwork fumbles as it seeks out its audience. The process is imperfect. Some good stuff is overlooked. Some bad stuff which get lucky in catching a current. Nevertheless, the name of the game is circulation. Box office is a measure of circulation. High circulation is a sign that, "Hey, maybe there's something to this?".
In that case I would have more opinions. It's not that I have escaped intersubjectivity, but now I have hierarchically granulated intersubjectivity. Sometimes, of course, the elite opinion leaders get it wrong. There are empirical studies which show, for example, that elite wine-tasters fail. There are no perfect signs. Myself, I will work with as much evidence as I can get.
Have you noticed that box office returns for "can't lose" franchises are costing studios billions of dollars? The average Joe is also staying home more. In terms of the coarse question "Was this entertaining?" I think you have more in common with "Joe" than you think.
There really isn't such a thing a "pure" art (internal, private, autonomous, made for itself, instrumental to nothing, serving no purpose, connecting to nothing but itself). Art is a cultural practice. Art is made for communities who gather in various ways to consume it (e.g., concerts, theater attendance, exhibitions, auctions). The circulatory nature of art implicates in the whoredom (serving some audience) which you seem to despise.

At best, art runs the gamut of low art (street hookers and strippers), middle-brow art (escort services and exotic dancers), and high brow stuff (courtesans and ballerinas), but all of it is servicing an audience. You can can be a high class hooker, but if you're an artist, you're always a hooker and you should be.

Your job as an artist is to serve others, not yourself. A good artist is a good servant. He serves the needs and desires of the people of his time. He elevates their sight. He connects them to the issues of the day. He offers them a way to imagine a way out of the nightmare of history. The romantic theory of art is a derangement of egotism and narcissism. If you just want to write love letters to yourself, there is no need to ever make such letters public.

Artists want to connect, they want to commune, they want to be celebrated, they want to make a dent, they want to help, they want to be remembered--you can do none of these things without serving some audience, something outside you. Pick what kind you servant you wish to be, at the end of the day you will always be a servant. Dust off those knee-pads--it's time to service the public.

Art is the endless adjustment of symbols to people and people to symbols. The virtue is the mean, the middle point. The vices lie in the extremes. Honesty is a midpoint between cowardice and recklessness. Like wise, good art is a midpoint between exclusive focus on the symbol ("I don't care if you do like this, normies! This is art! It only has to please me, the artist!") which leads to the childish insularity which defies circulation, and an exclusive focus on the audience (e.g., hacks, toadies, lickspittles, flatterers). What you see as a damming corruption is part of the purpose (circulation) and necessity (you gotta eat, even if you're a "head up my own ass" artist).

Oxygen is a killer. We've been sold on anti-oxidants to extend out lives. But try living your life without oxygen and see how long you last. Is oxygen a "corrupter" or simply an element of life? Money, as a metric of circulation, is part of what art is supposed to to (i.e., connect with a public).
A good artist is a good servant. It is a willing bondage to the human race as it is inflected in the culture of one's time. You might as well say that the really lucky people at the dance are the one's who never scuff up their dance shoes when people ask them to dance or accept their offer to dance. "But he has to replace his dancing shoes! I am so lucky to be the wallflower!"

I just don't see a common person's opinion about cinema worthwhile. Just like I don't care what a non-security expert has to say about dumping passwords in favor of more secure approaches.

True artists are either mirrors (they reflect reality) or innovators (they want to change the world). The rest are paratroopers who jump down the ground and the camera is already rolling. These paratroopers are the servants you're talking about.

Lets see how many more times Corax equates artists with servants. And prostitutes. Let's call it a fetish.


Now to be clear, Corax is the only John here. He wants things that make him feel inferior down on their knees. This isn't about defending the tastes of any other common man but one. One who believes art must service the values of the establishment or be diminished as the threat he clearly views it as. Anything else is an affront. To him.


He believes modern art to be an attack on beauty. He says it all the time. But has he ever defined what beauty is? Has he ever even seen it? Or is its face already payed for and buried in his crotch?


He likes to consider someone like me a zealot, but the only one who has any agenda here, who wants them to uphold his specific demands (which, to be clear, are political...just give him time), is this pathological case study.

I think they're that bad and always have been
People in capes flying with super powers!! don't waste my time I'm not a 10 year old

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"Beliefs don't change facts. Facts, if you're rational, should change your beliefs" Ricky Gervais