How do you judge films and how much you care about directing?

Are you implying that the goal itself cannot be judged ?

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To be fair, he said he considered the films goals, not that he (or we) should subsume every other consideration to that one.

I think it's roughly the right posture, demonstrated by considering the opposite: it would be absurd to criticize a silly comedy because you don't like silly comedies and would have rather watched a drama. On some level you have to essentially "concede" the film's premise and aims and then judge it based on that. Otherwise, your criticism becomes a statement about you, and not about the film.

I care about direction as I think it's key to how a film works. My technical knowledge is pretty so so (no formal education in film, just what I picked up from reading criticism), but I do try to unpack directing choices as I watch a film.


How I evaluate how "good" a film is is much more freeform and based on whatever catches my attention. I'm also an extremely easy grader, if a movie gives me a few things to chew over there's a good chance I'm giving it a pass. I don't equate being a harsh grader to more thorough analysis

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No I'm suggesting that by following the logic of the listed criteria as the way of judging movies or any other piece of art you'll end up rating bad things as better than they actually are or deserve to be rated as long as they do good on those points. I don't think it's anything wrong with them but I wouldn't expect them to be sufficient for judging -well anything.

Did anyone say it should be "the" way, though? IIRC it was one of several ways listed.

Sure. Judging movies by what you think of as their own premises may easily lead to an over valuing of bad movies is all I'm saying. A good understanding of the ins and outs behind making movies doesn't necessarily make for a better judgement of a movie either. Lots of art is explained and understood as better than it actually is by people standing too close to the scene. Or too far away from the majority of the intended audience. All IMO off course, and I'm not pointing fingers at anyone here.

Not specifically, no.

Ok then

Cool, think we're on the same page then.

But did it have a good story? Was the acting good? Decent camera work? Or was it completely frontloaded with special effects? Seventh Son made that brutal mistake.

Obviously, there is no one way to look critically at film. No absolutism in suggestions a film is good or bad. To me there is little difference in judging a film, and judging a person. They come with all sorts of virtues and faults. They don't always achieve what they set out to, but sometimes the struggle to say anything matters regardless. As a result, I like to judge a film as to how I relate to it, warts and all. And while I would agree it is important to at least try and figure out what a film wants to be (just like a person, it's important to try and relate to what they are struggling to say or do, if we want to have a better chance of grappling with what it is showing us), that becomes a pointless quagmire of its own if we start fretting too much about how efficient or unerringly it does so. Because, honestly, who cares?


Our relation to film should be deeply personal, and to try and remove that essential subjectivity for some fruitless aim of finding one true objective analysis, cuts the heart out of a critique. Renders it virtually impudent. While I would never outright discount (for example) an academic paper on how perfect a films thematic realization is, (learning things is important!), I think using this road to talk about film can be a profound dead end since there is still much more to possibly learn from a film, even if it flounders about a bit. Or a lot.



For me, if we are going to posit questions towards a film to discover if we think it 'works' or not, I suppose I have a few I might ask myself


1) What does this film make me think about the subject at hand
2) What does this film make me understand about the society it was made in
3) What does this film tell me about the process of filmmaking
4) What does this film reveal about the person who made it

5) What does this film reveal about myself


As long as a movie gives me some interesting windows into understanding, or empathizing, or becoming curious over any of these things, I will probably have something positive to say about the movie.


As to whether or not it is a movie that is better than other movies, while I may debate these things online out of some obligation to alleviate my boredom, I have almost zero interest in that actual dogfight. I'm much more interested in talking about things it made me feel, thoughts it made me think. The rest is pretty irrelevant to me.

Exactly. Seems I mistakenly took your 4 criteria list to be meant as exclusively how you rate everything. Hence my comment.

What I mean is that each of the four point can be a matter of evaluation. The first point, "the goal", doesn't need to be a mere relativist premise in relation to which the other points are evaluated, but it can itself take a part of the judgement. For instance :

You can take opposite examples. If a film's goal its racist propaganda or other deliberate misinformation, or some financial loophole abuse à la uwe boll, or quick-and-dirty cash-grabbing through name recognition, etc, then it becomes part of the judgement. "But it does it well" hardly becomes an excuse. Efficiency doesn't always mean quality ("it did efficiently cut all costs to maximize short term profit, as planned") or deserves praise ("it managed to prevent cultists to defect before next week's mass suicide", "it managed to sow enough doubt towards sanitary measures", "it effectively contributed to the genocide program", "it's very high quality pedophilia" etc).

So "does it succeed at its goals", and "at which costs" are valuable objects of evaluations, but the goals themselves, also, aren't above it.

Correct, it's easy to come up with edge cases that invalidate either absolute: a film's goals are not exempt from criticism, but neither is it reasonable to criticize a film simply for not being the kind of film you like, or not the one you wanted to see that particular day. At least not in the way I mean the word "criticism," which in this context means something more than "I am just a person cataloguing my reaction." It carries with it an assumption that you are judging the film as a film, and in a way that will be elucidating to others (and if it isn't, why am I reading it?).

I will say, however, that criticism of a film's goals themselves is often (probably? Always?) not actually Film Criticism, if you get my meaning, and needs to be qualified as such.

You don't have to go to edge cases to qualify differently a movie with, say, a "self-expression" focus or "commercial ad" focus. Different goals, different judgments, along a continuum between the extremes. The same applies to each of the four points, as any angle (or component) or criticism could be abused - arbitrarily, subjectively. They're just aspects to weight, people weight them differently. But discarding one as legit matter of evaluation is precisely quite an absolute.

Then of course, the question of "is that-thing a good that-thing" is philosophically complex, and often obscures the underlying "good in which sense". A relatively easy question for easy objects (a good heater is good at heating) and impossibly complex for complex objects (what is a good book, what is a good mind, what is a good world). The "purpose" approach is limited, and implies subjective, implicit moral conceptions in itself (about an object's finality). In short, when you ask "is being-good-at-it a good thing" you broaden the perspective but don't necessarily lose the relevance, you can also increase it by including aspects that were deliberately left out. Again, cue to edge examples (is a good serial killer a good human), but they serve to point at coordinates on an axis to interpolate : the point is the axis itself.

Technical framing is often suspicious, in how objective it tries to present itself, and in what it smuggles out of the discussion.

Anyway, the closest thing to my own approach stays Hume's "Of the standard of taste" and its own balance of relativism and universalism. All aspects have to be considered, some requiring to adjust our referential, some not. I may just have a slightly more matryoshka doll version of it.

Right. I see what you're saying and I don't disagree with any of it. It's sometimes easy to detect absolutism when it's not actually there when discussing over the interwebs. That combined with a healthy appreciation for a good discussion I've experienced can sometimes lead to misunderstandings

I agree with this, but I also think this is precisely why it's important.

Art is subjective, I presume we all agree. But that's also a conversation dead-end if taken as the final word, and that subjectivity can be (and often is) used to lazily deflect criticism of careless opinions. IE: you can't prove I'm wrong, so my facile gut-level reaction is therefore on the same footing as any highly experienced, highly thoughtful analysis. Technically.

By talking about whether "that thing is a good that thing" we can, over time, construct standards which are at least roughly agreed upon. Or, more accurately, which create a standard, which makes comparisons possible which aid in interesting and useful discussion, even if they are not facts. For this reason, I tend to think that "art is subjective" is something which is undeniably true but, in practice, is best totally forgotten. Reminds me of that old Dave Barry quote about philosophy classes in college: "Philosophy is a class where everyone decides there is no such thing as reality and then goes to lunch." Film is an art form where everyone decides there is no such thing as objective quality and then we try to talk usefully about it anyway.

Basically, if people are already arguing about what standards are good, and why, we've already "won." We've already started building structures and expectations around the form that will ultimately help us understand and appreciate it more. Heck, even the downside of this (structures constrain expression) create opportunities for artists to transgress, giving us the best of both worlds.

All of this is good, and certainly preferable to acknowledging subjectivity as a reason to stop, rather than begin, debate.

Wowzers

thats a good question i dont have a clue =/

It is. You're still mistaken. You're stoping at the goal and not thinking about the sacrifice.