I’ve been a full-time employee at Flicks for five years now. A good 90% of my time has been spent doing either database stuff or assistant editorial stuff, which are just different sides to the same tambourine that I bang as the Flicks work monkey. The other 10% is where I get to rip off the lobby boy uniform to do what I love – write about movies.
I say ‘write about movies’ instead of ‘review movies’ because I’d much rather describe how a film made me feel than try to rank it on a scale. Although, a lot of the time, it’s easy to do both.
I could detail how I, Daniel Blake threw me into an emotional dumpster fire by providing one of the most powerful movie experiences I had last year. I could also verbally piss on the smouldering ashes of horrible that was the Kevin Spacey talking cat movie Mr. Fuzzypants. In comparison, one’s a masterpiece while the other’s a masterpieceofshit. Ranking often comes naturally.
Those two films are on extreme sides of the spectrum, so the difference in quality is clear. However, when you get films of similar quality, the idea of ranking them becomes absurd. Not even Pythagoras of Samos could write a theorem that would undeniably calculate whether or not Lion is better than Hidden Figures.
The more precision we attempt with this weird rating system, the more we treat it like a scientific metric. That’s when shit starts to look ridiculous. (It’s also why I refuse to use half-stars on Letterboxd.)
While the technical elements of film can – and should – be judged on an objective scale, trying to apply that same logic to something as subjective as art misses the point. Successful art does not earn Art Points – it earns discussion. That’s what most filmmakers want.
Even if you just want entertainment over art, the same thing applies. As much as Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice pains me on both a physical and spiritual level, I can’t deny someone feeling satisfied with it as entertainment if all they wanted was eight minutes of two adult men in costumes beating the shit out of each other. The two-and-a-half hour movie certainly gives you that.
The same goes for comedy. I have no idea what personally makes you laugh, but I know what does it for me. I like jokes with butts. Butts are funny. If you show a butt, I’ll laugh. It doesn’t even have to be in context to anything. If the 60th page of the La La Land script added “…and then Sebastian showed his butt,” I would have given that movie five butts out of five. However, not everyone sees comedy gold when they stare at a big-screen butt. Otherwise, they’d just make every comedy about butts.
Point is, everyone has their own threshold for things like entertainment and comedy. Yours could be high; mine could be low. A person’s rating doesn’t apply to anyone except themselves, yet it’s still assumed that the word of an ‘official film critic’ (whatever that actually means) is universal. This is why we’ll keep hearing the immortal phrase: “the critics are wrong.”
In truth, critics are neither wrong nor right. In fact, no one’s right. Ever. Because there’s nothing to get right. That’s why star ratings are kinda bullshit.
But they do serve one use.
While star ratings are a dumb way to compare movies, they’re a great way to compare ourselves with other people. Whether it’s a review that makes you think “This person gets it!” or a tweet that makes you yell “How dare you besmirch the honour of Suicide Squad!” this simple act of comparison solidifies what we individually value in film. But just because everyone’s a critic doesn’t mean everyone’s a good writer, which makes those simple yellow stars so accessible.
I think the reason film critics will never die is that, for better or worse, they provoke discussion. That’s what most filmmakers want for their films – to be talked about.
Just… try to do it in a way that won’t get you retweeted by the Amazon Movie Reviews Twitter account.
