T w e n t y S i d e d

I really enjoy good movie reviews. I’m picky, though. Up until recently the only reviewer I could get into was Ebert, but he is sadly in the hospital right now and thus not writing any reviews.

99% of the reviewers out there get on my nerves. Newspaper movie critics, I swear, have some sort of “Mad Libs” style review generator:

And so reviews are filled with clumsy puns, statements of the blindingly obvious, and painful forced metaphors. Do these people really get paid for this stuff? These boilerplate reviews drone on, and it is clear the critic has no idea what movie reviews are for. The reader isn’t wading through this prose because they want to know what the critic thought of the movie. They can see that for themselves by looking at the thumbs up/down, number of stars, percentage rating, or whatever other system is used to distill complex subjective opinions into hard numbers. No, the reader is there to be entertained.

A writer who thinks that saying that “the movie Click! is a real turn-off!” is entertainment is someone who’s particular skill set might be more suited to other parts of the newspaper. I suggest they be given the job of writing wedding announcements, obituaries, and – when they are feeling particularly vivacious – maybe a few want ads.

Movie critics should not be erudite stiffs who would rather analyze a movie than enjoy it. They certainly shouldn’t be pompus elitists. They should be witty and interesting, even when the movie they are talking about isn’t. Especially then. People like Dave Barry or James Lileks would be perfect movie critics. It doesn’t matter one bit that they might not like the movies I do, or that they do not posses encyclopedic knowledge of every work ever put to celluloid. The important thing is that they can find new and clever ways of saying the same things over and over, because that is 90% of the job. The job has nothing to do with picking winners, predicting popular movies, or educating the great unwashed masses of dolts who watch Adam Sandler movies instead of attending Sundance. It has everything to do with making people want to read and maybe even talk about the reviews themselves.

While I’m waiting for Roger Ebert to recover, I’m really enjoying the reviews Alex is putting up over at his new site. Unless this site is a web of lies and deception, then Alex is a mere 21 years old, which is pretty depressing for me. At 21 I would not have been capable of putting together a paragraph that would be worth anyone’s time, much less turning out interesting movie reviews.

Back in 1998-ish I used to read movie review site titled “Girls on Film”. The site was pink and (I guess) aimed at female readers, but their reviews were witty and interesting and I never really felt left out by the by-women-for-women intent of the site. Eventually the dot-com thing got underway and the site expanded. The staff grew, features were added (I can’t remember what the other stuff was now, since I ignored everything that wasn’t a movie review) the navigation became more convoluted, the site got less responsive, it was bathed in ads, newer (less interesting) critics came on board, and the whole thing went to crap. Googling around today, it looks like the thing is gone for good.

Good review sites are hard to come by. I tend to apply the same criteria to them as I do when looking for enjoyable blogs: I like clean, fast-loading sites with a personal voice, which is about as different from newspaper critics as you can get.

I just wrote, what? Eight or so paragraphs outlining how thousands of movie critics are doing their jobs wrong and how they sould change to better suit my tastes? That is hubris, right there.

I love the internet.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.