Edgy...

5 hours ago, Daeglan said:

I never use film critics as a barometer. Other than if the critics hate it it is probably actually good.

That... not how film criticism works.

1 hour ago, micheldebruyn said:

That... not how film criticism works.

It did for me with an old film critic who (luckily) doesn't work around here any more. We had completely opposite tastes in movies so if he hated a movie I knew I had to watch it and vice versa

3 hours ago, micheldebruyn said:

That... not how film criticism works.

It can depend on the film critic.

If you know a critic's preferred film tastes skew towards a certain type of movie that you enjoy, then the more they enjoyed that type of film, the better the odds that you'll enjoy it. Same if their dislikes in films line up fairly well with yours, so that if they pan a certain movie, odds are the film's not going to be worth your time, or at least not worth paying movie theater prices to see.

Likewise, the more a certain critic hates a particular type of movie, the more they rail against it, then the better the odds that you'll like that film.

7 minutes ago, Donovan Morningfire said:

It can depend on the film critic.

If you know a critic's preferred film tastes skew towards a certain type of movie that you enjoy, then the more they enjoyed that type of film, the better the odds that you'll enjoy it. Same if their dislikes in films line up fairly well with yours, so that if they pan a certain movie, odds are the film's not going to be worth your time, or at least not worth paying movie theater prices to see.

Likewise, the more a certain critic hates a particular type of movie, the more they rail against it, then the better the odds that you'll like that film.

That's pretty much how I use critics. There are a handful that I watch, because when they've explained why they love/hate a movie that I had already seen (like doing a series of videos about classic action films, etc), and they say "This is why I love this film, because of reasons X, Y, and Z." And I'm like "yeah, those are the same reasons that I've always loved that film." And then when they also go "This is why this movie wasn't as enjoyable for me, because they did A, B, and C, which just didn't do it for me", I can agree on those. So I have a reasonable baseline of their tastes, and see that they align reasonably close to my own. That's when I will use their opinion about going to see a film or not.

It doesn't always work of course, for example every critic I follow loved John Wick 2&3, and I found those films incredibly boring and a slog to sit through, but when 80%+ of the opinions line up for you, they can be a useful measure of whether you should go spend your money to see that film in the theater or not. I rarely see movies anymore because I get tired of spending good money on films that I find just "meh". And since most films, on average, are "meh" (meh=just fine, but nothing really great), I try to be selective with what I go see.

You can all talk about the fact that you might have opposing views and tastes with one or two critics but as soon as you believe (or state) that movie critics as a whole are to be distrusted or that they are that they represent what is wrong with cinema then you indeed do not understand how movie critics work or you are an Edge Lord.

4 hours ago, micheldebruyn said:

That... not how film criticism works.

And yet that is how many use them successfully.

I always liked Roger Ebert, agree or disagree (especially when he bizarrely saw a herald of fascism in Arnie's Conan the Barbarian). Independent thinker.

8 hours ago, wilsch said:

I always liked Roger Ebert, agree or disagree (especially when he bizarrely saw a herald of fascism in Arnie's Conan the Barbarian). Independent thinker.

I played a droid called 3-BRT in a campaign once. His nickname (of course) was Ebert and he was based on the good man as well.

15 hours ago, DanteRotterdam said:

You can all talk about the fact that you might have opposing views and tastes with one or two critics but as soon as you believe (or state) that movie critics as a whole are to be distrusted or that they are that they represent what is wrong with cinema then you indeed do not understand how movie critics work or you are an Edge Lord.

Funny that isnt what I said. What I said is I find Film critics to be worthless about what is a good movie or not. Largely because they seem to be more interested in impressing other film critics with their critique. take Rotten Tomatoes. If the Critics say the movie is good but it has a terrible audience score. It probably is not an enjoyable movie. If the Audience loves it and the Critics say it is terrible. It is probably a fun movie. Empire Strikes back is probably a good example of this. Critics said it was terrible. Based on box office the public disagreed.

So it is exactly what you said...

9 hours ago, Daeglan said:

Based on box office the public disagreed.

Plenty of bad movies do well at the box office, and vice versa. One of the greatest films of all time, as determined by...well basically anyone familiar with films, The Shawshank Redemption, did terribly at the box office, but critics loved it. It has since become one of the most consistent "Greatest Film Ever" on various polls, for decades. Whereas the Transformer Films are festering piles of lard, and yet make bank, Because Explosions.

So yeah, box office is a terrible metric for if a movie is good.

59 minutes ago, KungFuFerret said:

Plenty of bad movies do well at the box office, and vice versa. One of the greatest films of all time, as determined by...well basically anyone familiar with films, The Shawshank Redemption, did terribly at the box office, but critics loved it. It has since become one of the most consistent "Greatest Film Ever" on various polls, for decades. Whereas the Transformer Films are festering piles of lard, and yet make bank, Because Explosions.

So yeah, box office is a terrible metric for if a movie is good.

Notice i didnt say good. I said fun.

1 hour ago, KungFuFerret said:

Plenty of bad movies do well at the box office, and vice versa. One of the greatest films of all time, as determined by...well basically anyone familiar with films, The Shawshank Redemption, did terribly at the box office, but critics loved it. It has since become one of the most consistent "Greatest Film Ever" on various polls, for decades. Whereas the Transformer Films are festering piles of lard, and yet make bank, Because Explosions.

So yeah, box office is a terrible metric for if a movie is good.

With the case of "bad" (subjective a term as it is) movies, a lot of that can depend on the production budget.

Gore-fest flick franchises like the Saw series (especially after the initial one) as well as the various slasher franchises (Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween) kept going for years simply because they had relatively low budgets, so all they really needed was a good opening weekend to be profitable, after that it didn't matter as much if the box office receipts went into a tailspin. And yet, all those franchises have their dedicated fanbases who enjoy those films immensely. The only reason there were so many Scary Movies (generally agreed to be horrible) was because they were so cheap to produce that it was easy for those films to make a healthy return on investment, at least before the "let's parody current pop culture" gag ran its course. A number of critics panned those movies, so by Daeglan's twisted logic those movies should have all been great as they were (in terms of box office returns) extremely successful.

Shawshank's biggest problem was how it was marketed, done in such a way that most people had little to no interest in seeing it in theaters. The Princess Bride is another case of a beloved cult classic that earned mediocre returns ($30.8 mil on a $16 mil production budget), and only found it's audience due to home video, as it otherwise would have been completely forgotten (and the world a poorer place for it).

As I said earlier, Empire Strikes Back got mixed reviews both critics and audiences (something that Daeglan has completely overlooked in his most recent snit) when it was released, was a box office smash, and is these days regarded as one of the best films of the Star Wars franchise, a state of affairs that didn't occur until years after its initial release. A quick check on the film's Wikipedia page offers a few links to articles that it wasn't just critics lambasting Empire, but general audience members as well, including a number of remarks from older issues of fan-mag Starlog that if read today strike eerily similar tones to comments made about TLJ today.

1 hour ago, Donovan Morningfire said:

Shawshank's biggest problem was how it was marketed, done in such a way that most people had little to no interest in seeing it in theaters. The Princess Bride is another case of a beloved cult classic that earned mediocre returns ($30.8 mil on a $16 mil production budget), and only found it's audience due to home video, as it otherwise would have been completely forgotten (and the world a poorer place for it).

Which is why I was saying that box office results is a terrible way to judge if a movie is good or not.

The best way to judge the quality of a movie is to ask the opinion of someone you trust, agree with, and who has watched the movie. There. Can we stop now?

3 minutes ago, KungFuFerret said:

Which is why I was saying that box office results is a terrible way to judge if a movie is good or not.

I can agree that using box office results alone and by themselves is bad way to judge a film's quality.

But by the same token, if a film has both high box office results and generally favorable reviews from a broad range of audience members and critics, the film in question has a high probability of being objectively good. And if a film is posting record box office numbers, it has to be doing something right.

That doesn't mean said film is going to be everyone's cup of tea. For instance, the Godfather films (especially first two) are held up as cinematic masterpieces, but I can't stand either of them and feel that Coppola hasn't done anything to warrant the reputation he has. Objectively, those movies are considered good, but personally for me I find them to be pretty darn awful, with Marlon Brando's performance being about the thing with watching out of the several hours the trilogy of films comprise.

Same could be said for the recent film Joker, which is also raking in the money at the box office, getting wide praise from critics and audiences, but I saw it as a "meh" film with all the ties to DC properties feeling like they were pandering in the hopes of boosting up their audiences due to a lack of faith in the film being able to stand on its own without having the DC ties.

However, I also don't go barging into threads on forums/reddits/social media where folks are talking about how they loved those particular films and start making false claims about how those films are objectively horrible simply because I personally didn't care for it.

There used to be a time... years ago, at this point... when films were largely driven solely by critical responses. You could usually gauge how well a film would do based on how good of a review it had, but that time has since passed with the advent of social media and the internet. Now, it's much more about word of mouth and such. It's why so many pundits/sites talk about 'second weekend dropoff' as being a metric of stuff since usually the diehard fans of something go opening weekend, and then they tell their friends whether to go or not, which influences the percentage dropoff of the second weekend. (My industry, video games, is still too tied to critic scores and we should really be breaking away from that, but that's another discussion.)

Anyway, I don't think there's any like... real way to judge 'goodness' of a film, since that's subjective, but you can judge successful films with box office numbers, since that's what makes a successful product. By that metric, TFA and TLJ were both successful, and I don't see any reason why RoS also won't be a success.

On 11/3/2019 at 3:42 AM, Donovan Morningfire said:

It's a matter of time and perspective.

Back when ESB was released, it was savaged by both critics and especially adult audience members, with many saying that Lucas had pretty much ensured that his career as a Hollywood film maker was over, or that he should just step away entirely and let other people handle the next Star Wars movie, that they ruined Vader as a villain by making him Luke's father, or that Han's charm got drastically reduced by making him an outright creep that wouldn't take no from Leia when she rebuked his advances on the Falcon. And this was the film directed by Irwin Kershner, a well-respected and accomplished director. A film that only in later years, long after its release, did it start to be seen as "good" or "the best of the trilogy."

And much how the prequels were blasted, after more than a decade has passed, there's a growing portion of the fanbase, many of whom where children/tweens when the prequels came out, that hold them as being as good, if not in some ways better than the original films. And I'll be very surprised if in a decade's time, TLJ is heralded as being on the same lofty tier that ESB has since been put on. You may not like TLJ, just as there are people who saw ESB when it was released and still think that movie is trash.

You have to wonder about that though. I think there are people who are invested in TLJ and all things Star Wars who may be experiencing cognitive dissonance as adults, vs. kids being in love with something and that persisting through to adulthood on its own merit. I've never met anyone who felt ESB was trash who was a Star Wars fan, but if I did I would feel confident that they have a perspective that doesn't really apply to any sense of what is good in Star Wars that would make sense to me. There are also people who also persist in being Pollyannas about anything Star Wars because they want to hit that mainstream level of acceptance and acceptability to official sources, and other non-discerning ventures involving the IP.

Also as I watch TLJ I can see point by point the problems that it has, while ESB does not have that stacking level of disappointing choices. I wanted to like TLJ going in and gave it fair shakes, but in the end it was a disappointing movie that as a kid I would only have liked marginally better I think. Kids aren't dumb, and a kid who reads a lot and consumes movies can often sense when something is special and when it is generic and lackluster.

6 hours ago, Donovan Morningfire said:

Same could be said for the recent film Joker, which is also raking in the money at the box office, getting wide praise from critics

The joker is at a 56% on metacritic though... and that is still too high if you ask me.

56 minutes ago, DanteRotterdam said:

The joker is at a 56% on metacritic though... and that is still too high if you ask me.

Phoenix's performance alone is good enough for 50% at least even though there isn't much else to the film. Oh, and I found the score really good.

I was not impressed. I believe he was laying it on way too thick, especially goven what he had too work with.

13 hours ago, Archlyte said:

I've never met anyone who felt ESB was trash who was a Star Wars fan...

I'm going to call this specific point out, because it falls squarely into the realm of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy.

What exactly defines a Star Wars fan? Do you apply a BS purity test like what Vondy suggested a while back, and anyone that doesn't meet the criteria of that purity test gets dismissed as "not a true fan"? At point, it's much easier to say "well none of the Star Wars fans I know..." when you set the criteria to such a point you get a very narrow slice of what the actual fanbase is and can easily dismiss any opinions of those who disagree with your views because they don't pass your purity test of what a Star Wars fan is.

For myself, my "test" for "is this person a Star Wars fan?" rather simple: Have they watched an enjoyed any bit of Star Wars media?

Have they only seen and liked the original films? Congrats, they're a Star Wars fan.
Have they only read and liked a few of the EU books? Congrats, they're a Star Wars fan.
Have they only seen and liked the prequels? Congrats, they're a Star Wars fan.
Have they only watched and liked the animated series? Congrats, they're a Star Wars fan.
Have they only seen and liked the various films (including Solo and Rogue One)? Congrats, they're a Star Wars fan.
Have they only played and enjoyed the Star Wars video games? Congrats, they're a Star Wars fan

The folks that would apply a purity test would not consider any of those folks above to be "true fans" of Star Wars, which is why those types of purity tests are complete and utter crap.

You want to be exclusive of who qualifies as a Star Wars fan? Fine, knock yourself out, but don't expect people outside of your narrowly defined group of "true fans" to respect your opinions based upon your narrow-minded gatekeeping qualifications of "a true Star Wars fan" that excludes a large swath of people that have consumed and enjoyed Star Wars media.

1 hour ago, Donovan Morningfire said:

I'm going to call this specific point out, because it falls squarely into the realm of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy.

What exactly defines a Star Wars fan? Do you apply a BS purity test like what Vondy suggested a while back, and anyone that doesn't meet the criteria of that purity test gets dismissed as "not a true fan"? At point, it's much easier to say "well none of the Star Wars fans I know..." when you set the criteria to such a point you get a very narrow slice of what the actual fanbase is and can easily dismiss any opinions of those who disagree with your views because they don't pass your purity test of what a Star Wars fan is.

For myself, my "test" for "is this person a Star Wars fan?" rather simple: Have they watched an enjoyed any bit of Star Wars media?

Have they only seen and liked the original films? Congrats, they're a Star Wars fan.
Have they only read and liked a few of the EU books? Congrats, they're a Star Wars fan.
Have they only seen and liked the prequels? Congrats, they're a Star Wars fan.
Have they only watched and liked the animated series? Congrats, they're a Star Wars fan.
Have they only seen and liked the various films (including Solo and Rogue One)? Congrats, they're a Star Wars fan.
Have they only played and enjoyed the Star Wars video games? Congrats, they're a Star Wars fan

The folks that would apply a purity test would not consider any of those folks above to be "true fans" of Star Wars, which is why those types of purity tests are complete and utter crap.

You want to be exclusive of who qualifies as a Star Wars fan? Fine, knock yourself out, but don't expect people outside of your narrowly defined group of "true fans" to respect your opinions based upon your narrow-minded gatekeeping qualifications of "a true Star Wars fan" that excludes a large swath of people that have consumed and enjoyed Star Wars media.

Not to mention that someone's status as a "true fan" doesn't say anything about the validity of their criticism, in either direction. People can still dismiss the "other" person's statement, but it doesn't actually address if the point made, was a good/bad one in the first place.

I mean you just have to browse this very forum to see thousands of examples of "true fans" being simply wrong, like factually wrong, about plenty of things.

3 hours ago, Donovan Morningfire said:

For myself, my "test" for "is this person a Star Wars fan?" rather simple: Have they watched an enjoyed any bit of Star Wars media?

Have they only seen and liked the original films? Congrats, they're a Star Wars fan.
Have they only read and liked a few of the EU books? Congrats, they're a Star Wars fan.
Have they only seen and liked the prequels? Congrats, they're a Star Wars fan.
Have they only watched and liked the animated series? Congrats, they're a Star Wars fan.
Have they only seen and liked the various films (including Solo and Rogue One)? Congrats, they're a Star Wars fan.
Have they only played and enjoyed the Star Wars video games? Congrats, they're a Star Wars fan

My younger sister has watched and enjoyed all of the Star Wars movies. However, I would not classify her as a Star Wars fan. She doesn't know much about it, she has trouble remembering key plot points, and she knows almost nothing aside from what she can get straight out of the movies (and she doesn't know a lot of what you can get straight out of the movie).

As far as someone being a Star Wars fan for watching and enjoying any Star Wars media, that would make me a Marvel fan because I have watched and enjoyed a couple Captain America movies and the first Avengers movie (as well as some ancillary materials). However, I would never describe myself as a Marvel fan because, while I probably know more than the average person, I don't know all that much about it and I've never cared all that much about it. Furthermore, you can't apply your definition to other peoples' statements. If I say the sky is blue, and you say that it isn't, even though I think it clearly is, you can still claim that you're right because your definition of blue is the same as my definition of purple. (I intentionally picked this example because both are similar colors and valid colors for the sky)

As far as what constitutes a "Star Wars Fan" I don't believe in purity tests, and I believe that it is very hard to form any sort of criteria. If you want to say that your definition of "Star Wars Fan" is what you wrote down, then when we say Star Wars fan, interpret it as "Die-Hard Star Wars Fan."

Not being a Star Wars fan doesn't mean you can't have a valid opinion. My older sister was either indifferent to or disliked the original trilogy and the prequel trilogy. She thought Rogue One was great (though she didn't enjoy it very much because everyone died). She loved TFA. She thought the characters were interesting, she thought the story was set up well, etc. She was really looking forward to TLJ and hated it almost as much as I did (the saving grace being that I cared much more about Star Wars and the lore of Star Wars).

Would I classify her as a Star Wars fan and include her in a hypothetical (and extremely impractical) survey of Star Wars fans on the subject of TLJ? No. She isn't really a Star Wars fan, she just enjoyed a couple of the movies as movies.