5 Truths About Film Criticism, Straight From Nathan Rabin

But the TMNT reboot did not get overwhelmingly negative reviews because snooty critics felt it lacked the deep-focus compositions and emotional depth of Orson Welles' legendary debut. No, they gave it overwhelmingly negative reviews because even by the lenient standards of CGI-heavy franchise reboots starring Megan Fox in tight jeans bantering stiffly with disconcertingly realistic-looking beasts, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is poorly conceived. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles doesn't need to be compared to timeless art to be found lacking; it's pretty damn awful on its own terms.

Much of a critic's job comes down to contextualization, in placing the film in a specific cultural and historical context. For the TMNT reboot, this might involve analyzing the film within the context of the incongruously gritty comic books that spawned both the film and the previous film and TV series. And above all else, a good critic asks, "What does this film set out to do, and how successful is it in realizing its goals?" They do not ask "Is the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot as good as The Godfather?" We're not morons, and we're not insane. Mostly. I hope.

Paramount Pictures
*cough*

There's no objective truth about a film's quality. Everything is subjective, and when movies are rated on a scale, it reflects that subjectivity. Then people get confused and, in the inevitable tradition of the internet, pissed. When I reviewed movies for The AV Club, for example, Crank 2: High Voltage got a very controversial A-, which led commenters to complain that whenever a film that was supposed to be conventionally "great" got a grade under an A-, that meant we were saying that Crank 2 was better than it. That's not true at all. Crank 2 got an A- because the critic felt it was wholly successful at realizing its ambition to be a crazy, go-for-broke B-movie, not because it deserves to be catapulted into the pantheon of great cinema. Not everything has to be high art, or even remotely artful, even for critics.

In other words, we're not ranking all movies from best to worst with these scores. That would take a serial killer's level of obsession and compulsion to pull off. And very few of us are serial killers.

Reviews do not dictate a movie's commercial performance. They're merely one of a series of factors at play in a film's eventual gross. The importance of critical opinion fluctuates according to film type. Arthouse movies are most dependent upon critical praise. These are the movies where a high-profile rave can make a huge difference. Yet people who hate film critics enough to subscribe to loony conspiracy theories tend not to think that, say, Moonlight became a critical favorite because the studio behind it was lining the pockets of inkstained wretches with greenbacks in exchange for rave reviews.

They do, however, seem to think bribery comes into play with superhero movies. This boggles the mind, because superhero movies are a genre where critical reviews are fundamentally irrelevant. Audiences didn't see Deadpool and Guardians Of The Galaxy because they received some of the best reviews of superhero movies ever. No, they flocked to those films because they wanted to see Ryan Reynolds be a profane, wisecracking badass and a space raccoon that wears people clothes do awesome shit, respectively.

Marvel Studio
No Tomato score was getting in the way of people wanting to see this.

Similarly, audiences didn't see Suicide Squad and Batman V. Superman in huge numbers because they expected quality cinema. No, they went because they were huge movies with huge budgets and huge stars and huge advertising campaigns and are rooted in some of the hugest pop culture icons of the past century. They are essentially critic-proof, so it would be insane to bribe critics to either attack or praise them.

If critics dictated 100 percent of what people saw, the number-one movie this weekend would be Seven Samurai, as it would've been for the past 60 years.

Plenty of little movie lovers grow up wanting to be Martin Scorsese, but plenty of them also grow up wanting to be Roger Ebert. I was one of them, and I'm proud to say that for a number of years, I had the honor of sharing a screening room with him, and that he blurbed my first book, though I never quite mustered up the courage to talk to him.

Film criticism is a rich world onto itself. Hell, Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino have the souls of natural-born film critics themselves. They just happen to work on the other side of the business. In one of the most moving and surprising scenes in Life, Itself, the wonderful documentary about Roger Ebert, Scorsese talks about how the tough love of Ebert's pointed criticism helped give him strength and confidence at a time when he was at a low ebb, emotionally.

And while it's rare for that kind of connection to form, it is beautiful when it happens. Film criticism and filmmaking aren't bitter enemies, with the former trying to destroy the latter out of jealousy; they are simply two moving parts in the wonderful machine that is cinema. Not every Penthouse letters writer aspires to be a porn star.

Like a lot of blue-collar workers, the jobs of professional film critics are disappearing at an alarming rate. For a good stretch, it seemed like a distinguished veteran film critic was being laid off by a major newspaper every few months. I suspect the bloodletting only abated because there were so few full-time newspaper critics left. We didn't become any less disposable; the bosses just started to run out of people to fire.

Our culture, as a whole, does not value film critics or film criticism. True, the day-to-day life and work experiences of a factory worker or a Target middle manager might be vastly different from that of a film critic. When I was a film critic, I was grateful every day that I got to make my living watching movies and writing about them. I tried to never lose sight of how fortunate I was. I've been extraordinarily lucky. However, I also know that I'll have to scrap and hustle and work like hell just to make sure my family doesn't have to boil shoes for sustenance.

Amazon
Just gonna leave this here ...

So blue-collar commenters who complain that movie critics are out of touch with their lives aren't entirely wrong. Alaskan fishermen and people for whom a grueling day at work involves watching six movies at Sundance don't inherently have a whole lot in common, lifestyle-wise (although they both smell like fish). But if they realized how much they had in common in terms of money and financial uncertainty, they might have a little more compassion and understanding for each other and their viewpoints.

But despite this seeming disparity, critics and non-critics all have the same goal: They want movies to be good. When I was a critic, hope sprung anew every time I would sit down in a theater seat or click an online link. And I made it a point to always review films and not audiences. When I panned Joe Dirt 2, for example, I was not making a withering statement about the intelligence of Joe Dirt 2 fans. I was merely giving my own subjective experience of watching Joe Dirt 2 on my laptop on one weird day in 2014. If you think that I'm personally attacking your taste or saying that you're stupid because we disagree on the merits of a particular film, you're vastly misunderstanding what a movie critique is in the first place.

Crackle
If there's one thing to take away from this, it's that. If there are two things, it's that and the "attractive, with amazing genitals" part.

Many film reviews are written in the third person. This eliminates a lot of self-indulgence, but it can also lead to readers thinking the critic is delivering their judgment from on high, as if it were the incontrovertible truth about a movie's worth and not just one person's opinion when they wrote it, possibly on tight deadline, possibly at the end of terrible, exhausting day. And sure, critics take themselves seriously, sometimes to a fault, but that's a measure of how deeply committed they are to doing their jobs, despite the total lack of security and sour contempt from a strange alliance of filmmakers, actors, and the public at large. And like you, they are bitterly disappointed when filmmakers make such poor use of such a miraculous medium.

So the next time you see a movie review that fills you with rage, put yourself in the sweaty, uncomfortable skin of a movie critic. You might just find yourself overcome with a strange feeling known as "empathy." Empathy is a quality far too rare in our strange contemporary world, yet it's one you will find in the very best film critics, as well as the very best films. I'm talking about films like Citizen Kane. That's a good one. I would go so far as to say that it's even better than Joe Dirt 2. But that's just one man's opinion, and hell, I ain't even no damn film critic anymore.

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For more, check out 4 Ways Pop Culture Critics Have Made Themselves Obsolete and 5 Reasons It's Now Impossible To Tell If A New Movie's Good.

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