Thorough Movie Reviews Revisited
by Steve West on August 27, 2007
Are you one of the group of people, like myself, who insist that they are not influenced by movie critics and make your film choices based on whim, fancy, instinct or some other method completely unrelated to some "professional's" opinion? Perhaps you should visit this website where you can rate (not review) movies yourself, and compare the result with a series of national reviewers to see whose opinion most closely matches yours. Maybe that particular reviewer deserves a second look since you two seem to be on similar movie viewing wavelengths. Sadly, Scott Hardie is not one of the listed reviewers.
Four Replies to Thorough Movie Reviews Revisited
Matthew Preston | August 27, 2007
91% agreeable to Rotten Tomatoes here.
Steve West | August 28, 2007
Mine was 87% Rotten Tomatoes.
Amy Austin | August 28, 2007
I guess Rotten Tomatoes is the way to go... 85% here.
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Steve West scours the Web searching for interest or absurdity and then shakes his head ruefully when he finds it. Read more »
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Scott Hardie | August 27, 2007
That's because nobody agrees with me. :-)
After I watched National Treasure for the first time this weekend, I looked it up online and was struck by how many people were angry with critics for disliking it. "We know what a good movie is, and we don't need them to tell us what a good movie is!" was the general sentiment.
Critics, most of them anyway, don't follow some arcane formula that if the movie does A B C things right it's good and X Y Z things wrong it's bad. They merely tell you their opinion of the movie, and are paid to do so because they're well-educated or they write entertaining commentary or some other reason that makes them compelling.
The point is, they didn't turn up their noses at National Treasure because it had plot holes and phony characters and lame stunts, as if it was a fun movie and those things made it bad in principle; they honestly disliked it for what it was. Their opinion is no more valid than yours just because theirs is published. If you frequently disagree with a critic, she or he would be the first to tell you to find another critic, which makes this site a good thing.