battlewraith

Then you miss the point of a lot of human endeavor. Yes, he's a grifter. He's delivering a formula to his audience. That's what I've been saying. If people want to enjoy that, whatever. If they mention it here, I feel like I can comment on it. Is that okay with you?

Maybe look up the expression if you still don't get it? The well in this instance would be the conceit that he is an impartial critic. A one-word review is a crap review. However the "appalling" is not a review, it's a tagline. There's a link to the slightly longer full review, which is also succinct and dismissive but was done in 2015. 15 years after the movie was released, so it's hard to really see that as poisoning the well. And the example you're using here is ....Battlefield Earth. Having or sharing an agenda doesn't mean agreeing on everything or behaving the same way every time. Like I said, I've watched a couple videos and looked over his review titles (eg. "The Message" is Dead--Snow White was the Funeral). I don't hold him to the same standard as other critics because he's been referenced here to pre-shit on movies. If people were leaning on other people to the same extent, I'd scrutinize them as well. All good?

You glossed over the whole point of what I wrote. He poisons the well. It's not that he's wrong about C list characters being in the film. It's that he, right at the outset, explains how he has no enthusiasm for the film because if features C list characters that nobody knows, from films most of us haven't seen, in a by-the-numbers action flick, fighting a poorly explained threat etc. etc. Before asking if it will be as bad as we expect. He's pandering to his audience. He's reassuring them that he will crap on it for their entertainment. An actual critic won't do that because they are generally try to be as impartial as possible, so that the review will be useful to some general reader/viewer who does not have an axe to grind. For that kind of person, there's really no reason to watch the review past that first 40 seconds because he's clearly heavily biased. Why do I watch his content? I don't. But if he, and people like him, keep getting referenced in discussions like this I think some basic familiarity and pushback is warranted. Before this thread, I think the only review of his that I had seen all the way through was the Thor Ragnarok review where he described the film as "Thor getting his ass beat twice by girlbosses". That one seems to be gone now.

That did it for you huh? Not a hypothetical where someone receives a prosthetic limb they don't need. Or talk about ancient Chinese monks getting too many horses? Lol okay?

"Poisoning the well" in the philosophical or rhetorical sense of smearing something to discredit it prior to making an actual case for something. I keep defaulting to Thunderbolts because I've actually seen it recently. In the first 40 seconds of CD's review, for instance, he talks about feeling nothing about the film because its a bunch of C and D-list characters that nobody knows, from films most of us haven't seen, in a by-the-numbers action flick, fighting a poorly explained threat etc. etc. He then asks "but is it really as bad as we expected?" He can then spend the rest of the video pointing out "stupid things", mention a couple things he actually liked and then explain ultimately why it's another Marvel failure--posturing as reasonably disappointed after dismissing it completely in the opening of the video. That's a hack that's pandering, though judging by the comments for that video his followers didn't agree with him. I don't know if he and his cohort bear much responsibility for the failure of movies, but you were the one that pointed out that they have millions of subscribers.

A legitimate critic brings a number of things to the table. They should have an understanding of filmmaking and film history. They should provide the reader or viewer with some basic information that informs the review (eg who is the director, what are they know for, etc.) They should try to be impartial--the point of a review is to evaluate a film, not unload the reviewer's baggage. They should offer an actual critique of the film, which involves discussing the good and bad. Moreover, a critic should be upfront if they do actually have some kind of strong bias. For example, someone who hates slasher films should state that upfront, and try to get past that, if tasked with reviewing a slasher movie. If a reviewer's content is actively poisoning the well and situating things within a framework of established grievances--it's not criticism. It's propaganda. It may be pandering to a specific audience (ie a grift) or actually part of a political movement.

Calling something a gift is a linguistic convention. It's not a reference to ontological status or whether the recipient is happy about the gift. The definition is one sided because there's no other side that matters. It's simply the way people communicate. Your boss doesn't gift you more hours. The IRS doesn't gift you more taxes. That's not the convention of how the word is used in English.

PI posted a still from the trailer and said that he was worried the film would be a hamfisted lecture about the current administration (presumably in the US). This was linked to a reddit post by the Critical Drinker, who I criticized as a formulaic online grifter. Shardwarrior then kicked off this discussion of critics in general, saying that the industry incentivizes critics to heap lavish praise on their films. This was a non sequitur. Even if it were blatantly obvious that all professional film critics are paid to hype movies, that would not be a defense of online grifters. It is also a false equivalence to view people that may exaggerate the positive qualities of a film in a review with people who denigrate these films along predictable ideological lines often based on a short snippet from a trailer before a film is even released.

The bad logic here is evident if you simply swap terms. Some doctors have committed malpractice, therefore it's safe to assume all doctors commit malpractice. Some cops are paid off, ergo all cops are assumed to be dirty. And so on. There was one research article posted in this exchange that studied studio bias with regard to reviewers. That study acknowledged there was influence and concluded that the result was typically a small rating shift, maybe half a star and/or a delay of 1-3 days for a negative review to be released. The conclusions of that article stated this: “The implication is not that the reviews are grossly inaccurate, on average, but I think as a consumer, you should probably rely on more than one reviewing outlet if you’re making a consumption decision,” says Waguespack."

My wife is going to subscribe to watch the new season of Andor, so we'll probably check this out.

Sony was sued over that incident and settled.

The truth of the matter is that critics vary, as do studios--or any group of people. It's not this categorical, black or white thing. Pointing to a fake critic or bad business is not an indictment of all critics or businesses. And yeah--if you're just willing to assume sweeping generalizations like this you are more likely to buy into conspiracy theories. Do better. You're welcome.

Lol oh really? Where did I equate that? PI mostly posts this stuff, but obviously people get bent if you criticize something like that. Surely this august assembly would not spend pages roasting the notion of criticism itself over nothing right? These zesty insinuations of industry wrongdoing had to come from somewhere.

All of this talk about credibility and trust in critics is because I called out the Critical Drinker. Why did I do this--because people keep referencing his garbage takes in these threads. The Thunderbolts review was a great example. In the first minute, he's disparaging Yelena as an embodiment of modern feminism. In actuality, the film as far as I could tell had nothing to with feminism unless you think fictional female superheroes fighting alongside male fictional superheroes counts as feminism. The fact that he's pandering in these reviews is made clear when he puts out a short film that features the same "girlbossy" depictions that he routinely slams big studios for doing (except executed very poorly). This to me demonstrates the gap between his grifting and his aspirations as a serious filmmaker. It's whataboutism. It would be like if you identified a specific doctor as a quack and in response someone called out controversies with Big Pharma. It's a deflection. Both can be true and it wouldn't change anything. And if f a bunch of shills from the big studios show up here, $50 in hand and start hyping up movies--that complaint would be relevant. But in reality, it's just Critical Drinker fans here pre-shitting on movies because their cohort squeezes everything through the same ideological lens.

Sounds offended to me. Particularly in relation to a trailer for a James Gunn Superman movie. Somebody watching that trailer and then being haunted by this caricature is bizarre to say the least.

That's the funniest thing about it. As someone who sees the current administration as an Onion parody come to life, I have no idea what the "political" issue is. I watched that trailer and just saw a bunch of standard Superman story tropes.

So, the first article concerns a pr firm's attempt to game rotten tomatoes over a film that hadn't even been picked up yet. And this example, which would've had a tiny sample size is extrapolated to all reviews. The research article talks about strategies the reviewers take to not piss off studios--the key one being to delay unfavorable reviews by 1-3 days. That's it. Additionally, the article talks about media outlets wanting to differentiate themselves. So reviews that come out later will tend to be more negative.

IKR? Especially when the whole Supes-in handcuffs things has been done in other films and animations.

The problem is that, when you are dealing with social media "critics" they are, as you say, driven by clicks--which are fueled by the algorithms driving the various platforms. Material that is more contentious is going to be more visible to viewers. A punchy video trashing a film along ideological lines is going to get more views then a measured, reasonable discussions of a film's quality. And content providers can see this in their metrics and have strong incentive to cater to more sensationalized content in order to make more money.

Right, so if they never posted anything positive, about anything, ever --THEN they would be grifting. LOL! Yes I've watched their content. The video I linked, if you removed the context, would be indistinguishable from his actual content. Always huh? Got some quotes?

Whataboutism. You should maybe not listen to those people either. I looked up reviews of the Marvels. Audience reviews are generally higher than the critical reviews were. And if you look on something like Rotten Tomatoes for instance, the highly rated critics gave it an even worse score. So that's not a profound indictment of critics.

Ah the irony, given how little it takes to elicit that kind of response from you. But let me clarify things. It's not about difference of opinion or worldview, particularly regarding a film that hasn't even been released yet. (maybe you'll even see it if your mates give the thumbs up). It's about grifters. Shitty, formulaic would be critics who crap on films to entertain an aggrieved audience who wants to see these films fail. They'll call out "what we all know" and then clutch their sphincters tight as they wait for the receipts to trickle in, praying for a flop to prove them somehow right. Fortunately, any shtick gets old and played out. And sometimes they themselves reveal why nobody should take them seriously.

I'm hopeful that people will eventually stop letting social media hacks poison their perception of pretty much every big tent superhero film that comes out. Edit: to be clear, CriticalDrinker is one such hack in case there was any confusion.

Wyatt Russel as John Walker seems like 20% Snake Plissken mixed with 35% Jack Burton.

I always love to hear auteurs weighing in on Disney movies.