I have read a lot less film criticism since Roger Ebert died though. It seems like recently anything remotely enjoyable on rotten tomatoes gets above 90.
The vast majority of the web has devolved similarly. Interested in a widget? If you Google "Widget Reviews" the first page is drowned out by listicles. Google gets the ad money, the listicle website gets the referral money, Amazon gets the retailer's cut plus maybe another Prime membership. There's very little incentive for fair and honest criticism on the web and every incentive for the big players to drown it out.
Roger Ebert [1] and Gene Siskel [2] were my introduction to analysis and argumentation. Watching two adults getting into a argument and discussing something using some sort of rules-of-engagement fascinated me. That they viewed a piece from so many angles, criticism is a skill and an art. Opinion shouldn't occupy more than 10% of result. ;)
I didn't understand the depth of that personal and professional relationship until I saw an interview with Ebert, where he teared up at the loss of his friend Gene. [3]
What are some other professional duos?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Ebert
Long gone now but the trio of Howard Cosells, Don Meredith and Frank Gifford enamored me similarly as a young boy, and for similar reasons to the point of today I still find sports commentary far more enthralling than the game itself.
My favorite duo today, while a biased favorite as a local are Len Casper and Jim DeShaies who are the home announcers of the Chicago Cubs. They bring a spirit and joviality influenced by deep reverence for the game of baseball that I don’t think can be touched by any other broadcasting duo in the league (this is relegated to television broadcast announcers, there are too many to name in radio I think).
Every time a Cubs hitter knocks one out onto Waveland, and Len lets out an “oh BABY that ball is GONE” I like to imagine the late legendary Haray Caray is looking down on the booth smiling upon this generation of Cubs color commentator.
They’re both gone now, and the new TV crew is ok, but their radio announcers, Scott Franzke and Larry Andersen are great. They’re funny, have a deep knowledge of the game, and they know when to let the game breath a little. Baseball and radio are such a great combination, when done well.
Car Talk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Itself_(2014_film)
I have been wanting to join http://blog.scarecrow.com/ for awhile now, it is a Seattle based video rental place with lots of rare movies and videos. Years ago we rented 2001 on laserdisc and a laserdisc player. Not quite as cool as running a film projector but still a fun experience.
If it wasn't clear in my first paragraph, Siskel and Ebert were definitely in a class of their own in the professionalism and thoroughness they brought to film criticism.
Like imagine going to work at a generic office and trying to talk about a half forgotten French movie like The Green Ray. There are too many unknowns (no recognizable cast, foreign film, kind of old) and I don’t think the average person has the fortitude to stand up to that kind of social situation so they avoid it instinctively.
But Netflix could definitely try harder instead of nurturing lazy entertainment. I don’t expect much from them since they made Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 2 in English. What a lame decision.
that movie was awful, especially in comparison to the original. it had none of the innuendo and poetry, more a punch in the face.
imho, the hollowing out of american film began ~20 years ago, with netflix being just a milestone in that evolution. i've been much more interested in foreign films as a result. i'm currently going through the recent back canon of korean films (take care of my cat, oldboy, mother), and it's been great! reminds me of the 90's in american film--while today's films are technically and visually more sophisticated, storytelling and character development has suffered measurably. older french films (and others) are great for that too. the big american blockbusters are fun to watch in the moment but feel like empty calories afterwards.
Now, however, those initial contracts have expired, and a host of streaming services have popped up. If I want to find a movie, I need to fire up Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, and Amazon Prime, then run a search on each of them. Half the time, I still fall back to placing a hold at my local library. I don't think Netflix is pushing new shows because they think the new shows are best. I think they are pushing new shows because they are desperately trying to pivot from a streaming company to a production studio, and the only way to do so is to downplay older media.
You tell what you subscribe to, and it'll search all the catalogs at once.
I'd love a service like this that works internationally (or better yet, a world where I don't need this sort of thing).
I have admittedly discovered a handful of great authors via Goodreads recommendations, but they’re big names I think I would have eventually found anyway (e.g. Brandon Sanderson), and I spent a lot of time adding books I’d read and carefully considering how to rate each one.
I’m actually broadly curious why these systems aren’t more effective. It seems like such a perfect system on paper.
In comparison, when I go rate movies on IDMb I'm rarely more than one star away from the average rating, so IMDb serves my needs quite well, anyway.
I read a comparison (linked on HN) between IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, and Metacritic which used statistical analysis and concluded Metacritic was most accurate.
The movie you mentioned (I don't know about it) gets 82/100 on Metacritic [1], and a must see reward (whatever that means). 82 is high.
The director of the movie is JJ Abrams who seems to turn anything he touches into gold (with one recent exception, IIRC).
The TV Series rating link: call me old or highbrow but I really thought Rod Serling's "The Twilight Zone" should be in the top 10. Nope, not even in the top 146.
The U.S. "The Office" makes the top 146 (#13) but not the U.K. version.
Fawlty Towers? Nowhere.
Etc.
OP here. If you have a better source, use it. Which source is the best was not the point of the article anyway. The point was that you should look for good stuff, not blindly watch the new movie or read the new book.
The article uses Star Trek (2009) as its example of a mediocre film. Its IMDB rating is 7.9/10 from over 500k votes over 11 years -- surely this would place the film squarely in the "tried and tested" category.
If I look on some smaller sites I see a different story. Letterboxd: 7.2/10, 234k votes RateYourMusic: 6.4/10, 3k votes The first site has a higher ratio of capital f Film fans and the second site is a much smaller site focused on music. Using these three data points I can deduct that Star Trek (2009) is probably a decent franchise action movie that most will find enjoyable but won't stand up to scrutiny as a stand alone film or for those expecting something more substantial.
The article is right that it's so much easier to access the history of a medium than in the past. It's interesting to me when a previously unknown work from 25+ years ago is rediscovered and entered into "the canon". In alternative music a recent example is Long Season by Fishmans from 1996.
But going through the canonical "best of" lists for a medium is more-or-less a gateway to developing and discovering your own taste in these things (a process that never ends). You shouldn't put much trust in any single source.
Something that's missing now with this intermingling of old and new art is historical context. A film streaming platform is just a directory of video files attached to 250px images and paragraph blurbs. What is Netflix saying about film and its viewers when it has less than 50 films pre-1980? Now that watching 2000+ films before the age of 30 is common for film fans, what will that mean for the future of film?