Are negative reviews mostly by generally unhappy people these days?

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Preserving the sanctity of cinema. Subtitles preferred, mainstream dismissed, and always in search of yet another film you have never heard of. I speak fluent French New Wave.

The thread veered into discussing box office as an index of quality before I offered commentary on this idea.

Here is what you had to say,
And then
I then responded to a Phoenix74 who claimed that
The idea that it gives no clue is well-beyond the mark, IMO and I have been arguing for the moderate position that popularity/box office are weak evidence in favor of quality, but it is still evidence.

So, the thread was "off-topic" before I commented. You made the comments about $$$ and quality which helped drive it "off-topic." My comments actually provide moderate support for your side of the case.

Why do you keep assuming everyone on this board is a kid? Would this be considered a proverbial axe to grind in regards to age demographics?

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Whatever is going on, it's hilarious

We've had a lot of 'interestingly different, yet similar' members joining and then jumping right into the discussion. Curious I tell ya.

(*New Guy looks up, abashed*) Wait... what? Was I supposed to stay out of this thread?

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"If it was priggish for an older generation of reviewers to be ashamed of what they enjoyed and to feel they had to be contemptuous of popular entertainment, it's even more priggish for a new movie generation to be so proud of what they enjoy that they use their education to try to place trash within the acceptable academic tradition." -- Pauline Kael

Most certainly not!

Keep on postin!

You'll have to excuse Citizen. He is cloyingly coy to the point of obscurity.



So long as you don't read me the Riot Act for trying to shore-up your weak position (looking at you BKB), you're fine by me.

Just let's to get a bit more focused on the topic at hand, please. We are drifting a bit too far afield on this most recent page.

Thanks!

So back to the subject: Are negative reviews mostly by generally unhappy people these days?

No. I sometimes read old reviews for films when they were first released and there's plenty of negative film criticism back in the day. I'm talking even back in the early to mid 20th century. Some of the harshest critics are Broadway theater critics and that goes way back too. I've even seen movies about nasty critics such as:
Critic's Choice (1963)

Every one of us, when we go to a movie, brings what I like to call the "baggage of expectation" with them. Every time we go to see a movie, our expectations are based on what kind of movie we're led to believe it is, based on our understanding of genre conventions as well as what the trailer has led us to believe. But quite often, we're left unsatisfied by the movie we've seen because it didn't necessarily conform to those expectations, and we're left disappointed by what we feel the film isn't. Which then leaves the question: What exactly is the movie we're seeing?

We all know that certain movies achieve an elevated status within popular culture in spite of being a box-office failure upon its initial release, or if not exactly a failure, then merely a lukewarm, "break-even" sort of success. Sometimes movies are just ahead of their time, or sometimes merely out of sync with the audience's (and critics') tastes at the time. A good example of this latter phenomenon would be the relative failures of John Carpenter's The Thing and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner in, which were both out of sync in 1982, the year of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial.

Quite often, it takes a while for us to understand what exactly the virtues of a movie are. David Fincher's Fight Club underperformed during its initial theatrical run in late 1999, and people's first reactions to it ranged from perplexity to outright hostility. Quite frankly, as much as I outright love Fight Club (it's one of my Top 10 favorites of all time), my feelings about it are still in a state of flux, and I understand why the movie made (and continues to make) people somewhat nervous. But it's one of those films that always reveals something new and offers new insights every time I watch it.

In my opinion, professional movie critics are especially vulnerable to this "baggage" because their job entails that they keep seeing one movie after another after another on a regular basis, and under such circumstances they can become numb. Honestly, I think it would be nothing short of amazing if a critic managed to maintain any sort of intuition or understanding of what they're seeing, or if they could tell a well-intentioned, professional piece of hackwork that ticks off all the correct boxes from an original, uncategorizable work out of left field from some maverick not given to observing rules and conventions.

Part of my problem - if I'm to be perfectly honest - is that I'm disinclined to be negative about any movie I see. If I pay a good chunk of money to see a film in a theater, or pay an even greater sum for a DVD or Blu-ray, I want to feel like my investment was worth it, and I focus on what was positive about my viewing experience. And if it doesn't necessarily deliver the goods that I expect it to, then I'm more inclined to believe that my own compass is off or that I'm misperceiving something. Partially it's just because I want to separate myself from those "nattering nabobs of negativism" (thank you, Spiro Agnew) who are always first off the block to criticize and trash something before anybody else has a chance to get a positive word in. Another thing is, sometimes the "failures" tend to possess kinks and quirks and eccentricities that more successful movies are too - for lack of a better word - sensible to have. Hence my great love of John Boorman, whose Exorcist II: The Heretic and Zardoz continue to perplex and appall people who consider themselves possessing sensible taste, but whom I am a die-hard fan of.

Perhaps the ultimate test of whether any movie is worthwhile or not is this: Do you remember the movie five years down the road? Does the movie leave an imprint or mark on your psyche? How many times do you find yourself rewatching it? I remember when I saw the J.J. Abrams-produced Star Wars Sequel Trilogy (2015-2019), I remember wanting to like each film perhaps more than I ultimately did. I'm never the type of guy who sits down and tightly folds his arms and thinks, "OK, impress me!" But four years on from The Rise of Skywalker, the most telling thing I can relate about the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy is this: Those films don't particularly resonate with me, and I even forget many of their specific details and plot elements. (OK, I guess The Last Jedi gets extra marks for being perversely contrarian, which is something I always appreciate, albeit in measured doses.) Something else you might like to know: I purchased the Blu-rays for each film in the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, and I've seen each of them a total of once!

Furthermore, in my opinion, the artistic failure of the 2015-2019 Star Wars films definitely gives a new luster to George Lucas' Prequel Trilogy (1999-2005). Granted, those films are not necessarily perfect (my unconditional love of Revenge of the Sith notwithstanding), but at least they look like the work of someone who had a plan and stuck to it! George Lucas may be a dullard when it comes to dialogue, and he may be tone-deaf when it comes to the chemistry of his actors, but he's certainly a deft hand at story structure and one of the great visual masters of cinema history.

Anyway...

Well that's it!! That must mean the critics back then were unhappy since they gave negative reviews, right?? This is a silly thread and all because the poster who started it doesn't apparently like when a movie he or she likes gets panned and must mean they live unhappy lives and as a result, we're graced with this thread..

No. Quantumania is actually worse. The International Criminal Court has designated it a war crime; formal charges from the Hague, centering specifically upon the MODOK sequences, will be forthcoming.


Let justice be done.

Some of you may have noticed, but I am deleting (and will continue to delete) posts that are only about other posters/the thread itself.

You can talk about the topic, or you can refrain from replying. Those are the options.

For sure. Considering the movie production cycle and the timeline of plague problems, it's not a surprise. We're in the thick of movies that were gestated in plague time and like the rest of us, movie writers and makers don't seem to know the way out. I had a similar reaction to Oppenheimer, like they needed some writers who could make that story line work better. Having read several books and seen some of the older movies, I thought that a Nolan version of this story could be epic, but I ended up scratching my head, wondering who was in charge of continuity. I'm not a critic, and went enthusiastically, but was disappointed.

That's not promising. Fat Man and Little Boy already covered this terrain, so they should've already look at someone else's draft of the assignment. And heaven knows how many non-fiction and fiction books have also focused on the Manhattan Project.

Yep. The movie makes it seem like they could just go to the supermarket and buy a couple cans of Uranium and Plutonium. Enrichment of Uranium and making Plutonium were half of the project. Admittedly, given the title of the movie, it was mainly focused on Oppenheimer himself but nevertheless, given a 3 hour run time, a mention of how they obtained the fuel for the bombs seems like a necessary part of the big picture. In addition, I didn't think that Matt Damon, generally a guy with a nice demeanor, did a very good job of mimicking the irascible, grouchy Leslie Groves. He was the guy responsible for cracking the whip on those egg-head scientists who wanted to do science but had to make a monstrous bomb.

Adding to my list of complaints was the fact that they side-lined Leo Szilard, the guy who actually puzzled out how a bomb might work, in the years before the Manhattan Project. He was the guy who wrote an important letter to the government detailing the importance of the project and the horrifying thought that the Nazis might get there first. Szilard actually took out a patent on the concept of fission back in the 1930's. He was in the cast, but I didn't notice him.

This is very interesting, as it’s the first time I see something similar to what I feel quite often articulated that clearly. I don’t think for me it has anything to do with my ‘investment’, as I watch films primarily to cope with life and they have been, in many ways, my primary investment for a long time. But I definitely am disinclined to be overly negative about films. I mean, there are some I find truly awful (Where’d You Go, Bernadette and such), but even with those, I always retrospectively try to find something I enjoyed. I usually watch films alone so it’s not to appease anyone or anything, but I do find it quite a natural thing to do, and usually there is something, be that the soundtrack or particular scenes or whatnot.

Either this or you are not able to follow and/or understand the matter at hand.

You know, there are in fact studies about how people tend to vote/rate things and it is already proven that people tend to rate/vote more negative when they are having a bad day.

So from a psychological point of view, this question this thread is raising, is everything else but silly nonsense.

You should also put in mind that i wasn´t stating facts with the thread-title, because i was just raising a question (that´s why the question mark!).

So once again, you are probably the exact prove of the formula. You criticized this thread in a negative way (along with sarcasm) because you were either already in a bad mood before you entered this thread or you got into one by reading it, this or that doesn´t really matters and fact is: Your negative response is based upon negative emotions.

Also, this thread ain´t about people who just rate a movie negative, which is in fact a "bad movie". This thread is about long-term-downvoters and the general negativity spreading online because there are obviously negative people who thrive on negativity these days and i don´t think those people are "happy people" at all, especially considering the more or less troublesome world we are living in today.

You never would've made it with Siskel & Ebert back in the day and the amount of Thumbs Down these 2 used to give when critiquing movies, but I guess they were miserable with unhappy lives at the time, right??