Criticism as Entertainment

post by Elizabeth (pktechgirl) · 2020-01-09T22:20:01.058Z · LW · GW · 12 comments

Contents

  Media Reviews
  Why Are You Talking About This?
None
12 comments

ETA: This post relies on video embeds that didn't carry over when LW imported it. For the full experience, see here.

Media Reviews

There is a popular genre of video that consist of shitting on other people’s work without any generative content. Let me provide some examples.

First, Cinema Sins. This is the first video I selected when looking for a movie I’d seen with a Cinema Sins I hadn’t (i.e. it’s not random, but it wasn’t selected for being particularly good or bad).

The first ten sins are:

1. Use of a consistent brand for props in the movie they’d have to have anyway, unobtrusively enough that I never noticed until Cinema Sins pointed it out.
2. A character being mildly unreasonable to provoke exposition.
3. The logo
4. Exposition that wasn’t perfectly justified in-story
5. A convenience about what was shown on screen
6. A font choice (from an entity that in-universe would plausibly make bad font choices)
7. An omission that will nag at you if you think about it long enough or expect the MCU to be a completely different thing, with some information about why it happened.
8. In-character choices that would be concerning in the real world and I would argue are treated appropriately by the movie, although reasonable people could disagree
9. Error by character that was extremely obviously intentional on the part of the film makers. There is no reasonable disagreement on this point.
10. An error perfectly in keeping with what we know about the character.

Of those, three to four could even plausibly be called sins of the movie- and if those bother you, maybe the MCU is not for you. The rest are deliberate choices by filmmakers to have characters do imperfect things. Everyone gets to draw their own line on characters being dumb- mine is after this movie but before 90s sitcoms running on miscommunication- but that’s irrelevant to this post because Cinema Sins is not helping you determine where a particular movie is relative to your line. Every video makes the movie sound exactly as bad as the last, regardless of the quality of the underlying movie. It’s like they analyze the dialogue sentence by sentence and look to see if there’s anything that could be criticized about it.

Pitch Meeting is roughly as useful, but instead of reacting to sentences, it’s reading the plot summary in a sarcastic tone of voice.

Pitch Meeting is at least bringing up actual problems with Game of Thrones season 8. But I dare you to tell if early Game of Thrones was better or worse than season 8, based on the Pitch Meeting.

I keep harping on “You can’t judge movie quality by the review”, but I don’t actually think that’s the biggest problem. Or rather, it’s a subset of the problem, which is you don’t learn anything from the review: not whether the reviewer considered the movie “good” or not, and not what could be changed to do make it better. Contrast with Zero Punctuation, a video game review series notorious for being criticism-as-entertainment, that nonetheless occasionally likes things, and at least once per episode displays a deep understanding of the problems of a game and what might be done to fix it.

Why Are You Talking About This?

It’s really, really easy to make something look bad, and the short-term rewards to doing so are high. You never risk looking stupid or having to issue a correction. It’s easier to make criticism funny. You get to feel superior. Not to mention the sheer joy in punishing bad things. But it’s corrosive. I’ve already covered (harped on) how useless shitting-on videos are for learning or improvement, but it goes deeper than that. Going in with those intentions changes how you watch the movie. It makes flaws more salient and good parts less so. You become literally less able to enjoy or learn from the original work.

Maybe this isn’t universal, but for me there is definitely a trade off between “groking the author’s concepts” and “interrogating the author’s concepts and evidence”. Groking is a good word here: it mostly means understand, but includes playing with the idea and applying it what I know.  That’s very difficult to do while simultaneously looking for flaws.

Should it be, though? Generating testable hypotheses should lead to greater understanding and trust or less trust, depending on the correctness of the book. So at least one of my investigation or groking procedures are wrong.

 

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