David Cronenberg , director of culty arthouse classics like Videodrome , The Fly and A History of Violence , says film criticism is no longer “ effective . ” And he blames sites like Rotten Tomatoes , that offer aggregate feeling rather than reason out theme .
Photo bycharles taylorvia Shutterstock
A movie critic ’s line of work is to offer informed analysis of a pic , based on an understanding of the medium ’s history as a popular graphics form . Usually this take gauge whether the movie succeeds in a phone number of ways , from storytelling and dissemble to sheer esthetical beaut . A good critic usually has a nuanced enough scene of a movie that it might be hard to reduce the integral affair to “ thumbs up ” or “ thumb down . ” That ’s why even the noted thumb referee , Siskel and Ebert , worked together . That way , you were guaranteed multiple perspectives — reminding you that sometimes you get a thumb up and a pollex down and you just have to live with that ambiguity .
But sites like Rotten Tomatoes have trained people to think of reviews as “ reflecting the opinions of the lot ” rather than the analytical brainstorm of a few movie nerd who spend a lot of time think about this Irish bull . And that ’s what film maker Cronenberg keen the other Clarence Day .
Cronenberg told CBC News :
Even now if you go to Rotten Tomatoes , you have critics and then you have ‘ Top Critics ’ , and what that really means is that there are legitimate critic who have actually pay their due and worked hard and are in a licit web site connected perhaps with a newspaper or perhaps not . Then there are all these other people who just say they ’re critics and you read their writing and they ca n’t write , or they can write and their penning reveal that they ’re quite stupefied and ignorant . … Some voices have emerged that are really quite good who never would have emerged before , so that ’s the top side of that . But I think it have in mind that it ’s thin out the effective critics .
Certainly there ’s a good reason why you might want to know , in congeries , whether everybody on the net thinks a movie is skilful or not . But pop music acculturation is n’t like a figurer — you ca n’t benchmark it to see whether it actually goes as fast as advertised . Your gasoline mileage may vary . Which is why we demand decisive analysis of movies that goes beyond the good / bad double star . Sometimes a movie succeeds in one path , but fails in another .
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