| I disagree that critic reviews are inherently prescriptive. Major blockbusters rely on cliches for the same reason that supermarket chains spend ridiculous amounts of money trying to get every store to look and feel the same: people find familiarity comforting. But to people who watch thousands upon thousands of movies this gets astoundingly boring. Take any hobby. Literally any one of them. The people who are really into it, whatever you are thinking about, will prefer different stuff from what casual fans like. Why do people die from erotic self-asphyxiation? Because we have a compulsion to escalate and to push things further. We need novelty. We need new stuff. We go mad if it's just the same thing over and over. At least that's true for most of us. Not everyone takes it all that far, but when you invest a significant amount of time doing one thing in particular, you're always going to want to take it to greater heights. And that's the thing about critic reviews: they represent movie fans suffering from the cinematic equivalent of erotic self-asphyxiation. Old, tired cliches and predictable plots? No. They want something they haven't seen before. Art movies are incredibly weird, and film critics love them. Imagine your job is rating beers. And you think pilsners are fine but super boring. But people get incredibly mad at you for dissing their favorite pilsners, and they think you're a pretentious snob for recommending imperial stouts. And they want you to give super-high ratings to ... run of the mill pilsners. That's what I imagine it's like being a film critic. |
I would say that there's so many different ways to appreciate films, so many different types of audiences, and such wildly different intentions behind the films and the critics who write about them. It seems reductive and a bit misguided, to me, for someone to write an article about the divergence between metascore and imdb ratings. It's comparing two gigantic blobs of scores and drawing straight lines through them. Does it actually say anything interesting? No in my opinion.
I mean, sure, the films with super-high metacritic scores are worth watching. They're a part of "the canon"-- although for the life of me I could never get through Citizen Kane. But a metacritic score is worth about as much as an imdb score. It's a blunt measurement.
The value of a well written review has little to do with "the score". Many include "a score" because they're forced to, but it's so much better to just pay attention to what the critic is actually saying in the review. It might speak to you if you're in the right headspace, and provide some insight into the film that you hadn't considered. They're typically more valuable to read AFTER you've seen the film. But if you find a writer you grok, you'll get some threads to pull on that will open up all kinds of film experiences you would have never had.
The value of an audience score is garbage, by itself, without any recommendation algorithm to match up your viewing habits and limit the pool of films presented to you. Even then, the high-scores mean almost nothing though the bottom-of-the-barrel low ones usually can be trusted to actually be bad.