Film Criticism

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domino harvey
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Re: Film Criticism

#951 Post by domino harvey » Wed Jan 31, 2018 11:20 am

It is shockingly easy to spot accounts that use fake follower providers without clicking a single profile, since there are countless free sites that will show you the span of new followers and these don't form an organic rise. I think it's highly likely Roeper was already someone they wanted to ditch and this was an excuse to get him out of his contract, though

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tenia
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Re: Film Criticism

#952 Post by tenia » Wed Jan 31, 2018 11:22 am

domino harvey wrote:It is shockingly easy to spot accounts that use fake follower providers without clicking a single profile, since there are countless free sites that will show you the span of new followers and these don't form an organic rise.
So it's pretty much the same than for some reviewing websites where bad movies' 5 stars Spectators reviews are all from brand new account with no other activity than posting this 5 stars review ?

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domino harvey
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Re: Film Criticism

#953 Post by domino harvey » Wed Jan 31, 2018 11:24 am

I have no doubt there are fake follower, subscriber, or reviewer providers for other platforms like YouTube or whatever else

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Big Ben
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Re: Film Criticism

#954 Post by Big Ben » Wed Jan 31, 2018 12:02 pm

I've seen quite a few people come to his defense of Twitter and they're echoing what's being said here. It seems slightly ridiculous when politicians have the same thing happening to them. I myself have fake followers (You don't get to choose who follows you if your Twitter is open.) and have had on more than one occasion been spammed with pornography from a bot.

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cdnchris
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Re: Film Criticism

#955 Post by cdnchris » Wed Jan 31, 2018 12:10 pm

Starting to read that sentence I was expecting it to finish with a sexual assault charge. So yeah...

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colinr0380
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Re: Film Criticism

#956 Post by colinr0380 » Wed Jan 31, 2018 1:25 pm

Big Ben wrote:I've seen quite a few people come to his defense of Twitter and they're echoing what's being said here. It seems slightly ridiculous when politicians have the same thing happening to them. I myself have fake followers (You don't get to choose who follows you if your Twitter is open.) and have had on more than one occasion been spammed with pornography from a bot.
I barely post on my Twitter page and have had the same thing, though on logging in I have perhaps the worst fake follower ever: The Donald J. Trump, although it cannot be the President himself as that account only joined in August 2015 and has not tweeted since 4th September 2015! (Presumably that was the point when the joke about Trump becoming President one day stopped being funny!)

But yes buying followers seems like it is another facet of the Rotten Tomatoes effect, where your salary or success is tied into an arbitrary count that definitively calculates your 'worth' through your 'popularity'. I haven't managed to get to Series 3 of Black Mirror yet, but didn't Bryce Dallas Howard act in an episode all about that?

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med
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Re: Film Criticism

#957 Post by med » Thu Feb 01, 2018 10:07 am

DarkImbecile wrote:
Ribs wrote:I think the main concern is it's possible he leveraged his Twitter following into salary negotiations, in which case spending the $500 or whatever to get an additional 100k+ followers is deceitful and taking advantage of their employer.
I know what you mean here, and you may well be right, but my immediate reaction was:

"Oh no! An employee manipulating information in order to take advantage of the employer?! Everything is upside down!" <clutches pearls>
To continue speculating, if Roeper did it for monetary gain, why would the Chicago Sun-Times prioritize the number of Twitter followers their writers have? Do they think it generates extra traffic? Because it doesn't. What Roeper did was silly and, at worst, embarrassing for him, but his employers shouldn't be placing financial importance on the number of Twitter followers he—or anyone else—has.

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hearthesilence
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Re: Film Criticism

#958 Post by hearthesilence » Fri Feb 02, 2018 11:32 am

Filmmaker Jon Jost hasn't seen most of the Oscar nominees, so he's slowly making his way through them and posting reviews on his FB page. He's not known to be much of a fan of studio films (he already trashed Dunkirk last summer), so needless to say, it hasn't been an enjoyable experience for him thus far.

(Comments on those posts are also entertaining. Jost gives Tarkovsky the highest praise, Mark Rappaport thinks he's vastly overrated. A few people who knew Stan Brakhage talk about his habit of seeing nearly every film screening at the local theater and finding something to love about everything, even Hope Floats.)

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colinr0380
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Re: Film Criticism

#959 Post by colinr0380 » Thu May 31, 2018 6:35 pm


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DarkImbecile
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Re: Film Criticism

#960 Post by DarkImbecile » Tue Jun 19, 2018 7:48 pm


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Big Ben
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Re: Film Criticism

#961 Post by Big Ben » Tue Jun 19, 2018 8:28 pm

Film Twitter was all over this one and has been all day and I won't lie I've been getting a kick out of the "What the hell?" responses to it. This is sadly not the weirdest oversexed response I've seen to a movie in the last six months. Be sure to check out the people who thought Venom and the new Predator are worth fucking. I imagine come release time it'll be even worse.

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DarkImbecile
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Re: Film Criticism

#962 Post by DarkImbecile » Tue Jun 19, 2018 8:31 pm

Big Ben wrote:
Tue Jun 19, 2018 8:28 pm
This is sadly not the weirdest oversexed response I've seen to a movie in the last six months. Be sure to check out the people who thought Venom and the new Predator are worth fucking. I imagine come release time it'll be even worse.
Sure, but none of those people got published in The New Yorker!

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Boosmahn
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Re: Film Criticism

#963 Post by Boosmahn » Tue Jun 19, 2018 9:24 pm

This is gold. "And Daddy rested his cooling soda in his lap... watch out for flying popcorn."

What makes it even funnier is that this went through at least one other person who thought it was appropriate.

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furbicide
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Re: Film Criticism

#964 Post by furbicide » Tue Jun 19, 2018 11:19 pm

I'd say that boredom does strange things to people, but Lane actually seems to have liked these films (Egyptian religious references and all). Each to their own, Anthony – I still haven't forgiven my family for dragging me along to the first film when I was a teenager.

The question for me is less whether animated Disney characters are sexualised/fetishised (of course they are) and more whether The New Yorker's film review choices are leaving their writers sexually frustrated. If so, perhaps he and these Twitter types have something in common.

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Aunt Peg
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Re: Film Criticism

#965 Post by Aunt Peg » Wed Jun 20, 2018 10:24 am

Seems some thespians aren't happy with some of the negative reviews of their films and would like more diversity of film critics. I've never really taken any interested in the gender, race or age of critics reviews that I read. I just want thoughtful and meaningful well written reviews and lets face it it is the sort of job that I want to see people who love and are interested in cinema do. Furthermore, since the emergence of the internet anyone can be one if they want.

Mindy Kaling

Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, and Brie Larson

An interesting article from The Guardian on the issue

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Kirkinson
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Re: Film Criticism

#966 Post by Kirkinson » Wed Jun 20, 2018 12:00 pm


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colinr0380
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Re: Film Criticism

#967 Post by colinr0380 » Wed Jun 20, 2018 12:10 pm

After the Once Upon A Time In The West /Richard--W thing last week I continued on with Dave Kehr's second collection of his criticism in Movies That Mattered, and on the comment about children's films apparently only able to be reviewed by children (and on the slightly concerning more general argument that only the 'target audience' of a product should be able to have a say about it) I was just reading a January 1982 piece on the train home from work today on Disney films and the difference between family films and children's films, which climaxes with a comment on Time Bandits that feels apt to this debate:
Dave Kehr in Disney Films wrote:The problem with Time Bandits is that it tips its hand. It doesn't have the Disney sweetness and light for camouflage, and no adult could possibly miss what its up to. It's the perfect children's film in all but one respect - it isn't a family film as well. No self-respecting adult would take his child to a piece of propaganda as powerful as this; there aren't any birdies and bunnies and fairies to hide what's going on.The producers apparently realised that they had a problem, and the film was advertised everywhere as adult entertainment with an unjustified emphasis placed on its science fiction elements and its Monty Python connections. Time Bandits won't become a classic, because it's been blocked - censored, in a way - from the start. As the sad case of Time Bandits demonstrates, there is something paradoxical, self-contradictory, built into the very notion of children's films. They have to be made by adults and (at least partly) for adults. And yet, almost by definition, a good children's film is one that keeps adults way: grown ups should never be allowed to understand it.
I do think that "Prism of Misunderstanding" would make for an excellent title for a blog though!

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tenia
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Re: Film Criticism

#968 Post by tenia » Wed Jun 20, 2018 12:33 pm

Aunt Peg wrote:
Wed Jun 20, 2018 10:24 am
Seems some thespians aren't happy with some of the negative reviews of their films and would like more diversity of film critics. I've never really taken any interested in the gender, race or age of critics reviews that I read. I just want thoughtful and meaningful well written reviews and lets face it it is the sort of job that I want to see people who love and are interested in cinema do.
But it is true that one's background will make you proner to some biases and most critics aren't immune to that, so the profession definitely would gain from being more diverse.
This being said, it's also very likely that a movie mostly panned by the actual non-diverse critics would be panned by diverse ones, and it's quite obvious most these people are just trying to blame critics instead of the mediocre or bad movies they acted in. It's all truer that these non-diverse critics are the same that are positive about The Mindy Kaling Show, Master of None or Get Out (just to name a few). While the most famous black gay critic is Armond White, who seems to enjoy nothing more than going against the tide every single possible time. Yet, even he didn't like A Wrinkle in Time either.

In any case though, this is just a case of "Who needs film critics" (as the Guardian writes it). In France, it's almost a running joke as old as cinema itself. It turns out it mostly just is some kind of cognitive biases' personification : when people like or dislike movies, they prefer to be said they're the norm, not the outliers. Who's better for movies than film critics, just like you'd go to a doctor if you think you're ill or how you'd trust an airplane pilot to fly a plane ?
But art is a bit more complicated than that, so when a popular movie turns out to be mostly awful but yet succesful, well, that's just the critics being posh with popular movies. But when they like popular movies, where are their posh attitude ? Which is it ?
The distrust has always been there and never really died, but it mostly only exists in people's mind, because when you go and look in the figures, in individual movie scores, most of the time, it shows that critics aren't that biased. There are tropes, there are differences with the viewers' general preferences, but this rather is a shift aside than a true gap. It's even truer currently in the US with most Marvel movies drawing huge audiences AND being massively successful critically.

These are partly the same biases which allow for bad movies aimed at children getting more leniency from adults viewers. "Ah, but it's for kids !" That's a very poor defense.

But taking the problem in reverse, what Larson says (and specifically how she says it) wouldn't change the issue of diversity, it would actually just trade a lack of diversity for another one. If the main target of a movie is the only one reviewing it, how can one be sure that there isn't the exact opposite bias at work ?


But in the end, all this certainly have much more to do with the reviewer's skills than his personal background. There can be already lots of difference between 2 reviewers from the same background, and some of them are already very good at going past their own background to dig into the movies, learn a lot about and around them, and making sure their reviews allow for the best comprehension of the reviewed movie. Sadly, not all reviewers care that much, but I'm quite sure even reviewers from the "targeted" audience of A Wrinkle in Time or Ocean's 8 would be writing very superficial and biased fluff about them.

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knives
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Re: Film Criticism

#969 Post by knives » Wed Jun 20, 2018 1:41 pm

tenia wrote:
Wed Jun 20, 2018 12:33 pm
Aunt Peg wrote:
Wed Jun 20, 2018 10:24 am
Seems some thespians aren't happy with some of the negative reviews of their films and would like more diversity of film critics. I've never really taken any interested in the gender, race or age of critics reviews that I read. I just want thoughtful and meaningful well written reviews and lets face it it is the sort of job that I want to see people who love and are interested in cinema do.
But it is true that one's background will make you proner to some biases and most critics aren't immune to that, so the profession definitely would gain from being more diverse.
This being said, it's also very likely that a movie mostly panned by the actual non-diverse critics would be panned by diverse ones, and it's quite obvious most these people are just trying to blame critics instead of the mediocre or bad movies they acted in. It's all truer that these non-diverse critics are the same that are positive about The Mindy Kaling Show, Master of None or Get Out (just to name a few). While the most famous black gay critic is Armond White, who seems to enjoy nothing more than going against the tide every single possible time. Yet, even he didn't like A Wrinkle in Time either.
There are definitely cases where cultural differences do affect the way films are seen. This is blatantly true with what gets imported and celebrated (how many African comedies get imported compared to dramas). I remember a few years back getting into a row with Mike D'Angelo wherein he said outright that he doesn't have the perspective to enjoy African cinema (or religious cinema either). Domestically you can see that readily in how films by African American filmmakers are perceived where they can't break through the white barrier of critics unless the film uses the hegemonic film language. Films that readily take inspiration from black theater aesthetically let alone thematically can't break through. Now, admittedly, some of these films are bad such as the Tyler Perry ones, but you never see even those criticisms framed within their cultural context because most critics don't have it.

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Mr Sausage
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Film Criticism

#970 Post by Mr Sausage » Wed Jun 20, 2018 2:34 pm

Seems like having people with a wide and full experience of many other cultures and their products gives more diversity than accumulating people from this or that specific culture. Like tenia says, diverse cultures don’t really produce diverse opinions in the way proponents of diversity seem to think. What you end up with is just a lack of diversity in a different guise.

To get diversity, you need people who know more, have experienced more, read more, seen more, and who can combine disciplines fruitfully. We need people who can get outside their own bubbles, not more bubbles.

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knives
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Re: Film Criticism

#971 Post by knives » Wed Jun 20, 2018 2:49 pm

That's fair, and a lot more reasonable than what I took Tenia as saying. I don't, to run with my example of African American cinema, see evidence that every African American is connected to that artistic culture for example while some white or Asian people are. That said, and I hate to sound like Scalia here, but if the pool of critics is largely people from the same two or three schools who grew up in the same ten neighborhoods than that limits the opportunity for natural diversity. In that vein as much as I, for example, may enjoy and have a mature understanding of black theater, but that diversity of thought isn't going to be the same as someone naturally born and raised in that cultural milieu.

All of this reminds me of that reaction to that AXIOS photo which was rather monochrome. Certainly, as you say, there could be a diversity of knowledge and experience in that group, but by not being inborn to that experience their very perspective of that knowledge will be lacking. Mine, and I hope these actresses, argument isn't for more bubbles. Rather it is for a greater diversity of starting points.

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tenia
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Re: Film Criticism

#972 Post by tenia » Wed Jun 20, 2018 3:01 pm

Mr Sausage wrote:
Wed Jun 20, 2018 2:34 pm
We need people who can get outside their own bubbles, not more bubbles.
That's very well said.
knives wrote:
Wed Jun 20, 2018 1:41 pm
This is blatantly true with what gets imported and celebrated (how many African comedies get imported compared to dramas).
We've had the same issues with Japanese and then Korean movies in the early 2000s, when these 2 countries were mostly seen in Occident through their action and gangster movies, as if they were only producing these kind of movies. That was very problematic because it has, on the long run, created expectations about how these countries were "thinking" on screen and thus what their views towards this or that was. For Korea notably, I remember seeing a lot of reviews using the more violent movies as an explanation about how Korean industry was simply more lenient towards violence, almost as if a cultural thing. I highly doubt this was the case, but that this impression simply came from the kind of movies we were importing.
knives wrote:
Wed Jun 20, 2018 2:49 pm
That's fair, and a lot more reasonable than what I took Tenia as saying.
I might have poorly phrased my view, but Mr Sausage's post sums up quite well what I wanted to convey : summoning different communities to review this or that won't automatically mean a wider wiser view on what is reviewed, but might just mean getting other biases.
I also strongly believe that there shouldn't be the idea of people being put in "silos" like this, but only people with a higher willingness to dig and be curious about what they're going to write about, and I don't believe that, say, being Asian automatically makes you a better reviewer for some Asian movie (the reverse being true too).

I've seen that myself with Get Out : I had a colleague that went as far as saying that the main character could have been white and that it wouldn't have changed a thing in the movie (clearly missing the whole movie, to be it simply), while I had to remind him about how heavily referencial the movie was to the current US socio-racial climate and how this is a clear core element of the movie. But we're both white middle class men in their 30s, and yet, I was willing to dig a bit more about the movie, and he simply wasn't. He just didn't have this general knowledge, despite most of these references being explicited on the movie's IMDB trivia.
I hope I'm clearer that way.


This being written, I also strongly believe that there is a high need of new fresh blood in the current critics pool and that this renewal should come with a better demographic representation.

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knives
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Re: Film Criticism

#973 Post by knives » Wed Jun 20, 2018 3:10 pm

That's all fair and it seems to what extent there is disagreement it could fit on a needle's head. Certainly the Chinese thing is still true. Just look at what Johnnie To movies get exposure to see the whole thing in miniature. It would be theoretically nice for critics to be able to naturally think outside their bubbles and engage with works that don't fit their preconceived notions, but that's not an easy trait for people to acquire in general and until it becomes more greatly emphasized in schools, training, etc having more women or African American or Korean Americans or people not named Dave is a perfectly fine bandaid (which I suspect is the limit of our disagreement lies).

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tenia
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Re: Film Criticism

#974 Post by tenia » Wed Jun 20, 2018 3:19 pm

I actually understand and partially agree with your last point. It might be a fine band-aid until more people are able to go outside their comfort and habit zone, I'm just unsure of that, but it might just be a case of needing a demonstration through the example.


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