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A reputational version of the backward bending demand curve When I saw this…
My first impulse when seeing the professional critic score compared to the ‘audience’ score was “hmm, this might be worth seeing.” 😀
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Never take the word of a professional critic. As with anything, ask someone who has shelled out their own money for the product or service.
It is well-worth seeing.
Maybe not worth the subscription that I paid to the Daily Wire, but close.
A somewhat unrealistic ending, otherwise fairly credible, very well acted and absolutely gripping.
A Statue Has Never Been Set Up in Honour of a Critic – Jean Sibelius.
I thoroughly enjoyed that movie, well recommended.
Not my cup of tea but the musical Les Miserables was panned by the critics, which in the world of musical theatre is often the kiss of death. It was an immediate box office hit due to the theatre lovers who also went to see it raving about it to everyone that they knew.
Damn those deplorable audiences. They’re like GG people for movies. You point them to woke stuff, you try to help them improve, and then they like this crap. The director’s a neanderthal, the film fails to recognize the school shooters’ real pain, and the opening scene glorifies shooting majestic animals like elk! With guns!
And not a single transsexual in the cast . . .
Alan,
Jean Sibelius went on one of his week-long drinking trips with his mates, his wife Aino asked, Jean, when can I expect you to come back home? Jean replied, dear Aino, I am a composer, not a fortune-teller.
I watched the movie last night on recommendation from Samizdata, it was quite good, amusing in parts and enjoyable.
Quite why there is such a disconnect between the lefty press critics and the audience I don’t know. Maybe they’ve just forgotten how to have a bit of mindless fun and excitement.
One complained “Why film Die Hard as a school shooting?”
To which my only response was “Why not?”. After all, it’s only a movie.
Do you have any idea how terrifying “they” find that idea? Gamergate was and sort of still is way bigger than many realise.
It’s because they are so far up their own arses, they can only see their molars.
Critics are writing for their own egos, to show the world how clever and right-on they are, not to genuinely review a piece of work from a potential audience’s point of view. They deplore the kind of people who watch popular entertainment.
The same disconnect exists between those who commission bbc drama series and their viewers. (see also Doctor Who, Top Gear etc etc etc)
This could be about to change. Gotta do something with those empty plinths.
A Statue Has Never Been Set Up in Honour of a Critic – Jean Sibelius.
False. As exhibits one, two, three, four, and five I give you Karl Marx, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin L. King, and Nelson Mandela, and Januarius Aloysius MacGahan .
(Granted the last three’s statuary postdates Sibelius.)
Staghounds:
To be honest, I felt that Vissarion Belinsky was the best counter-example.
Quite why there is such a disconnect between the lefty press critics and the audience I don’t know.
It’s because they are so far up their own arses, they can only see their molars.
Critics are writing for their own egos, to show the world how clever and right-on they are, not to genuinely review a piece of work from a potential audience’s point of view. They deplore the kind of people who watch popular entertainment.
Spot on.
And as Clovis Sangrail puts it, it’s an absolutely gripping film – marvelously well done.
This is interesting.
Usually, I see the other way: Good reputation by the critics but bad by the audience.
Those are the woke movies. The deplorable movies get ratio’ed the other way.
Which is good to know when choosing movies. Woke tends to be dreck.
Yes film critics, like game critics, are largely far left – if they hate something it may well be good.
Frankfurt School Marxist doctrines dominate most things now. For example, I am presently watching “Ski Sunday” on television.
This is a show about skiing and winter sports – but the presenters said (a few minutes ago) “winter sports are not diverse [they meant there are not enough people with black and brown skin], we must act COLLECTIVELY (his stress) to change this” and there was an interview on this – with some person being lectured on “lack of diversity”.
Oh – right now both presenters are now denouncing too many “white” people in winter sports again. And now they have a person with dark skin complaining about something – it is going on and on.
Well there you go – one can not watch a show about skiing without a Marxist lecture about how winter sports resorts were built as “safe spaces for WHITE people – that is a FACT” (says some person), it is not a fact at all – as when these places were built there were hardly any non white people in the British Isles, no one was terrified of being attacked by black people in the Highlands of Scotland (it is not a “fact” – it is a lunatic fantasy).
I could not give a Tinker’s curse what colour someone’s skin is – I just want them to shut up about all this Marxist nonsense (yes they show the Cliched Fist Marxist salute – and the Marxist, founded 2014, Black Lives Matter organisation). By the way George Floyd died of DRUGS – and the idea that Minneapolis (Woke Central for years) is “systematically racist” is about as likely as me being the Emperor of the Planet Mars.
“A provocative and inspiring film” says some white lady (who knows she would be SACKED by the television station if she said one word against all this bovine excrement) – well yes if you want to PROMOTE racialism by shoving all this Frankfurt School stuff down our throats
Still back to the subject – “Run, Hide and Fight” may be a good film. I will look into it.
Ah I think I understand – the best way to end a school shooting is to FIGHT BACK.
That is just a guess – so no need for a Spoiler Alert.
Firearms used to be common at American schools (teachers would go hunting – indeed training students in gun safety was common).
Then firearms were banned (by a series of moves over time – even the Boy Scouts stopped teaching gun safety and marksmanship, which used to be central to them) and mass school shootings started.
Mass shootings always happen in places which are “Gun Free Zones” (even the mass shooting on a military base – by Major H. – the Clinton Administration banned military people carrying firearms unless ordered to do so).
We are NOT ALLOWED TO DRAW ANY CONCLUSIONS from mass shootings always happening in Gun Free Zones.
Alan Peakall, good catch, but we both forgot George Orwell, who probably had “Critic” on his pay stubs.
The “Audience Score” will have to go, it is deeply problematic.
I think Perry in the OP has this the wrong way round. Yes, there are movies (and all sorts) that are slagged off by reviewers but loved by audiences but a bigger issue (for me anyway) is reviewers bigging-up dreadful films.
“The Deerhunter”, for example, is seen by many as a masterpiece. I regard it (and I tried – God Help me I did) as unwatcheable. And there are others…
As to Sibelius (one of my fave composers BTW) my favourite story about him is – and, yes he liked a drink. Well… he’d gone off to his cabin in the woods to compose. He got utterly wrecked on vodka and became convinced there was someone stalking round his hut so he went out. It was only later he realised he’d been following his own foot-prints in the snow. But a brilliant musician.
Rob – on “Wikipedia” the Audience Score has already gone.
They do not allow you to report the Audience Score – only the Critics (leftists) Score.
And if you complain about that (on the “Talk” sections of Wikipedia) they are likely to censor your words and ban you.
It is a bit like the “Conspiracy Theory” that Cultural side of Agenda 21 involved CENSORSHIP – if you mention this (other than to sneer at it as a “Conspiracy Theory”) they will CENSOR you.
That is one way of ending complaints about CENSORSHIP – just CENSOR the complaints.
While not disputing for a moment that professional critics can be élitist, out of touch and more concerned with projecting an image of cleverness than with attempting to be objective, there is an element of apples and oranges here. The audience is by definition composed of people who decided that this looked like the type of film they would enjoy watching. That’s going to skew your figures straight away.
As well as communicating other important points, George Orwell’s short and grimly hilarious essay, “Confessions of a book reviewer” implies that a representative statue would be unflattering. (The essay is quick to read and not wholly irrelevant to this thread – including the Thurber cartoon described at the end.)
The same kind of reviewer behaviour is covered, from the author’s point of view, by C.S.Lewis in his essay “On Criticism” – likewise amusing and tangentially relevant to the thread.
Another Lewis essay – I forget which – observes that some criticism just reveals that the critic hates the kind of literature the author was trying to write, and might hate it more the better it was written.
I think this limits AFT’s point about viewers versus reviewers (AFT, February 24, 2021 at 2:30 pm). Viewers who chose to watch ‘Run, Hide, Fight’ were viewers who hoped to enjoy a well-made film of that kind – and would notice if it disappointed them. Some of the critics may have no use for ‘action films’ whether good or bad, and, like the reviewers in Orwell and Lewis, only watch any of it to have just enough detail to damn it.