Maybe this belongs in “Everything Else”. If nothing else, that forum’s description for it mirrors my problem. To first know where to post, I must read the entire universe of posts. Books? Politics? Movies? Going with that.
I enjoyed reading the introduction to A. S. Hamrah’s collection of film reviews. I wanted to share it.
This was a delightful bit that resonated with my own observations.
The internet didn’t invent bad criticism or gullible and complicit thinking. For that I blame USA Today , which began the 1980s trend of dumbing-down news into bite-size nuggets, and Entertainment Weekly , which institutionalized the consumer-guide approach to film criticism.
Unlike Hamrah’s self-description in the essay, I enjoy many easily-approached or dumb movies. It’s the ones that fascinate me beyond my ability to articulate that I like having someone else put something into words. I hope to find reviews for those sorts of films when I read the book. Maybe they will provide reference points, maybe a possible path to new understanding and perspective.
The help for the forum asks me to consider what replies I want to have to this post. I feel fine without any. May no one be harmed, at minimum.
I find that I seem to not have enough understanding of movies to really say much more than I liked it or I didn’t. I can admire good scenes, which often include different camera angles, good acting, and good writing, and probably more. Usually I don’t know what to say other than I liked it.
I just watched The Hundred Foot Journey again for the third time, and I was struck by how important the different shots of food preparation were to the story. They seemed to add meaning and pacing. At one point a scene in which the budding chef cooked an omelet for the restaurant owner really stuck with me. The dialog was made soundless even though we could see them speaking. The action was the cooking and the camera focused on it with brief shots back to their faces. They had to cook together with him, the young chef auditioning for her kitchen, directing her with how to stir and just how much seasoning to add since his hands were bandaged due to injury. At the end she tasted his omelet and the camera was a rear shot so all we saw was her back, and it was all Helen Mirren’s reaction to the taste as shown by her changing posture that told the story. It seemed to me like great filmmaking, but I don’t really know what else to say other than it was moving and seemed just right. And I never would have even thought this much if this wasn’t a third viewing.
The funny thing about criticism is the specialized vocabulary different genres of criticism seem to have. You see a lot of the same adjectives used over and over and what do they really mean after awhile? A comedy can be a “romp” while an action movie can be “riveting.” Games can be a “mixed-bag,” like in real life most of us are used to taking home a mixed bag of something that is somehow mediocre because it’s mixed. I do my best not to buy a bag that has bad mixed in with good!
This isn’t true and unlike a lot of the people who say it, I’m pretty sure you know it. It is, instead, shorthand for “I disagreed so strongly with Tom on this one thing that in my head I have extended my disagreement to represent every opinion Tom has ever had.”
My dirty little secret is that my taste is far too mundane for any devoted contrarian.
Which is all a person ever really needs to do! Everything else is just gravy.
The difference for criticism is that it comes from someone who’s put time and practice into articulating it, and along the way has assembled a larger context for it. @_aaron’s post is exactly how folks should approach criticism and – spoiler! – it has nothing to do with whether you agree with a critic’s opinion:
That’s certainly what I look for when I read opinions. Whether I agree with the opinion is pretty much of no interest to me.
FAIL! Why do you say this after writing an insightful and informative paragraph about that scene?
I remember a writing workshop instructor who hated it if anyone said something was “moving.” He would say “engaging.” I always thought it was just a different word that meant sort of the same thing.
Excellent subject and thread @_aaron. Like @Mark_Asher I consider myself an everyman. I consume media through books and movies and games but I dont write for a living, and I worry when I talk about something it sounds less like prose and more like a baboon describing Monet, “paint, blurry, pretty.”
But I know that what I love most about particular critics or reviews is when they personalize things. When you feel THEIR feeling and experience of something, good or bad. Flowery wordsmithing aside, you can pick that out easily.
And like Mark mentioned, there are times when scenes or experiences from different media really move me. We talk about them here and I fumble through my relationship to them, hoping I do them justice. I really admire those who do that well, Tom included.
Fair enough, I’m exaggerating. And I phrased it that way because I so very often disagree with your opinions on things (games, mostly) while rarely disagreeing with your criticisms. I mean, yeah, we famously got into it over Civ V and I have the correct opinion about Deus Ex, but my disagreements with you (or other critics worth a shit) tend to be over the weighting of various elements.
Like, I may not be too fussed about the underlying math of some mechanic being poorly explained or an AI that steps on its own toes in tactical battles, where you may find those failures inexcusable because of the impact they have on your own enjoyment of Game X. A shitty critic (and I’m sure I did plenty of this in my previous life) would hand-wave it away with “The battle system sucks!” without explaining why they have that opinion and letting the reader form their own conclusions based on that. If I read a review of a 4X that says, “The AI is totally incapable of competing with a skilled human player without economic cheats and it drives me crazy!” I can take that criticism for what it is and filter that through my own likes/dislikes.
I mean, this is all known. I’m just reiterating the obvious arguments for posterity, I guess. But the point is that I’ve read your reviews for god knows how long now and I still do, unlike literally every other video game critic on the planet. That should tell you my opinion of your professional output. If my lazy post upthread gave a different impression, I apologize.
Nah. I mean, I’m sure similar things have been used as similar shorthand before, but I really do disagree with you, like, all the time. I just don’t make a point of stalking your review threads to argue about every little thing, heh.
I’m pretty sure I’ve written this elsewhere but I don’t really care much for criticism. That’s not to say that it doesn’t fulfill a useful, even necessary purpose, it’s just not for me. I think it’s worthwhile for the creators to look at an outside opinion and get an idea of how others perceive their work. But for me, the casual reader, I really only care about reading stuff that is interesting.
To put it another way, I don’t even remember how often I “agree” with Tom, it’s not my yardstick. On the increasingly rare occasions when he writes about a game that I’ve actually played, I usually find his hot takes amusing. And that’s all I need, I don’t require validation of my purchasing decision, and I sure don’t go looking to someone who plays and writes about games professionally to tell me what to buy - our heads aren’t even in the same zip code. I like to see other points of view, and I enjoy reading about interesting topics done competently.
Which leads to the second point, that Tom writes extremely well. I know that around here, that’s like saying the sun will rise in the morning. We all know this. But people who write well about interesting things feels increasingly rare, especially in this industry. I like the Giant Bomb guys but holy shit, have you read their reviews? Not like I’m any better, I think I can usually be depended on to put a series of words together into a coherent thought, but nobody ever said, holy crap dive, that was well said. It’s just not one of the tools I carry, unfortunately.
So, sure, criticism away folks! But try to have fun with it. Really helps the medicine go down.
Yeah, I love Tom’s writing, but it is sad that well written criticism is so rare these days. Around 2008-2010 was like the golden era of game criticism in retrospect. I used to have a dozen blogs bookmarked that I used to check every day to see if they had written something new about games. There was Brainy Gamer, and Banana Pepper Martini, and a few other people’s blogs where every week or so there would be an interesting article examining some aspect of games that looked at things from a fresh angle. And then it started happening once a month, then once every 6 months, and then everyone stopped writing.
Not to shill for Tom, but I figure it’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness, so I toss a few bucks to Tom’s Patreon each month. Hopefully he’ll be able to continue doing that thing he does in the way he wants to do it.
Same here. I grew up reading computer magazines, even really boring stuff like Byte. I felt bad that year after year, whatever I found useful or interesting and, thus, subscribed to, went out of business. It felt causal.
This horse put on the harness of a Patreon subscription. It wears comfortably and takes me on journeys, the same as the best parts of those monthlies did.
@Telefrog The link spiral brought me back to a 2008 Qt3 review of Europa Universalis, a perfect ending.
@Mark_Asher Thanks for the scene from The Hundred Foot Journey. I had never heard of it. Your description, and the fact it enticed you for three viewings, prompts me to investigate if it goes on the queue. I was reminded of the moment of realization in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
Nah, I just bristle when I feel folks are trying to dismiss me as an outlier. My taste is really similar to most of you guys. Like, boringly so. I don’t subscribe to the arguments some folks have made – usually when they’re departing in a hissy fit – about this being a hive mind, but we are all pretty much of a type. We like strategy games, we fall prey to the occasional MMO, we’re not into twitchy shooters or sports games, we read too much, we have an affinity for fantasy and superheroes, we talk about games as much as – if not more than – we play them. This is a site comprised mostly of gamers of a certain age, and we agree far more often than we disagree. We mostly share the same predilections for what to do with our leisure and entertainment time.
You really don’t. If we were to make a list of our, I dunno, fifty favorite games of all time, I bet more than half of them would overlap!
Heh. I support your general sentiment that we all have similar tastes, generally speaking. However, I was surprised at the diversity of people’s lists in this thread:
Of course, it only has about 22 people who posted their lists, so maybe if more Qt3 members posted, we’d start to see more overlap. From that thread I learned that even though we share tastes in a general sense, the games that we’re most passionate about actually vary quite a bit.
I devised a way to rank GOAT using pyramids. Your #1 game is at the top of the pyramid and is worth 1 point. Then you choose two games beneath the top game and award them 1/2 points each. Then choose three games below these two and award them 1/3 point each. Etc. etc. Anyway, that’s how I rank my favorite games mentally.
Like this. (But I got lazy and did not fill in the lower rows.)
