Something Amyss said:
dunam said:
Nah, I don't think you've been paying attention to the news coverage. If you don't like this movie, you're sexist, apparantly.
How strange then, that you can find any number of people who have been critical of the movie without being accused of sexism.
I wonder what sets apart the people being accused of sexism from the ones who aren't....
Arnoxthe1 said:
Movie critics are not an accurate gauge of popular public opinion. [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1289401/reviews?ref_=tt_urv]
Why do I care about popular public opinion in the first place? 2014's top grossing movie was Transformers: Age of Extinction. 2015's was The Force Awakens, which I imagine would also be controversial to many. We would also have to give legitimacy to 50 Shades of Grey, Twilight. Taylor Swift is one of the best musicians of all time, and Call of Duty deserves those high marks every year. This is what happens when you democratise criticism.
That's why I prefer specific critics when deciding on if I should spend my limited entertainment budget on a movie/game. I watch their reviews of things that I've already seen, and if they express similar tastes on why they liked/disliked a film/book/game, then I will take their opinion with more weight than just Rotten Tomatoes, or Metacritic. I don't care what some polling system says, I do care what *Insert Person's Name* has to say, because I've already established we look for the same kinds of things in our entertainment.
I don't see how this is any different from talking to your friends about a movie, and them telling you "It's shit, don't go see it." They likely know what your tastes are in entertainment, if your friends are anything like mine, the reason they are my friends is our shared interests in entertainment. So their opinions have more merit. I still might disagree with them, and sometimes do, but that initial discussion might at least prevent me from taking a risk and seeing it at full price on opening weekend, and instead waiting several months and seeing it at the dollar theater.
Considering how expensive movies are, and how limited my budget is, I'll be damned if I'm just going to go to every thing Hollywood churns out, paying full price, just so I can have some false sense of self satisfaction that I came to my opinion independent of any outside influence. I hate wasting money on shit, so I am selective in what I spend my money on, to try and minimize the amount of shit entertainment that I toss my money at. To do that, I have to get a sense of the material in question from an outside source. This is hardly new to human behavior, or exclusive to entertainment.
Do you go out and buy every car there is, because don't let someone else tell you this is a good/bad car. MAKE YOUR OWN DECISION! Spend your money and drive it, and then spend your money and drive the other car, and the next one, and the next. No, nobody does that. We read reviews of the cars, check publications that rate the quality of the product compared to others of it's similar make/model, and then, after taking that information into consideration, we may or may not spend our money on it. This is considered a practical consumer behavior, and yet somehow, when it comes to movies/games/books/etc, some people tell us to toss this logic out the window, and just spend your money and make your decision. No, I refuse to do that. The individual purchases might be less money each (15 bucks for a ticket compared to 10,000 bucks for a car), but when I'm buying comic after comic, and book after book, and movie after movie, regularly, week after week, year after year, the amount of total money invested adds up quick. There's a reason the entertainment industry is a multi-billion dollar industry. Because we toss LOTS of our money at our entertainment. So no, I'm not just going to ignore the trailers (designed to try and convince me to spend my money by showing me their product), and I'm not going to ignore the reviews. To ignore any outside input just because you don't want to hear it is ludicrous thinking.
Note: The you's used above were the plural use of you, not you specifically Amyss. Sort of went on a rant there, responding to some previous comments by other people, but your post was the original kernel that got me thinking.