The critics are out of touch...except when they're not

[Agema]

You can tell a good critic because even when they're wrong, they're wrong for the right reasons.

How do we rate a "good" movie? Does "good" mean popular, or does it represent all manner of measures like quality of plot, acting, characterisation, cinematography, etc.? A critic who predicts what's going to be popular is effectively telling us nothing. They're just witlessly trying to tell the public what the public want to hear. Thus a critic should appraise a film on other measures, and necessarily they are sometimes going to say movies the public like are bad movies.

That would suggest the public is completely dumb. Well, it might be partially true, but there are still a lot of popular movies and shows that are legitimately worthy of critical praise.

Firstly, the public are mostly dumb, although that's not a useful or tactful way to put it. Film-making is a developed skill like any other. Necessarily, most of the public do not have the time or often the interest (they are after all often just looking for entertainment) to devote to understanding why films may be technically brilliant. Calling them dumb generally devalues the reality that'll usually have great skill or understanding far outstripping the average film critic of their own specialist areas.

Thus mostly I'd mean it to say that many of the public may esteem movies for different reasons than critics might; as a result of this we should expect at least sometimes that critical and public opinions diverge.

 

[Hawki]

That would suggest the public is completely dumb.

What's the down side??

Well, it might be partially true, but there are still a lot of popular movies and shows that are legitimately worthy of critical praise.

There are pigs who pick winning lottery numbers. It doesn't mean they're geniuses or can see the future. It just means they happened to point their snouts at the right object with the right number.

I'm from the Men in Black school of things. A person is smart, people are not. The public, as an entity, is not intelligent. That they mjight occasionally find a piece of merit does not speak to their discerning tastes, only to probability that ventually, a pig will pick the megaJackpot numbers.

I had a similar sentiment a while back in another thread. [https://v1.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.1056223-Sony-implements-new-policy-that-affect-all-games-that-forbids-any-form-of-interactive-fanservice#24272661]