Don't Let Any One Person, Including Myself, Determine Whether You See a Movie or Not
I’m old enough to remember the days when every major newspaper had a film critic that you could follow along with the national biggies: Siskel & Ebert and Leonard Maltin and Gene Shalit and Rex Reed and Jeffrey Lyons and Michael Medved and whatever loser was writing about movies for The New Yorker and The New York Times.
I was lucky enough to grow up in Chicago during the heyday of Siskel & Ebert. Hollywood might have been the home of the film industry, but Chicago loomed large when it came to film criticism for a very good reason: our guys were on the television and consequently reached a much bigger, broader audience than newspapers did.
I’m old enough to have shared a screening room with Roger Ebert during the last decade of his life, though I never mustered up the courage to actually attempt to communicate with him, even after he blurbed my memoir The Big Rewind.
The internet was not a thing when I was a kid or a teenager. We didn’t have Rotten Tomatoes. We did not have Metacritic.
We had Blockbuster Video, where I worked for three years during high school and college. Because I worked in a place that rented videocassettes, people would ask me my opinions about movies.
I was flattered and confused. I had no problem giving my opinion but I also wanted to know why proper grown-ups were interested in what a seventeen year old who lived in a group home for emotionally disturbed adolescents thought, of I dunno, Consenting Adults.
I worked at Blockbuster because I loved movies but I was not overly invested in opinions, particularly my own. So when I told a middle-aged stranger that I didn’t care for a movie and they said that as a result they wouldn’t rent it, there was always some part of me that wanted to say, “Why do you care about my opinion? I’m just a guy, and a fucking teenager at that, and teenagers, canonically, don’t know what they’re talking about, ever.”
That somehow did not change when I was fortunate enough to secure a full time job with benefits as the head writer and a film critic for The A.V. Club.
I take my job seriously but I do not take myself or my opinions seriously. I also don’t take other people’s opinions too seriously.
I am forever annoyed when someone posts that they’re curious or excited about a new movie, and some random stranger will say that it sucks, and the original poster will reply that they were excited about the movie but would definitely not be seeing it now.
We live in a world where you can access a seemingly limitless number of reviews online of both the professional and amateur variety. It can honestly be overwhelming.
That’s why websites like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic have value. They don’t just give you the opinion of one critic; they give you the critical consensus. They tell you how everyone feels about a movie.
That has a lot more value than reading what I wrote about something.
Sometimes, I’ll post a negative review on Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas or this website, and readers will respond that they were excited about seeing the movie, but they’ll save some money and some hassle by not seeing it because of my pan.
This is a weird pet peeve of mine because I’m a weird fucking dude. I’ve had a unique set of life experiences. I have a wide variety of mental illnesses and neurological conditions.
If my reviews have value, it’s not because I’m right. It’s because I’ve been doing this for nearly thirty years so I hopefully have an informed opinion that’s also entertaining.
When I hate a movie I really hate it. When I was in my twenties I thought I would die of a rage-induced heart attack after suffering through a particularly terrible movie. That, to me, would be an honorable death. It would be dying in the line of duty.
I HATED Megalopolis, for example. It’s the kind of movie I generally adore—bizarre, deeply personal, audacious, crazy, flamboyantly terrible—but I despised Coppola’s would-be comeback film with the proverbial white-hot burning passion.
But when readers responded to my full-throated pans by saying that because of what I’d written, they’d skip Megalopolis, I became weirdly indignant.
If you’re curious about Megalopolis, go see Megalopolis. It’s an utterly unique film by an important filmmaker. It’s fucking godawful, but if you’re a cinephile or a Coppola fan, I admonish you to see that shit so that you can determine for yourself how you feel about it.
The same is true of Saturday Night. I hated that movie. It was dishonest, wildly fictionalized pro-Lorne Michaels propaganda, but if you’re fascinated by Saturday Night Live like I am, you should see it and decide for yourself if it’s an abomination or a riveting comedy-drama.
Don’t give any one critic, writer, or friend the power to conclusively determine what you see. I understand a critic’s opinion being a determining factor in whether or not to see a movie, but don’t let it be the only factor.
Nathan needed expensive, life-saving dental implants, and his dental plan doesn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
Did you enjoy this article? Then consider becoming a patron here.