Category Archives: Reviews

Thank You

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On September 14, 2011, I launched the Doom Cheez Cinema.

During the past twelve months, the site has gone places I’d never expected it to go, and has proven to be a success even beyond my best expectations.  I’ve met some amazing new people along the way, many of whom I now consider to be good friends, and I’ve reconnected with a few old friends, too.  I couldn’t have come this far without them, nor without those other people who visit the site regularly (or even occasionally) but whose names I don’t yet know.

I just wanted to take a moment to thank all of you for a wonderful first year back in the game.

To mark the occasion, I’ve put together my first “Favorites List” of Eighteen Essential Films.  I hope you’ll all take a look at it and enjoy what’s there, and then tell me what you think.  After all, I wrote the list for you.

It’s now September 15, 2012.  Year Two starts today.  Let’s have some fun.

Why I Don’t Use Stars Or Numeric Ratings

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Normally, when one reads a critic’s review, it’s accompanied by one of four standard rating devices:

 

Stars: Either a 4, 5, or 10 star system.

Numeric Ratings: 0 or 1 to 5 or 10.

Letter Grades:  A to F.  Sometimes with + or – suffixes available.

 

There is no qualitative difference at all between these systems.  They’re all thermometer scales with the same (or very nearly the same, depending on the critic) number of stops along the way, and they’re “one size fits all” systems.  There’s also an implied breakdown in each system into just three categories: Good, Okay, Bad.  Which brings us to the fourth system:

 

Binary:  Yes/no.  Thumbs up/down.  Smile/frown.  You get the picture.

 

This is about as basic as it gets, and the critics who use this kind of system don’t even allow for a middle ground.

If you’ve visited my site at DoomCheez.com, you’ll notice that I don’t use any of these systems.  Instead, I pair the stuff I review with cheese and alcohol, and even then, the pairings don’t always carry the same symbolism from review to review.  However, I do think that they’re a much better representation of the actual experience provided by a given show.

I used to use a numeric scale on my older sites, but it always bothered me.  For one thing, I think that people put too much stock in the quickest thing they see: often, people will see that a critic gave a movie four stars or a thumbs down or whatever and not bother reading the review.  This is something that I wanted to avoid.  After all, I spend hours writing these things, and I’d really appreciate it if that effort was rewarded with a read.  But more importantly, when I write a review, I make sure to explain why I feel a certain way about whatever it is I’m reviewing, which is something that absolutely cannot be conveyed by a number or a thumb or line of stars.  Not all movies that rate a critical 1/10 are wastes of time, just as there are some 10/10 movies that I never, ever want to see again.  No matter how I went about coming up with the numbers, the numbers would rarely tell the whole truth.

Here are two standout examples.

On the high number side we have The Shawshank Redemption, which sits near or at the top of roughly a zillion internet critics’ lists.  On a critical level, I have to agree that it’s an excellent film.  It is very well acted, the screenplay is excellent and very well adapted from its source material, and the direction is powerful.  Giving a movie like this anything less than a 9/10 would be an injustice, and anything other than a 10/10, realistically, would be nitpicking.  When I reviewed it for my old site, it got the high number that almost any film professor would say it deserves, and which the effort of the people involved certainly warrants.  Nothing else would have been appropriate.

Except that I don’t like that movie and never want to see it again.  Despite all of its artistic merit and the truly outstanding work done by the cast and crew, I don’t find it entertaining in the least.  And so the number lied.

Pair it with a high quality but aromatic cheese and bitter alcohol, and that’s more like the truth, whether or not one actually finds the film entertaining… and it also presents the reader with much more incentive to read the whole review and find out why.

On the low side, we have something like Gymkata, which is generally regarded as the worst martial arts flick ever made.  By any objective critical standard, it stinks.  Kurt Thomas has no business pretending to be an action hero, and the story is the very definition of absurdity.  No self-respecting critic could look at this train wreck and call it at higher than a 2/10; really, without a mulligan, it deserves a 1/10.

Except that for people who love the genre, this movie is so horrible that it comes out the other side as a must-see classic of truly epic proportions.  I want everyone to see this movie.  Again, a number tells a lie.

But pair it with Cheez Whiz and cheap beer, and whether or not one is the type of person who recognizes crap as art, that pairing tells a very definitive truth.  And yes, and it also presents the reader with much more incentive to read the whole review.

And that, my friends, is why I stopped doing numeric ratings.  Numbers, stars, and thumbs just don’t tell a true story.  Not one worth putting stock in, anyway.

Having my own gimmick is nice, too, of course.  Care for some Cheddar and an Anchor Steam?

The Worst Thing I Can Say About Your Project

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Let’s assume that you’re a filmmaker of some sort, whether you’re an actor, a producer, a director, all of the above, or whatever else.  Your project has finally made it to the combat zone that is the land of critical scrutiny.  What do you think is the single worst thing that I or any other critic could possibly say about your project?

If you’re like most people, your gut reaction was to say “It sucked.”  If that’s the case, you’re wrong.

Perhaps you took it a step further and went with something on the order of “That’s the worst crap I’ve ever seen.”  If that’s the case, not only are you wrong, but you’re even more wrong than the first guy was.

I’ve been doing this for over a decade now, and I’ve picked up on a few secrets of audience psychology, though really, there’s nothing secret about them; it’s just a matter of remembering how to think like everyone else, which is a skill that many people – both critics and creators – lose the moment that they enter into their chosen arena.  So what, then, is the single worst thing that I or any other critic can say about your project?

“It’s okay.”

Even the actual words “disaster” and “doom” don’t convey the reality of disaster and doom to a project as swiftly as the phrase “it’s okay.”  There’s just no creative death sentence as sure as being chucked into the pile of dispassionate mediocrity.

Here’s the full equation:

 

Best Ever > Excellent|Great|Good = Worst Ever > Bad > Okay

 

Here it is broken down:

 

Best Ever.  Whether we’re writers or actors or directors or plumbers, it’s the accolade we all strive for, and why not?  It’s really kind of a no-brainer, isn’t it?  The best is the best.  As long as an audience has respect for – or, perhaps even more to the point, no active disrespect for – the critic making the determination, then an accolade like “Best Ever” or even “Among the Best” will grab attention, and it will have an impact.

Excellent|Great|Good.  While these words represent a sliding scale by definition and in the minds of most critics, as well, most audiences when looking at a review tend to lump these and similar words into the same judgmental pile.  An actor, of course, is likely to and should catch the difference in degrees when seeing his or her own performance described, but being honest, the audience at large is far less likely to make that distinction.  It’s a curse of overuse, but on the plus side, all of those words still translate into “go see my movie or watch my show,” so if the audience misses the nuance, it’s still a positive result.

Worst Ever.  You’re either nodding and smiling with understanding or you’re very confused.  Yes, folks, I’m telling you that “Worst Ever” or “Among the Worst” is just as good as and sometimes even better than “Good.”  Why?  There are a few bits of psychology at work here.

First, there is a massive contingent of people out there who are magnetically drawn to crap.  They take phrases like “the worst ever” and “steaming pile of animal waste” as personal challenges.  I know these people well, for I am one of them, and we are legion.  Gaining a reputation as an ultimate stinker in a genre (especially one that doesn’t get a lot of popular respect to begin with) can actually lead to greater success for a film than being called “decent.”  For example, does anyone really think that the Dino version of Flash Gordon is beloved by fans even thirty years later because it’s good?  Hell, no!  People love it because it’s so horrible that it’s come out the other side!  That is the power of “the worst ever.”

Hell, I’ve even had a filmmaker or three thank me for laying that kind of label on their project.  One said “it proves you’re honest” (and hey, that proves that the guy was real about his own stuff), and another said that if a few more people said the same thing, it could easily triple the rentals.

This is also where an audience’s disrespect for a critic can come into play.  I knew a guy in university who always wanted to know what Leonard Maltin thought of any given movie.  It’s not because he liked Maltin, though; it’s because he couldn’t stand him, and so he was automatically suspicious of anything Maltin liked, and almost certain to go see anything Maltin called out as garbage.

Bad.  All of the above applies to a lesser degree to this category.  Much like “Best” is to “Good,” the superlative value of “Worst” has got steroid-ridden muscle.

Again, though, “bad” is far from being a death sentence.  Just ask Kristen Stewart and everyone else associated with Twilight, or the Wayans brothers.

Okay.  Now that you’ve had time to give it some thought, it should be obvious that there’s nothing in the critical universe worse than “okay.”

It often means “your project was so uninteresting that I couldn’t even get pissed off about it.”  At least when a critic hates something, you know that your project was able to stir some kind of emotion in someone.  But when a critic – who is more likely as a matter of course to be trying to find the emotion in something that he or she is watching – can’t be stirred at all, even to complain?  Uh-oh.  After all, isn’t that what we’re supposed to love to do?

Looking at it from another angle, imagine some other aspect of your life, like lunch.  When a friend asks how your boring, unexciting meal is, what are you likely to say?  “It’s okay.”  But you don’t mean it.  Two days later you’re probably not even going to remember what it was.  Now flash forward again and replace that lunch with the project you’ve worked so hard on as a creative professional.  Do you really want someone to find it so uninteresting that they call it “okay,” the kiss of “I’ll forget it before next week”?  I suspect you’d rather they were pissed enough to remember it instead.  At least then you know you reached the person.

At least then, too, you’d have a shot of appealing to the “bad” instincts noted above, whereas “meh/mediocre” is a pretty universal “I’ll pass, thanks.”

 

So the next time you read a review that says “this movie sucks” or “that was the worst performance ever,” remember: it could be worse.  The critic could have spoken in vague generalities and then said “it’s okay,” thereby telling everyone that he or she actually couldn’t give a shit less one way or another.