As of this time, I have written 62 posts on movies/shows and out of these 5 are critical. Rest of the posts praise the movies/shows. Why this discrepancy? Turns out there are many good reasons for not criticising.
1. I don’t have to.
A professional critic has to write a column every week and dissect whichever movie is playing. More often than not, the movie is not up to the mark and the review turns out to be anywhere between mildly critical to absolutely scathing. I don’t have to turn in a column every week. No nagging editors breathing down my neck. I write whenever I want and it happens only when the movie is absolutely compelling.
2. It makes a better reading.
Garbage in, garbage out. If you are writing about a movie that is of substandard quality, how can you expect the review to be of superior quality? I chose the path of least resistance. I write about movies that are so astounding that writing about them is a compulsion and a pleasure. And the review makes a great reading.
3. I don’t feel qualified enough to criticise.
Filmmaking is very difficult. A writer can lock himself in a room and come out with the novel of the century, armed only with a pen and paper (or a laptop). A painter can buy supplies, go into isolation and paint a masterpiece. A filmmaker requires enormous amount of money, cooperation of hundreds of very creative artists and managing logistics everyday that require great skills. As a viewer, I am happily sitting in my chair, passing judgements. This issue is complicated. On one hand, it is important for the filmmakers that the audience likes their movie. Their whole business depends on it. Even so, I feel a bit callous discounting a scene where the writers, actors and the director may have spent days trying to get it right. Whenever possible, I try to give the benefit of doubt to the artists. True, there are many movies that are sloppily made and do not deserve this consideration but I am not watching them anyway. Once I restrict myself to actors, writers and filmmakers who are so serious about their art as if their life depends on it, I also feel a responsibility as a viewer and as a reviewer not to pass summary judgements.
4. Everyone is criticising anyway.
Most film reviews are critical and very often they reveal more about the biases of the reviewer than the film itself. I like reviews where the reviewer displays empathy towards the filmmaker. No one knows everything. Even the great Roger Ebert feels so spectacularly wrong today when you read that he gave a measly 1.5/4 stars to the 1995 movie The Usual Suspects and included it in his “most hated films” list. It has received 8.5/10 on IMDB and 89% on Rotten Tomatoes at the time of writing. Ebert’s most hated list is very entertaining to read, with some choicest insults such as this one.
I am not surprised by the viciousness of the insults. Exceptions like The Usual Suspects aside, I am sure the movies were awful and deserved the reviews. What surprises me more is that Roger Ebert would waste so much of his valuable time in watching these god-awful movies because even an amateur can tell a bad movie within the first five or ten minutes. Why sit through it and torture yourself?
5. Writing is hard, period.
It is extremely difficult to write something that’s interesting, original, easily accessible, with the length that is right for the subject. Content trumps style and everything else. This is what many bloggers seem to overlook. They spend obnoxious amounts of time worrying over their writing styles or over technical aspects like Medium vs WordPress (WordPress!). Quora is full of such bloggers caught in the limbo of decision paralysis. Instead, they should be asking themselves two simple questions. One, do I have anything original to say? Second, is it interesting? I have some very original observations about how my nails grow, but they are not interesting. If it’s interesting, clear and original, it will read much better irrespective of the writing style. If the originality is lacking and/or there is no clarity, it will fail no matter how much you vamp it up with style, images or videos.
The bottom line is – writing is hard. So why should I waste my time articulating how exactly a movie sucked. Even watching a great movie does not guarantee a great review article. I have watched The Shawshank Redemption or The Godfather countless times and yet I have not been able to write a single word about them because I was not sure I had something to say that had not been said already. The best I could manage was Director’s Cut : The Godfather with Francis Ford Coppola that is simply a summary of the great director’s thoughts on the movie.
Instead of ‘film critic’, I prefer the term ‘film appreciator.’ If it’s a bad movie, I will ignore it. If it’s a good one and I have something to say about it, I will shout it from this metaphorical rooftop.
