Comedy is Serious Business

There needs to be a major reformation in the way movies are reviewed. I’m not saying that I have the best taste in movies (one of my favorites is “Good Burger”) but it bugs me how there is a certain, unwritten standard that all movies made must uphold. Why is that? The main purpose of a movie is to entertain. If a movie keeps your interest for it’s entirety, it accomplished what it was made to do. Not all movies have to be thought provoking or emotionally charged. Sometimes we just want to see a guy shoot something for two hours. Yet we feel ashamed that we saw “Guy Shooting Stuff for Two Hours” because it got an abysmal review.

I think the main problem lies with who it is exactly that critiques these films. Can someone explain to me why the guy who saw and raved about “The King’s Speech” is also seeing and reviewing “The Green Lantern”? Most movie critics see “Citizen Kane” and “The Godfather” as the best movies ever made, so there’s a bias when they have to sit and watch the latest, mindless action film. Why waste their time? They know what they’re getting into and weknow what we’re getting into when we fork over the $11 to watch things explode and have our senses numbed. They write things like “poorly written dialogue” and “convoluted story” in their reviews like it’s a surprise. Now, people who would have genuinely enjoyed the movie steer clear because some online critic gave it one-out-of-five sour lemons. On the flip side of that, a movie can be described as “emotionally stirring” and called “the film that will define our generation” so a person races out to see it, only to find it the most boring thing they’ve ever had to sit through.

My solution: when movies are reviewed, have the films sorted by genre and have a different critic who specializes in that particular genre critique the movies in their respective genre (you follow that? Good). That way, a movie about pirates and robots isn’t being compared to the dramatic period piece that’s playing two theaters over. Each film can stand on it’s own within it’s appropriate genre. Or, better yet, we can stop reviewing movies altogether. Let people form their own opinion about the movie they’re watching. What you think about a film shouldn’t be based on someone else’s experience. You be the judge of that.

I always thought that what made a person a movie critic is the ability to understand the finer points of a film, not having your own, unwavering set of expectations that you judge every film you see by. Not every film maker is trying to appeal to your ridiculously high standards. Instead of calling “Guy Shooting Stuff for Two Hours” mindless drivel, a good film critic should say “Although I didn’t particularly care for the film, there is a certain population that would appreciate the part where the guy fires a chainsaw out of a shotgun.”