They’re a bunch of pretentious arseholes, aren’t they?
Only the NY Times and Guardian are really worth reading. Every other critic tends to attack any film that isn’t to their tastes or adheres to cliche with a dictionary in one hand and their bloated head in the other.
Close Encounters was an alright movie, but it was stunningly well filmed and written, for example. But every critic on the planet touts it as a “sci-fi great”, “free of cliche”. Cliches are like the spanners in a movie’s toolkit. Without them, the audience can’t ground themselves in the plot and understand the basics of what they’re meant to feel and see. District 9 inverts cliche, and we’re made aware of that. Why does inversion instantly equal superiority though? D9 is a fantastic, genius and very well made film. Close Encounters is all but the latter, but also inverts cliche. That doesn’t mean it deserves an instant 98%.
One thing that also really grinds my gears is the constant, constant reference to gamers. It’s slung around by critics like a dead cat, and stinks up the place. Whether it’s “for gamers” or “a horrendous FPS-style” piece of shit doesn’t matter - it’s irrelevant. There’s no such thing as a ‘gamer’ and people who pigeonhole themselves as such are either having to talk to less open-minded people or are closed-minded themselves. People play games. This does not pigeonhole them into some sort of drooling, mouth-breathing stereotype.
Frankly, the movie critic thing is overdone, overwrought and full of bullshit. I don’t need 81 critics telling me their opinion. I need a few Yahtzee Croshaws to point out the fundamental flaws, not paste the damn thing with their opinion and laugh-out-loud thesaurus descriptions of basic words.
If it’s shit in your opinion, say so. But back it up in plain English.
