On the Nature of a Good Review, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Movies

Perhaps the most significant accusation leveled against The Cinema King, other than the predilection of a fairly small kingdom with an otherwise unknown number of subjects (seriously, readers, make yourself known!), is the call that there are too many good reviews on this site.

This bears investigation. Let us then as statisticians evaluate the factual merit of this claim. Of 77 posts tagged as "movie reviews" (thank you, Blogger), I would only describe 16 as more than 50% negative. (Movies that I halfheartedly enjoyed I evaluated on a case-by-case basis and decided from there.) That leaves 61 positive reviews on this site - a 79% ratio -- almost 4 out of 5 reviews.

So the claim that the majority of reviews on this site are positive has merit. We could now turn to the claim of "too many good reviews." Are there too many good reviews on this site? Is 80% too much? Unfortunately, I can't seem to find a ratio for the reviews of Roger Ebert (a reviewer with whom I have been known to disagree but whose writings I still very much respect), so we don't quite have a barometer. "Too much" is perhaps too subjective a term for me to properly evaluate here, so let us leave it to your discretion. If 80% of my reviews being positive ones perturbs you, I can point you in the direction of some snarkier blogs.

However, let me first offer some explanation as to why the majority of my reviews are positive. For a review to emerge as a positive one, two things must occur. The reviewer must have enjoyed the film, and the reviewer must be able to articulate that enjoyment in the form of a clear and entertaining piece of prose that may best bear the term "review." I attempt always to fulfill the second of these requirements, providing content that I hope my readers enjoy (do you?) while satisfying my own desires as a writer. The first one is a little more difficult to do. I can't always guarantee that I'll like a movie before I go into it. But I frequently can.

That's where Mr. Ebert and I are doing different jobs. Yes, we're both movie reviewers (though I am The Cinema King, he is far more prolific and popular), but he has the means, opportunity, and in some ways the responsibility to see far more movies than I do. Where I have 77 reviews on my site, Rotten Tomatoes registers an excess of 6200 reviews from Camp Ebert. Therefore, his potential for writing negative reviews is exponentially greater than my own. He's literally written thousands more reviews than I have (he's also been doing it for longer, but the nascency of this blog isn't something I can get nostalgic about just yet).

There's a final difference between Sir Ebert and myself: choice. I don't mean to imply that he has no volition in his capacity as reviewer (potentially apocryphal stories have him walking out of the cinema), but I think it's safe to say that I - standing in front of the shelf in a rental store or a library or media emporium - have a bit more freedom in which movies I watch and review. That's why the uneven quantitative comparison between us. My greater freedom of choice is a double-edged sword. Unlike Mr. Ebert, I never get invited to preview screenings (save for a pre-midnight show of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End on one of my more unforgettable birthdays), and so my reviews are frequently less than timely; the fact that 15 posts on this site are tagged with a decade before 2000 is testament to the fact that timeliness isn't one of my chief concerns.

However, greater powers of selection in moviegoing allows me to weed out movies I know I won't like, such as The Ugly Truth (watch out for a Trailer Park post on that stinker coming soon). Since I can choose the films I review, I can limit my scope to films I'm dying to see (Michael Mann's Heat was viewed days before I resumed my reviewing enterprise, and it met with my approval and a query as to just how influential it was for Nolan on The Dark Knight) or to films that I'm sort of lukewarm about seeing. I won't spend my time watching a movie I know I won't enjoy when I could be watching one I will. That's perhaps the greatest reason for the 80% approval rating on this site: choice.

I hope that clears up any thoughts on my being too enthusiastic of a film fan. Admittedly, I have some "guilty pleasures" - at my place of employment, I'm still being chided for enjoying Hairspray and Sweeney Todd more than No Country for Old Men (even if I'm starting to recant that position) - but that's the beauty of reviews. In the words of the great Dennis Miller, "Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong."