reviews are generally a worthless form of writing, so I guess you may as well have fun with them
yes, but it has to assume the audience hasnāt experienced the work in question, which is kind of a basic prerequisite for any criticism worth anything. hence this whole spoilers business, which isnāt even in the critical lexicon
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While this may be true, itās worth saying that not all good art is great, and not all not-great art is unworth engaging. There are lots of good movies that are less good with spoilers, which might not be true if they were great movies. But they arenāt. Iāll take good where I can find it.
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Is it wrong if this actually makes me want to see this movie more?
I still like Dark Knight. It was a good movie. Not a great movie, but a good one. The third one is where the grimcruft overloaded the whole thing into a vaguely unwatchable monster.
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Ledger almost saves it, ultimately just makes it watchable. Otherwise, yeah, all the Nolanmen suck pretty bad.
Iāve always been kind of mystified by the notion of grown adults having cultivated a lifetimeās worth of media consumption ā deriving a matured personal rubric for taste/interest in so doing ā not having a pretty good idea of whether or not theyāre going to care about a thing just by seeing a trailer or reading a press release synopsis or whatever
There are things I know could go either way for me, like superhero movies.
Hearing a trusted source saying, yeah this one is good or neigh this one is garbage, is kind of handy.
For the former maybe Iāll pick it for a movie date, if itās the latter Iāll just watch it on a plane someday.
A review is a lot more interesting if it isnāt tiptoeing around plot points.
i think this is really an interesting part of how movies are scripted/edited/whatever, that is probably worth thinking more about. like what are the exact conditions necessary to say so-and-so āsteals the show?ā heath ledger in tdr is really a pretty good example, but in that case the metanarrative is, obv, also quite important to how that movie was received. also, itās really easy to imagine what the nolan batman movies would be like without heath ledger, because we have two of those and they are both a little shitty.
but anyway, exhibits a and b for your consideration:
a. beetlejuice: the secret about beetlejuice is that, somehow, itās actually a really good movie (to me) even beyond the remarkably brief screen time of its title character. the whole movie is about beetlejuice, but he isnāt the main character. but all of the stuff w/ alec baldwin and geena davis works so well that you donāt notice michael keaton is only there for ā¦ [google] 17.5 minutes? but you canāt really say keaton āsteals the showā because the movie is about that character and is named after that character. he does an awesome job, though, and if he wasnāt as memorable as he was no one would care about this movie anymore, even though the rest of it is actually pretty great.
b. pirates of the caribbean (part 1): this movie is ostensibly not about johnny deppās character, but from the beginning he is the only good thing about the movie. it really has no reason to exist without his character, but for some reason it got made anyway, and made in such a way that you are continually reminded that he is only a supporting character. in this case he really does āsteal the show,ā but if he hadnāt done that i really doubt anyone would have seen the movie at all. so ā¦ what is there to steal? without him, iit would be just a weird footnote like the Country Bears movie or the Haunted House movie. (yes, those both actually happened. remember?)
basically the greatest thing that ever happened to beetlejuice was the fact that they never made a sequel
but anyway, even though i think both movies are successful in their own way for completely different reasons, or perhaps because of that, i think the mechanics of the āshowcase performance from a supporting characterā are something that go way beyond acting, into the structure of the rest of the movie. someone must have realized that what depp was doing in potc was going to put asses in seats, and crafted the movie around that in a way that didnāt just lean too hard on him, and thatās why it remains the best one in the series (itās a paradox: depp is the best part of potc, but the fact that the other three have more depp makes them worse)
itās also interesting to think about times when this has utterly failed, and for that we have the perfect example of the lone ranger.
butā¦ what else?
hollywood and superhero, man,
While I typically avoid any reviews or trailers for films that I plan to see, I agree with the sentiment that if a movie can be āspoiledā by knowing what happens in it then itās probably not a very strong movie.
That said, I enjoy being surprised by how a plot develops. Whenever I read a book thatās new to me and has a foreword, I skip that part and maybe come back when Iām done. If I even remember that itās there. Iād rather have an essay like that at the end. (Like 8128 said.)
Maybe it comes down to whether youāre likely to read (or watch) something more than once. You can probably focus on and appreciate some aspects of a work more if itās already familiar. But who reads or watches anything twice anymore? There are just too many things out there. I intend to sometimes but itās very rare that I do.
Iāve enjoyed the rare occasion that Iāve been surprised by a movieās genre. Most examples I can think of offhand have been presented as horror but have turned out to be a non-traditional type of horror or something else entirely.
Also, the only movie reviews I ever read are by random people (or SB people) on Letterboxd.
Also, just to make it clear that my taste is suspect, I like Christopher Nolan movies (even the superhero ones, which are just about the only superhero things I find tolerable, though that third Batman got pretty ridiculous). Iām looking forward to his next one and plan to avoid trailers for it. Though, come to think of it, will there even be theatrical movie releases this summer?
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