Critics
As I mentioned in my last post, I went to see Spider-Man 3 on its opening night at midnight. I came out of the theatre wowed by the spectacle I had just beheld. I'm a fan of comic-book movies, even though I never had the pleasure of reading the comic books themselves. My collection of such movies includes films like Hulk, Batman Begins, the X-Men trilogy, and Daredevil and Elektra among others. I tend to prefer Marvel over DC, but whatever… that's not all that important really.
Recently it seems the most recent installment of the Spidey series hasn't gone over too well with the critics. Here's a sampling of the “blurbs you'll never see on the SM3 DVD”:
Bloated and stupid, this movie is so bad you can't even review it.
…so dopey and forgettable and crafted out of second-rate cheese.
Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 3 makes just about every wrong move in the sequel playbook…
Hmm. That's not good at all. Seems the critics just didn't enjoy it as much as I did.
But you know what? Screw them.
When I go to the movies, my goal is to be entertained. That's it. That's my only expectation. Entertainment. Whether it involves spending nine dollars on a ticket stub and trying to avoid the snack counter like the plague, or pulling a DVD case off its shelf and popping in a disc from my own collection, movies exist solely for entertainment. I don't go into movies with some expectation of high-class work. I don't have a list of things the movie needs to do to be good. I expect them to have a plot that works semi-plausibly within my suspension of disbelief. That's about all there is to it for me.
So what I don't get is what the critics' problem is. I mean, I understand it's their job to watch hundreds of movies and comment on how well they were put together. But really… I think they've lost perspective. They get to watch hundreds of movies, and get paid for it. That sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me, ignoring the obvious fact that they have to watch lots of bad movies too.
If I come out of a movie entertained, then I count that movie as good. It may be better or worse than some other movies I've seen, but as long as I've been entertained, I'm happy with it. Sure, some movies have bad plots. Some have bad acting. Unfortunately, some have both. For some movies, the combination of thin plot, bad writing, and less-than-phenomenal acting spells death for the movie. We see this all the time — movies that never make it onto the big screen and end up on the discount racks at your local Blockbuster.
But you know what? If a movie manages to have a semi-decent plot, decent writing, and decent actors to deliver those lines, I'm satisfied. That's all I need — entertainment.
So what's wrong with critics? Did they just lose their sense of fun?