All Hail The Film Critic!

I often have long conversations with one of my co-workers about movies, even while on the clock when I should be doing something more efficient - out motto at work is "with a sense of urgency." He has good taste in movies. He judges every movie on how much of an emotional connection he gets to the film. For example, one of his favorites is Pieces Of April. He connected on an emotional level with Katie Holmes trying to cook a turkey dinner for her parents. I told him he needed to see Little Miss Sunshine, about a dysfunctional family that must pull through together on a road trip to a beauty pageant. He didn't understand it. The emotional connection for him wasn't there. To each his own, I guess.

Now I can respect his taste in movies because emotional impact is what every movie should strive for. What I don't agree with about my friend is how he comes to determine which movies he will see. He swears by his favorite film critic. he loves going on to metacritic.com and see what movies get the highest ratings. And his favorite film critic is Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal. If Mr. Morgenstern likes a movie, then my friend will probably consider seeing it.

Now I haven't really paid much attention to film critics in the past. You never really remember the movies you agree with them on. You just remember them tearing apart your favorite movies. It's just the way our minds work. We tend to remember the negativity more often than not. All I really know about film critics are Siskel & Ebert's TV show when I was a kid and the movie reviews I would occasionally read in Entertainment Weekly or Rolling Stone. But actually paying attention what they really had to say, well that was new to me.

So I decided to apply science to this predicament. I would figure out which critic is most suited to my taste so that I can have someone to turn to and determine what I should see (wink, wink). First, I would take 10 of my favorite movies and see how their scores stood up to mine. All 10 of my movies are what I would consider 100's (the scoring system on metacritic). I would take a handful of critics and add up their scores of my 10 and see who had the greatest total. I determined my top 10 by selecting 5 of my all-time favorites and 5 of my favorite movies in the last 5 years.

I started with Pulp Fiction, the movie I would consider to be my all-time favorite. If the critic didn't at least give that movie a decent score, then I probably wouldn't agree with them on most movies. Then, I found out that most critics hadn't reviewed all 10 of my movies, so I improvised my scientific experiment. I would take the highest 5 ratings of any of my 10 and compare the scores that way. So, essentially they might not have given Almost Famous(one of my top 10) a good score, but that wouldn't hurt them as long as they scored another movie of mine high.

After I added up all the score of my test critics, taking just the top 5 scores, I came to an interesting conclusion. The critic that had the highest score in my experiment is...drum roll, please!

Roger Ebert!

This was both exciting and a let down. exciting because Roger Ebert is the man! It was a let down because, it's Roger Ebert. I was hoping to find some obscure film critic from some newspaper in Bumfuck, Oregon to be my messiah. Roger is cool, but everybody knows Roger. But upon further introspection, I realized that Roger Ebert is the perfect film critic for me. After all, he loved Pulp Fiction, gave it a thumbs up. And any fan of Tarantino knows that film doesn't have to be perfect and grand. It can be small low budget b-film that entertains, even with it's many flaws. And Ebert wrote what I consider to be one of the worst movies ever made and he still went on to become a successful film critic. He can appreciate movies that most others wouldn't see.

My runner-up critic ended up being James Barardinelli of reelviews.net. From what I gather, he's an average person like you and me who became accredited (whatever that means) and now posts his movie reviews on his website. So there's hope for me after all.

and, for your information, my friends film critic, Joe Morgenstern scored the worst. Go figure!