Review Types: Food and Therapy

Reading reactions to Justice League made me realize there are two ways of reviewing movies, in terms of the logic they present.

The most popular, and often mocked, is movies as food. You know the type “Sometimes I want an expensive steak, but hey, sometimes I want a fast food cheeseburger, and this movie was a good cheeseburger.” There’s plenty of snark about that specific metaphor, but the logic behind it is less absurd and worth critiquing.

In this sense, what matters in the movie is the ingredients. We’re asking “is the movie good?” and the determinant of that is “Were quality ingredients put together using a known recipe?” If a movie isn’t good, it’s just because you can point to one ingredient and say it’s bad. The pacing was bad, the writing was saccharine, or the director is overrated. Such reviews are not a discussion of how different elements work together to produce something, but just operate on the assumption that if one of the ingredients is bad, that explains why the whole thing is worse. Or in the positive direction, a review will tell us the actors have good chemistry, that the CGI is seamless, the director is hip and capable of working with politically challenging themes - though not how any of these elements interact, beyond goodness multiplying with goodness.

This all points towards a very mass produced view of art. After all, that’s how we think of hamburgers, right? Once you’ve figured out how to make hamburgers, well then, just keep getting good ingredients, put them together the way you know how, and viola, you reliably have a finished product that will please as much as the first time.

If you liked Iron Man 1, well then Spiderman: Homecoming has the exact same quality ingredients, why wouldn’t you like it.

(The moral public image and political leanings of the stars of the film, are just one more ingredient these days that adds to its goodness or badness.)

Empirically, the philosophy doesn’t really work (or else churning out box office successes would be as simple as running McDonalds), but it’s still the basis for almost all professional reviews. It’s just easier to understand.

I'm lazy and examples of these are everywhere, so here's a random Justice League review from Rotten Tomatoes: http://www.screenit.com/ourtake/2017/justice_league.html

The good news is that those behind the scenes finally figured out that audiences of superhero movies prefer them not to be as morose, grim and humorless as most of DC Comics latest offerings, and like them having a little Marvel style humor thrown into the mix. I can't say if the late in production replacement of original director Zack Snyder with Joss Whedon (due to a family tragedy for the former) had anything to do with that change, but it's a welcome one that greatly benefits the offering. 

I'd wager there's more humor in this single film than all of its immediate predecessors combined, and much of that stems from Ezra Miller showing up to play the hyperactive, lightning bolt activated The Flash character. Much like Quicksilver in the "X-Men" movies, he zips along at high speed (thus making everyone else seem frozen in a freeze frame collage), resulting in some similarly fun scenes. But his naive eagerness and interaction with others are what makes him stand out. 

Jason Momoa gets some less hyper moments of humor playing the loner surfer dude type Aquaman character, but it's the presence of Gal Gadot reprising her Wonder Woman character that truly saves the day...and the film. The actress is so natural and comfortable in the part and the character is so powerful (above and beyond the physical) that you simply can't take your eyes off her, and the film really excels whenever she's present. Ray Fisher is okay as the part-human, part machine Cyborg character, but isn't explored enough to make him that interesting. Ben Affleck seems tired and ready to hang up the caped crusader character (which sort of parallels his Bruce Wayne alter-ego), and a character from past films makes a return (guess who) and livens up the proceedings in the third act. 

Which is a good thing as both the villain (Ciarán Hinds, heavily assisted by CGI) and his plot (assembling some powerful boxes to destroy the world) aren't anything worth writing home about. Many of these films really fail to create compelling antagonists and this is yet another prime example. As a result, you're not as invested in watching him get his comeuppance that you automatically know is going to involve lots of CGI heavy, multiple character fight sequences where too much is occurring and looks fake up on the screen. 

Thankfully, the return of that one significant character along with the presence of Gadot, Miller and Marvel-like humor makes most of the film easy and sometimes quite entertaining to watch. I would have preferred a more compelling story (rather than the usual end of the world material), better villain and less reliance on special effects. But enough of the pic works, even considering its various issues, to earn a recommendation. "Justice League" rates as a 5.5 out of 10.

***

At the other end of the spectrum we have looking at movies… like a therapy session.

You would not say about therapy: the client was very charismatic, and the story of their childhood had excellent pacing, but the lighting was flat and boring. B+.

Instead of grading it at all, we’d discuss how the elements (which might be awkward on their own) worked together to say something larger. “The way the client stuttered while talking about his mother,” says one thing, and “the fact that the client brings up academic success at any opportunity” says another. We find meaning both in the plain content of their utterances, and the details around the way they are delivered. The result isn’t good or bad, but it’s interpretable.

This is where the Group 3 type of film critique (and most academic work) ends up. The type of acting (flat, naturalist, manic, sensual) is seen as a filter on the words said and the plot elements. A director’s history is seen as context for themes they deal with in this work. How does the beginning of the session/movie compare to where things are at the end - are things the same, are there important changes, and what does that say about the nature of the problem the characters were struggling to solve?

Sure the movie is ugly (or the client is disruptive.) What does that tell us? In what ways is it ugly, and how can those be seen as deliberate choices?

Compare the above Rotten Tomatoes to people deciphering David Lynch's Twin Peaks, which emphasizes various unpleasant aspects to tell us how they comment on the broader work. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/david-lynchs-late-style/#!

Lynch holds on this scene for an uncomfortable amount of time, lavishing seven cuts and nearly a minute of footage on Mr. C’s tactile show of dominance, the effect of his gesture passing from intimidation to a strange kind of tenderness, registering the tragic feeling of the strong for the weak they nonetheless mean to exploit. We later find out that Jack gets murdered in this scene, but we never see the act take place. His death, we feel, is already written in the lines of this gruff but malleable face, the skin gone slack, vulnerable, now just an unresisting sculptural material for the dark forces that menace and shape it. In this gloriously inexpressive pause, Mr. C seems to be asking himself: what can this goony, docile face be made to sing? 

In many ways, this long squeeze is perfectly representative of the oblique, beguiling aesthetic of the new Twin Peaks. It is not only that the pace is so exquisitely slow or that the scene’s narrative purpose is unclear. We are also left to wonder about the spotlight of lyrical dread lavished upon a character so soon to disappear from the story, just as we may be disarmed by the proliferation of arresting minor characters, stray images, and tangential action throughout the series. 

Lynch has always had a way of elevating peripheral performances to derail our sense of narrative logic (think of the man in Wild at Heart who quacks like a duck, or the inexplicable presence of anthropomorphic rabbits in Inland Empire). But no work of Lynch’s has been so gloriously digressive as Twin Peaks: The Return, nor has any work of his been so elliptical or so unforgivingly distracted by the characters, images, and scenes that seem to exist to the side of its story line. In this, the series embraces a narrative style that is arguably even more inventive and jarring than the narrative itself, with its baroque mythology of lodges, personified evil, and interdimensional rabbit holes. 

The new season challenges us most in the way it seems to undo the story it is telling, moving out of sequence and perversely out of rhythm, indicating a wealth of paths it has no interest in going down, spending long stretches of time in scenes that do not immediately further the plot, and jumping without warning from characters and locales we know to those we don’t (and never come to know). The result is a feeling of erratic, transfixing chaos. A greasy drug-addled woman sits in the Roadhouse talking with her friend about zebras and penguins, scratching the “wicked rash” in her armpit. A woman frantically honking her horn screams at Deputy Briggs to let her car through traffic because, as she puts it with incredible and hideous fury, “We’re laaaaaate!” while a diseased young girl lurches from the passenger seat, vomiting a dark trickle of green slime. A young girl waiting for a friend at the Roadhouse is removed from her booth by two grown men, drops to her knees in the middle of a concert, and crawls through the crowd of dancers before screaming at the top of her lungs. In any other series — even the original series of Twin Peaks — these scenes would have consequences: they’d be explained or taken up again or at least referred to in passing later on, in order incorporate them into the larger plot. In Lynch’s hands, they are left only as refractory trace variations of the show’s central action.

This way, every movie becomes a complex inkblot, a source for endless analysis and conclusions that are both more and less than “good, bad, should I see it.” This view has its flaws as well (such as the reader bringing so much subjective baggage to their interpretation that they can’t really provide useful information for anyone else) but the point is how different it is, and why it’s valuable to keep this attitude in your toolkit.

(This is not the same thing as SECRET MESSAGES delivered through a film, like explaining how random names are actually references to some historical event, a la a Wizard of Oz being about the gold standard, or Room 237 about The Shining. These sort of fan conspiracy theories aren't really substantive, anymore than if you believed your therapy client could best be interpreted by taking the first word of every anecdote, and stringing them together to find out their message from their Russian spymasters.)

The therapy mode is much more engaging with the Real of the work, picking up on random details and incorporating them. As I mentioned with Justice League, few of the professional reviews that wanted to tell us whether it was “humorless” or “grim” or not, said anything about the fact that the first minute is nothing but a diagetic paean to Superman, let alone what the meaning of that choice of introduction was. When you read a therapy review, at least you see the elements the critic is talking about - when you read a food-type review, you might wonder “did she even watch the movie?”

***

oligopsoneia

Or: “reviews” vs. “criticism.”

(Also note that these aren’t just different styles of doing the same thing but different goals really: reviews/”food” finds its fundamental value for people who haven’t eaten the burger yet, while criticism/”therapy” is most useful for people who have already been to the session. A RottenTomatoes-style aggregator of critical reception of a work would be as stupid as a printed collection of food-style reviews.)

bambamramfan

I mean really it’s “types of discussion”, I’m not really sure any words like review or criticism properly categorize the difference. Youtube videos that tell you 100 things wrong with a movie would be called “criticism” but are the highest example of this ingredient-based analysis.

I think you’re wrong with the “different goals” and that is related to how badly the food-style gets its own goal wrong. All reviewers, myself included, would love the ability to look at a work, and be able to tell someone else whether they will like this movie. That’s basically the holy grail of the entire review edifice (including as you say, aggregators) and particularly Hollywood planning departments.

Food is just a very simple way of trying this, and it fails fairly badly. It does not turn out that “script by Whedon, acted by Blanchett, plus social justice themes, plus famous IP” makes something you can actually predict people will like. Certainly not to the degree that I can predict a friend will like my risotto recipe.

Therapy is a different attempt/style to figure out “what is going on with this movie” that ends up in a very different place, but really does start with the same question “why did I like Empire Strikes Back, but not really Return of the Jedi?”