Why "Quality" Is Overrated

I don't think your comments on Rot F are a very good basis for discussion. Either your points are irrelevant to the question of the quality of the movie - how it was made, how much effort the director put into it - or they're so self-evident that we disagree on the validity of the premisse, which makes discussion rather pointless.

I don't want to cause you stress. Remember, it's just a disagreement on a damn website. It gives me a chance to examine opposing viewpoints and forces me to critically examine my own, all while interacting with nice people who share my interest in narrative media. I'm enjoying this, and I certainly hope you are too.

You can't really take Kane and a Transformers film together in one discussion. I've focused mostly on how the classic art cinema is discussed as it is because it is simply different both textually and contextually to contemporary mainstream Hollywood cinema as we know it. It's the same for the classic Hollywood cinema, even if Kane does stand out because it problematises many of the paradigms generally associated with classical Hollywood cinema. That's what makes it interesting in one perspective, but that's neither here nor there in this case, I guess.

I'm pretty certain Transformers has received some discussion time in academic criticism, not as much some renowned art cinema classics but then again, those are debates that have gone on for decades and are no different to classic literature, philosophy, etc. discussions just because they involve a supposedly trashy commercial medium (which is insulting to any lover of film, that's the real elitism). Like I've said, discussions of blockbusters came about in response to other elements of academic criticism. Then I'd have to detail a small history of neo-formalism which is almost what a couple of Transformers fans have got at in this thread already.

As for "quality" being subjective in the ways suggested above... well, it's long been deconstructed, and it's still a feature of contemporary western art. See, "official" Dogma 95 films (as opposed to student Dogma 95 films on Youtube and elsewhere) for example, one of which I take my screenname here from. Like classic Dada, one political element (and all films are political) of those films is to take a big shit on what makes a film decent in today's world, theme-wise and in regards to visual aspects.

edited 27th Feb '12 11:08:17 PM by TheSollerodFascist

False, that is built upon the assumption that facts are the same as opinions. If you're making a statement that could only be taken as opinion, it is true, but not as a general statement.

Fight smart, not fair.

Interesting. Your argument makes sense, but has the strange implication that these opinions that are useful now won't be useful a century later. Even if that's true, the perceived disconnect between what movie-goers enjoy (or are at least drawn to) and what critics consider as good or bad combined with such an argument would imply that at least part of the time, critics' opinions can be useless, or that critics are useful to some movie-goers but not others.

On the side, JO Zeldenrust, I think you proved Extreme 64's point better than Extreme 64 did.

edited 28th Feb '12 8:52:50 AM by shiro_okami

Thank you for confirming the source, Zeldenrust. It’s right, such “relativizing” phrases have a legitimate communicative function, but only because they're considered "polite" phrases. But just as communication can fail because of insufficient politeness, it can also fail because of too much politeness. If you would consequently introduce all your statements of opinion with “I think”, “I believe”, “My opinion is”, etc, you'll quickly come across as overly defensive and submissive, like you were saying “you don’t have to take me seriously, deep in my heart I know I’m wrong.” And that is usually not what you’ll want.

@Fresison:

and @Deboss:

There is no clear, unambiguous, natural distinguishing line between "facts" and "opinions". Before Copernicus came along, it was considered fact that the Sun circles around the Earth. Afterwards, people realized that this was only an opinion.

Of course we have certain concepts of what are “matters of fact” and what are “matters of opinion”, but that doesn’t change that we think, deep down (or not so deep down), that our own opinions (obviously not the diverging opinions of other people) are a subcategory of the facts, and not an entirely different category.

“Water boils at 100° Celsius” is a different case because it is ultimately a definition, not a statement on the nature of the world.

Besides, I’d like to throw in that “I enjoy this movie” and “I think this movie is good” are not the same. I can acknowledge that a movie is good without particularly enjoying (or claiming to enjoy) it; and I can enjoy a movie without thinking or claiming that it is particularly “good”. The two tend to stand in a vague positive correlation to each other, but most people will have no problem with acknowledging that they are not identical.

Let's just say and leave it at that.

Any mountain climber will tell you that water only boils at precisely 100 degrees C if you do so at sea level in a vacuum. Otherwise it is up for debate.

As it happens, so is quality when it applies to cinematic arts.

Well, I never watched movies on a mountain top or in a vacuum. Maybe Plan 9 from Outer Space is Oscar material on top of Mount Everest. I don't know.

Apart from that, the temperature at which water boils is not "up for debate", as it can be fairly accurately determined for different conditions. And Celsius adjusted his scale of temperature so that water boiled at 100° wherever his laboratory was.

edited 28th Feb '12 1:04:04 PM by LordGro

Let's just say and leave it at that.

Does anyone else think it's surprising that we're discussing the possibility that there's no objective sense of quality on a site dedicated to understanding writing and figuring out what's good and bad in storytelling?

edited 28th Feb '12 3:29:58 PM by Akagikiba

I don't like to think I name-drop a number of different films for no reason. I'm just not fond of going over the fundamentals of art philosophy, so I like to put it forward that "quality" is subjective... but that's no reason to stop studying genre motivations, authorship themes or taking a film in hand with wider, less specific cultural studies-esque reading. Among many other things... and it still all involves tropes and ideas.

On my mind, I know a lot of folks here really hang themselves on the "no such thing as notability" tagline and occasionally use it harshly as a rebuke to alternative styles of cinema, but the best way isn't to make assumptions or questioning pop-criticism presumptions about quality. You take a film or a group of films appropriately.

You'd really only do otherwise casual-like, i.e. if I were to say that I like Pasolini's Gospel According to St. Matthew because it's neo-realist, therefore so very different to the American religiously-themed epics of around the same time.

edited 28th Feb '12 4:10:29 PM by TheSollerodFascist

Those opinions may indeed become useless over time, but that isn't certain. Some opinions on what constitutes quality have lasted for thousands of years, probably because they resonate with the human psyche on a very fundamental level. Still, that resonance is a result of the relationship between a work and it's audience, so it is subjective.

Well, I agree with Extreme 64's point insofar as I think value judgements are inherently subjective. I disagree with him that it's harmful to value some opinions more highly than others, and I disagree that critical review and analysis of films somehow diminishes the worth of the individual opinions of people who base their judgement on other criteria.

I have to disagree with you here. The idea that the Sun revolves around Earth is still a factual statement, it is just a false factual statement. Being proved wrong doesn;t make something an opinion.

There is a very clear distinction between facts and opinions: facts are description of a state of affairs, whereas opinions are judgements of value about a state of affairs.

In a vacuum, water has a triple point: it both boils and freezes at ~0 degrees. Water boils at 100 degrees at normal atmospheric pressure at sea level, which is ~10000 Pa. Also, your analogy is invalid, because a claim about the boiling point of water - whether true or false - is a factual statement, whereas as statement about the quality of a work inherently includes a value judgement. The two statements are not similar in the aspect relevant to this discussion.

I can't speak for others, but no, I don't think it's surprising. A site like TV Tropes makes it very clear that opinions on stories are similar, but not universal. Questions like these are to be expected.

@The Sollerod Fascist: I think I get the point from your last two posts, but I think you're taking too academic an approach here. In academic debate it really shouldn't matter whether you like a work or not: works are analysed not because they're very good, but because they are important in some sense, be it historical, artistic or socio-poilitical.

Critical analysis as a tool in forming an opinion, as it's put to used by critics, has value from an academic perspective because it has some predictive power as to which works are at least somewhat likely to become important in some sense. This value, however, doesn't seem to be the thing the opening poster has an issue with. S/he seems to have a problem with critics' opinions being viewed as more valid than others', which isn't the case. Either that or s/he has a problem with critics' opinions being treated as more important than others', which is true, but not a problem.

This is accurate for the most part, but the best distinguishing characteristic is that if everyone stops believing something, it is still true (making it a fact). If belief is required for it, it's an opinion.

Fight smart, not fair.

^^ I am academically-minded when it comes to film criticism. That's the kind of film fan I am, thanks to a few people.

I understand the original points of the thread, and to respond to those then that Mark Kermode video posted isn't a bad one. Pop journalism is a routine profession where you're getting paid to write eye-catching stuff. Not that I'm dismissing the level of skill involved or anything, but you buy newspapers/magazines, browse these well-made, snazzy websites for a certain reason.

I don't mean to insult anyone with that, it's just how my approach has come over the years. And hey, it's all a thousand miles above than those TV guides that offer seemingly random five-star ratings for films that happen to be being shown. "Two stars" for Rio Bravo? Yeah, erm, no.

My own "agenda" though is persuade against something of an aura in the thread, that is, don't assume that critics giving a lot of airtime to well-covered yet "more artistic" films (like I may do) is essentially an act of snobbery. Films come in many shapes and sizes, they simply can't be judged on one simple scale.

Also, the last Deliberately Monochrome European movie I recall seeing at the cinema itself wasn't even French.*

.

edited 29th Feb '12 3:21:56 AM by TheSollerodFascist

Not too much on topic, but I think my cable provider uses Roger Ebert's ratings for that.

Insert witty and clever quip here. My page, as the database hates my handle.

This is completely and utterly wrong. Opinions aren't true or false. Assigning a truth value to an opinion is meaningless. Seriously, this is so wrong I don't even know where to start.

edited 29th Feb '12 5:06:08 PM by shiro_okami

That said, a lot of people do *think* that facts are opinions ( or that opinions are facts ).

Home of CBR Rumbles-in-Exile: rumbles.fr.yuku.com

Opinions are things which you believe. Perhaps it would be better to say "is so" instead of "is true"?

Fight smart, not fair.

No they're not, opinions are things you have. Belief implies there's a chance you could be wrong. There's no such chance when it comes to opinions, because opinions, in contrast with factual statements, make no claim about the outside world.

"The earth revolves around the sun" is a factual statement. It describes a state of affairs of the world, not of your mind. It is also not completely certain, as our observations of the universe may have been mistaken or misinterpreted, so it requires some belief. That belief may be justified, qualifying it as knowledge, but it is still a belief.

"I like chocolat" is an opinion, and it doesn't make any claims about the outside world. It is a claim about my mind, and because I have perfect access to my mind, there is no uncertainty, no belief required.

Interesting theory... But incorrect. If only because the opinion of "I am always correct in all things", while having no claim upon the outside world, it isn't going to be a true opinion.

Also... That "I like chocolate" thing is also a factual statement. Because whoever says it either likes chocolate, making the statement true, or they don't, making it false.

edited 2nd Mar '12 1:55:01 AM by Swish

I agree on the earth thing, since it's positing a verifiable model, but "I like chocolate" isn't an opinion, it's a falsifiable statement.

"Chocolate tastes good" is an opinion, "I like chocolate" is a factual statement about an opinion. Essentially, we could say that a factual statement is one about the universal model, as opposed to the personal model of reality.

Fight smart, not fair.

Why talk about movies, when you have epistomology?

Home of CBR Rumbles-in-Exile: rumbles.fr.yuku.com

^ Have copied this post down to use in writing or something later

This is the first time I've come into a lengthy thread where Deboss was on the minority side of an argument, and I've agreed with Deboss instead of the people arguing with him. (Not that I necessarily agree with him on previous pages, but everything he's said on this page sounds consistent to me, and I think post 170 makes a good distinction.)

edited 2nd Mar '12 3:44:28 PM by feotakahari

That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something Awful

I think there is some objectivity in how good a film is. It comes down to pacing that most people feel on a primal level that's tied to our internal clocks and how we feel time passing. That may not be a scientific definition of "objective quality" but it's close enough for me.

I will likely never buy cognitivism in cinema all the way. All films are set up as they are, but I don't think you can use that as an eternal go-to answer for someone's interest, or better yet response, in or to a film. There is too large an arena of psychology to predict otherwise.

It has proven effective in the study of American blockbusters however.

It's been tricky for me in this thread. It's easier to explain why some films are so very worse than others (perhaps see the So Bad It's Horrible page here on this Wiki?), but you're violating socio-cultural barriers otherwise. For instance, I mentioned earlier that the Svensk Filmindustri and British Film Institute signifiers may be worth applause with some critics. This is due to the indication of national funding, craved in some regions but generally loathed in others (i.e. the USA, not to generalise but also yes to generalise).

I've been arguing for a broader field because I feel it's more appealling. Some may be surprised to hear that an incredible amount has been written on The Exorcist for instance.

edited 2nd Mar '12 6:31:49 PM by TheSollerodFascist