It was 2009, my last year of teenagehood and my second year at University with a directionless future ahead of me (I was studying philosophy). I met up with some friends at a café one hungover Sunday to mop up the leftover alcohol in my system with syrup and pancakes. Because my neck wasn’t listening to my brain properly, my head involuntarily slinky-ed towards the local paper and caused my eyes to read the truncated movie reviews from their esteemed film critic.
Scanning the films, I focused on a particularly negative review of a big dumb action blockbuster I remembered enjoying that previous Tuesday. The critic used these strange critic-y words that etched me the wrong way – words like “derivative” and “convoluted”.
That film was Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and I thought it was really good. Until I saw it again that very afternoon.
I had committed the review to memory due to some irrational desire to prove this critic wrong. But to my utter shock, the exact opposite occurred in that cinema.
The critic proved me wrong, flipping the script on a table they turned. This was difficult for me to deal with, for I found it hard to articulate what it was I liked about the film in the first place.
At first, I figured I just got swept up with the social circle I saw it with, but it went deeper than that. Having bought into the marketing behind Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, I was already primed to enjoy myself before I had even sat down to watch it. Thus, I attached myself to anything that looked remotely like “a good action scene”. In my moment of recollection, the only scene I ever bragged about was the last battle where Optimus decapitates Fallen.
That was it – that one minute scene in the movie that was 2.5 hours long.
I didn’t have much time or money for frequent cinema viewing, so this was one of the few “cinematic” experiences I could afford back then. It was like giving a starving man with an empty fridge a cupcake made of shit: he may ignore the shit but he’ll munch the fuck out of the cherry on top and thank you for the experience.
The film critic was the person pointing at the cupcakes that weren’t made of shit. And here I was defending the figurative skidmarks I made all over my face. Twice.
This may sound like I’m calling fans of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen shit-lickers, which isn’t the case. Taste is a strange thing after all – a sweaty sock may taste like a sweet mandarin to the residents of planet Xulquart. A lot of people have legitimate reasons for liking Transformers 2, meaning they didn’t taste a shit cupcake; they tasted a Bay-senberry sensation.
However, I had no legitimate reason for liking that film, and yet I still believed I liked it. I tasted shit, willingly continued to eat it and grinned like a dumbass with corn and nuts stuck in his teeth.
I used to view all movie reviewers as this one mutated creature made up of the same holier-than-thou opinion – and it was a monster I wanted to slay. But my shit-eating experience shattered this brash generalisation.
It motivated me to search for film critics whose personalities I could relate to. My opinion may not have always matched theirs, but I always understood their perspectives. The ability to express that perspective, I believe, is the most important aspect to reviewing – far more important than the actual opinion.
Perhaps this is why I wanted to be a movie reviewer myself, to use it as a platform to expressing my own perspectives. But the reader also has a responsibility to earnestly attempt to understand that perspective as well, or else those words are wasted. That’s not to say all critics express their perspectives well all the time (myself included).
Even my favourite critics are capable of batshit crazy outlier opinions that seemingly come from the planet Xulquart. Not that they are from planet Xulquart, but I occasionally have my suspicions.
