• Your average movie goer isn’t capable of telling from a trailer if a movie is going to be garbage or not.

    Of course not. A trailer is just an ad. That’s like expecting to be able to tell if a smartwatch is good after watching an ad.

    So a possible solution could be professional/expert reviews. We need to be able to trust them though (no bought reviews etc.) and they shouldn’t be snobbish against pure entertainment movies. Unfortunately this will only work if people actively seek out those reviews (at least I can’t think of a way to actively push the reviews to the consumers), which does not work as long as movies are consumed in order to not think. Which they will be as long as they are as shitty and brainless as many are right now.

    • We used to have that back in the day with Siskel and Ebert. Two, classically trained film reviewers, who had a show that aired the week before the films they were reviewing were due to come out.

      Of the two, Ebert would go easier on pure entertainment movies than Siskel would. They didn’t always agree, but when they did, you could be assured it was either really good or really bad.

      We don’t really have an equivalent in this day and age with review embargoes and such.

      • While S & E were great for explaining why they liked or did not like movies, their opinions were still opinions and at best they gave middling reviews to the types of movies they did not like even when those movies were the best of their type.

        Plus Ebert gave Anaconda a high rating and praise. Fucking Anaconda.

        • He liked Spawn as well which I still have not entirely forgiven him for! But like I say, of the two, he was the one who went easier on populist media than Siskel did. That’s probably why putting the two of them together worked better than anyone else who inherited the shows they left as they bounced around from one to the next to the next.

          Who else had their platform before Siskel died? Rex Reed + somebody else was one, and I think there was one more pair as well.

          Rex Reed sticks out because he turned into a giant bitchy queen when he really hated a movie and it was hilarious.

      •  SeaJ   ( @SeaJ@lemm.ee ) 
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        1 year ago

        I give props to Ebert for putting his money where his mouth is and actually writing a movie. While not a great movie, he was still willing to go through the process of writing a screenplay and getting the movie made.