MovieBob: Brie Larson is mostly right about needing more diversity in critics

[Underseer]

The problem is that Brie Larson implies that movies marketed at women would automatically get higher reviews if there were more female film critics, and I agree with MovieBob, that simply isn't the case.

Imagine for a moment that Hollywood tried to make a movie starring mostly Asian-Americans that told a story from an Asian-American perspective that was intended to appeal to Asian-Americans, and the movie made use of that "Asians are exotic" crap that most Asian-Americans find really annoying. In that case, such a movie would no doubt receive lower marks if there were more Asian-American film critics because white film critics are probably less likely to recognize that and recognize why Asian-Americans find that annoying.

I can certainly imagine those Madea movies getting lower ratings if there were more African-American critics.

The point to having more diversity among critics is not to get automatic higher ratings to movies that target certain demographics, it's to have more diversity in points of view in discussions about movies, and that genuinely has value.

One example MovieBob gives is a Japanese movie that is mostly silly over-the-top violence (the kind of schlocky movie that MovieBob adores), but he completely missed a certain subtext in the movie until he read reviews from Japanese or Japanese-Americans (hey, I would have completely missed this subtext even though I'm half Japanese).

There is a group of Japanese who are the descendants of Japanese who spent their childhood in Japanese-occupied China during WW2. Sometimes they don't get treated very well because they are regarded as "too Chinese" even though there's really no appreciable difference (every culture has its own stupidities when it comes to the "us vs them" concepts, and the Japanese can get downright bizarre on that point).

Anyway, having different perspectives among critics can genuinely bring observations to reviews that might otherwise go unnoticed if there is less diversity among critics.

For example, I enjoyed hearing from African-American YouTube movie critics explain why Black Panther would have far more positive impact on African-American children than the typical "slave epic" or "racism is bad" movie that Hollywood makes when they want to make an Oscar-bait "black" movie that appeals to the typical movie critic.

So Bree Larson was right: we do need more diversity among movie critics, but perhaps not entirely for the reason that she gave.

 

[Patooka]

My opinion on movie critics is twofold:

1) They are just as diverse as films being viewed today.

2) Considering the subjective nature of a movie review, being a critic is one of the most superfluous professions around. I think Moviebob touched on this a while back as well.

The bit I agree mostly with Moviebob in that clip is his growing unease towards films being rated by one all encompassing arbitrary score, using his love of Dead or Alive as an example. However, I think Bob is part of the problem here. One reason why user ratings are used as a measurement of how good a movie is is the huge disparity between attitudes between the average viewer and a "critic". Star Trek Discovery vs The Orville is the most recent example I can think of. So unless critics reflect attitudes of most viewers, I don't see that changing. And I don't see an injection of "diversity" fixing that.

 

[Underseer]

My opinion on movie critics is twofold:

1) They are just as diverse as films being viewed today.

2) Considering the subjective nature of a movie review, being a critic is one of the most superfluous professions around. I think Moviebob touched on this a while back as well.

The bit I agree mostly with Moviebob in that clip is his growing unease towards films being rated by one all encompassing arbitrary score, using his love of Dead or Alive as an example. However, I think Bob is part of the problem here. One reason why user ratings are used as a measurement of how good a movie is is the huge disparity between attitudes between the average viewer and a "critic". Star Trek Discovery vs The Orville is the most recent example I can think of. So unless critics reflect attitudes of most viewers, I don't see that changing. And I don't see an injection of "diversity" fixing that.

I'm inherently suspicious of user reviews given the tendency of white supremacists alt-right free speech warriors to use 'bots to influence those numbers in times past.

I know how to map from what certain critics like to what I'm likely to enjoy, but I don't know which films triggered the alt-right at any given moment. So the critics are more reliable, but to be honest, I don't watch, listen to, or read film critics to figure out what movies to watch. I pay attention to film critics because they tend to notice things about movies that I miss, and that's exactly the kind of thing that could benefit from more diversity.