Enjoy the Best, Not the Latest, Media
kartick.substack.com
kartick.substack.com
The article uses Star Trek (2009) as its example of a mediocre film. Its IMDB rating is 7.9/10 from over 500k votes over 11 years -- surely this would place the film squarely in the "tried and tested" category.
If I look on some smaller sites I see a different story. Letterboxd: 7.2/10, 234k votes RateYourMusic: 6.4/10, 3k votes The first site has a higher ratio of capital f Film fans and the second site is a much smaller site focused on music. Using these three data points I can deduct that Star Trek (2009) is probably a decent franchise action movie that most will find enjoyable but won't stand up to scrutiny as a stand alone film or for those expecting something more substantial.
The article is right that it's so much easier to access the history of a medium than in the past. It's interesting to me when a previously unknown work from 25+ years ago is rediscovered and entered into "the canon". In alternative music a recent example is Long Season by Fishmans from 1996.
But going through the canonical "best of" lists for a medium is more-or-less a gateway to developing and discovering your own taste in these things (a process that never ends). You shouldn't put much trust in any single source.
Something that's missing now with this intermingling of old and new art is historical context. A film streaming platform is just a directory of video files attached to 250px images and paragraph blurbs. What is Netflix saying about film and its viewers when it has less than 50 films pre-1980? Now that watching 2000+ films before the age of 30 is common for film fans, what will that mean for the future of film?
I have admittedly discovered a handful of great authors via Goodreads recommendations, but they’re big names I think I would have eventually found anyway (e.g. Brandon Sanderson), and I spent a lot of time adding books I’d read and carefully considering how to rate each one.
I’m actually broadly curious why these systems aren’t more effective. It seems like such a perfect system on paper.
In comparison, when I go rate movies on IDMb I'm rarely more than one star away from the average rating, so IMDb serves my needs quite well, anyway.
I read a comparison (linked on HN) between IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, and Metacritic which used statistical analysis and concluded Metacritic was most accurate.
The movie you mentioned (I don't know about it) gets 82/100 on Metacritic [1], and a must see reward (whatever that means). 82 is high.
The director of the movie is JJ Abrams who seems to turn anything he touches into gold (with one recent exception, IIRC).
I have read a lot less film criticism since Roger Ebert died though. It seems like recently anything remotely enjoyable on rotten tomatoes gets above 90.
Roger Ebert [1] and Gene Siskel [2] were my introduction to analysis and argumentation. Watching two adults getting into a argument and discussing something using some sort of rules-of-engagement fascinated me. That they viewed a piece from so many angles, criticism is a skill and an art. Opinion shouldn't occupy more than 10% of result. ;)
I didn't understand the depth of that personal and professional relationship until I saw an interview with Ebert, where he teared up at the loss of his friend Gene. [3]
What are some other professional duos?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Ebert
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Itself_(2014_film)
I have been wanting to join http://blog.scarecrow.com/ for awhile now, it is a Seattle based video rental place with lots of rare movies and videos. Years ago we rented 2001 on laserdisc and a laserdisc player. Not quite as cool as running a film projector but still a fun experience.
If it wasn't clear in my first paragraph, Siskel and Ebert were definitely in a class of their own in the professionalism and thoroughness they brought to film criticism.
Long gone now but the trio of Howard Cosells, Don Meredith and Frank Gifford enamored me similarly as a young boy, and for similar reasons to the point of today I still find sports commentary far more enthralling than the game itself.
My favorite duo today, while a biased favorite as a local are Len Casper and Jim DeShaies who are the home announcers of the Chicago Cubs. They bring a spirit and joviality influenced by deep reverence for the game of baseball that I don’t think can be touched by any other broadcasting duo in the league (this is relegated to television broadcast announcers, there are too many to name in radio I think).
Every time a Cubs hitter knocks one out onto Waveland, and Len lets out an “oh BABY that ball is GONE” I like to imagine the late legendary Haray Caray is looking down on the booth smiling upon this generation of Cubs color commentator.
Car Talk.
They’re both gone now, and the new TV crew is ok, but their radio announcers, Scott Franzke and Larry Andersen are great. They’re funny, have a deep knowledge of the game, and they know when to let the game breath a little. Baseball and radio are such a great combination, when done well.
The vast majority of the web has devolved similarly. Interested in a widget? If you Google "Widget Reviews" the first page is drowned out by listicles. Google gets the ad money, the listicle website gets the referral money, Amazon gets the retailer's cut plus maybe another Prime membership. There's very little incentive for fair and honest criticism on the web and every incentive for the big players to drown it out.
Like imagine going to work at a generic office and trying to talk about a half forgotten French movie like The Green Ray. There are too many unknowns (no recognizable cast, foreign film, kind of old) and I don’t think the average person has the fortitude to stand up to that kind of social situation so they avoid it instinctively.
But Netflix could definitely try harder instead of nurturing lazy entertainment. I don’t expect much from them since they made Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 2 in English. What a lame decision.
that movie was awful, especially in comparison to the original. it had none of the innuendo and poetry, more a punch in the face.
imho, the hollowing out of american film began ~20 years ago, with netflix being just a milestone in that evolution. i've been much more interested in foreign films as a result. i'm currently going through the recent back canon of korean films (take care of my cat, oldboy, mother), and it's been great! reminds me of the 90's in american film--while today's films are technically and visually more sophisticated, storytelling and character development has suffered measurably. older french films (and others) are great for that too. the big american blockbusters are fun to watch in the moment but feel like empty calories afterwards.
Now, however, those initial contracts have expired, and a host of streaming services have popped up. If I want to find a movie, I need to fire up Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, and Amazon Prime, then run a search on each of them. Half the time, I still fall back to placing a hold at my local library. I don't think Netflix is pushing new shows because they think the new shows are best. I think they are pushing new shows because they are desperately trying to pivot from a streaming company to a production studio, and the only way to do so is to downplay older media.
You tell what you subscribe to, and it'll search all the catalogs at once.
I'd love a service like this that works internationally (or better yet, a world where I don't need this sort of thing).
The TV Series rating link: call me old or highbrow but I really thought Rod Serling's "The Twilight Zone" should be in the top 10. Nope, not even in the top 146.
The U.S. "The Office" makes the top 146 (#13) but not the U.K. version.
Fawlty Towers? Nowhere.
Etc.
OP here. If you have a better source, use it. Which source is the best was not the point of the article anyway. The point was that you should look for good stuff, not blindly watch the new movie or read the new book.
The better I got to know Nagasawa, the stranger he seemed. I had met a lot of strange people in my day, but none as strange as Nagasawa. He was a far more voracious reader than I, but he made it a rule never to touch a book by any author who had not been dead at least thirty years. “That’s the only kind of book I can trust,” he said.
“It’s not that I don’t believe in contemporary literature,” he added, “but I don’t want to waste valuable time reading any book that has not had the baptism of time. Life is too short.”
“What kind of authors do you like?” I asked, speaking in respectful tones to this man two years my senior. “Balzac, Dante, Joseph Conrad, Dickens,” he answered without hesitation.
“Not exactly fashionable.”
“That’s why I read them. If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. That’s the world of hicks and slobs. Real people would be ashamed of themselves doing that. Haven’t you noticed, Watanabe? You and I are the only real ones in the dorm. The other guys are crap.”
This took me off guard. “How can you say that?”
“’ Cause it’s true. I know. I can see it. It’s like we have marks on our foreheads. …”
Dreams can be wild, but the writer manufactures their characters from their mind while conscious. The intention and the agency over the creation sets them apart.
I have had only a 1 or 2 lucid dreams, but I couldn't hold the dream state for any appreciable amount of time that I achieved consciousness in the dream world.
I wonder how many writers employ dreams in the creation of characters, if they dream about the stories they write?
... but the average rating is a measure of popularity :/. The best movies I have ever seen are rated poorly, because most people didn't understand them or they weren't "easy" to watch; if you want to find good content, you need to read reviews and find people whose recommendations matter to you, not work off ratings.
Not quite? Mulholland drive for example, was widely praised by critics and is remembered fondly by film nerds, but is not in most senses “popular”.
I’m not arguing that ratings are perfect, I largely agree with you; just that they’re a weird measurement and not one largely of popularity.
Goodreads is kind of a weird space which shows that the popular vote is kind of useless. It’s hard to find a good book based on ratings. Everything seems to be either 4+ stars or garbage. The Fault in our Stars probably has a better rating than print copies of Hamlet. Actually, all classics seem to hover around 3.68 stars. Never 2. In fact, I don’t think any books published in the history of the world have a rating less than 3.
Anyways, the language you google in heavily affects recommendations. Searching in general is not a useful way to find anything cool. It’s much better to happen upon a good source of reviews or criticism which align with whatever gets your rocks off and settle for curated entertainment/art.
Compare linking via epigraph in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24501978
This is particularly pronounced whenever there are any consequences attached to the ratings. If you give anything but 5 to your Uber driver, you're risking them losing their job. If you give anything but 5 on an e-commerce platform, the seller may lose a lot of money. 5 being the "neutral" score became normalized.
I've come to the (sad) conclusion that review systems are inaccurate, even when well intended. There was likely a moment during their existence where they were accurate. I would guesstimate this moment is generally before it gained momentum. E.g. early days of IMDB, early days of Amazon, and early days of tbat German law mentioned earlier (I don't know the name).
Since Metacritic is an aggregation of paid and amateur reviewers alike, it might very well be more accurate.
I really think GoodReads is the exception to this though. When I look through other people’s ratings I frequently see them using the full spectrum.
Furthermore, it’s very common for written reviews to say that a book really deserves some fractional number of stars, but Goodreads forced them to round.
Of course, the average ratings suck anyway...
Clearly though, different movies and books server different purposes. Is Schindlers List a better movie than Airplane! Sure, but I'm not going to put on the former when I want a few laughs.
Of the people I know who have seen a David Lynch movie, I haven’t met anyone who enjoyed them. Speaking for myself, Mulholland Drive is definitely in the running for worst movie I’ve ever seen.
Even worse, a rating could be because the raters were most of the people to notice a thing, but in a negative way. All ratings on the internet about things that center women or racial minorities should be ignored. Because of the overwhelming population of white male (and incel-type right-wing internet subculture) commenters, they can get a hate-boner about a movie or tv show just from the title or subject, network with each other, and then be responsible for an order of magnitude more ratings on the thing than the people who the thing was made for.
I think the best way to find other things you like is to figure out what the authors of the things you like themselves like or have worked on. That stuff is hard to find, though. You can get it from references within the works or from interviews and biographies, but it's nothing that algorithms are extracting yet.
I also find a habit from my old punk rock days to work: find other people who were working in the same place at around the same time. You may actually just like the zeitgeist, but have assigned it entirely to the only authors from that place/time that you've been exposed to.
Critic's reviews I find to be worthless, or at least their text. The ideal critic for me is one that just says "yes" or "no" to a long list of movies. You'll figure out from skimming the list whether that critic is a good critic for you. I often find Ebert's reviews a pleasure to read, but I rarely agree with him about the films themselves. Artistic criticism is generally a writing exercise imo, not anything with an actual relationship to the thing being commented upon. I'd put it 3rd in the ranking of most meaningless journalism, right below sports writing, which is still more meaningful than the ultimate: analysis of the reasons behind today's market movements.
Here is the end of his 2019 series (which includes links to all the other decades of that series): https://jessewalker.blogspot.com/2020/01/#342764971747282839...
Consumption of the best-ofs in a media category is an exercise in building media literacy. By listening to Pink Floyd you can get more out of Tame Impala.
Big media companies make more money from new than old, so are quite happy to have a consumer go through their life paying for potboiler ephemera. The consumer shouldn’t be happy with that though, as they’d have paid dearly in time and money for media that’s painfully beige compared to the best old stuff and also the best new stuff that they’d only have known to look for if they had built the media literacy.
One reason that's not a persuasive enough argument for many people is that what they want to get out of art is different. If you want the best sensory experience, then a black and white movie from the 30s is probably not to your taste. Other people appreciate the social aspect of media: being able to be participate in an ongoing conversation about some work, actor, or topic.
Both of those are valid reasons to like things, but ideally, you want to be able to see the value of a work independent of your own preferences. That doesn't mean denying your own preferences. But, part of a successful education is cultivating the ability to appreciate culture of all kinds, and on its own terms.
Now, that said I haven't gone to see a summer blockbuster in a decade. I don't like Marvel movies or Star wars sequels. There was only one good star wars movie in the original trilogy anyway.
Note that their choices aren't perfect; I've watched some movies that won awards that I really didn't like. That said, I think these sources are a better starting point than lists based solely on popularity.
The Greatest Show on Earth
Gigi
Tom Jones
When I was younger, it seemed obvious to me that Grand Illusion is the greatest Renoir film, easy. Rules of the Game was a head scratcher. I never understood why it was so highly regarded. It seemed more dated and slow. But now that I’m a little older I can see what’s great about it a little more clearly.
The list does seem a little too top heavy with B&W films from the 40s but most days I find myself agreeing with that era being best.
While some of them definitely were great, a lot (perhaps half?) really did not impress.
The IMDB 250 list is one I more consistently like. At one point I had seen over 240 of them, and was less frequently disappointed. The list is dynamic, though, so I'm sure there are plenty more now that I've not seen.
"Because people always read only the latest, instead of the best of all times, writers stay within a narrow circle of circulating ideas, and the age silts up ever more deeply in its own muck.
Therefore with respect to our reading the art of not reading is extremely important. It consists in our not picking up whatever happens to be occupying the greater public at any given time, such as for instance political or literary pamphlets, novels, poems and so on, which currently make a lot of noise and even reach several editions in the first and last years of their run. On the contrary, we should consider that whoever writes for fools always finds a large public, and we should devote the always precious and carefully measured time set aside for reading exclusively to the works of the great minds of all times and peoples, who tower over the rest of humanity, and who are distinguished as such by the voice of fame. Only they really shape and instruct us.
Of the inferior we can never read too little and the good never too often. Bad books are intellectual poison: they ruin the mind.
In order to read the good it is a condition that we do not read the bad; for life is short, and our time and our powers are limited."
My copy of "Greatest Hits of 1720", purchased in a nearby music shop before there was a commercial Internet, disagrees.
That limited space for physical goods in local stores didn't mean we only got new stuff. The record shops had an oldies section (not new but only a generation or two old music) and a classical section (for much older music). Older books and movies were similarly available at bookstores and video stores.
The way they dealt with limited space was by only stocking the best of the older stuff. You could not go into a music store and find the symphonies of whoever was the 50th best symphony composer from the time of Beethoven. You would just find Beethoven and Haydn and Schubert and some others.
Compare to the new section, where you would find everything from the best to the run of the mill.
I feel like we have regressed a bit now. One of my biggest issues with Netflix is that they don’t expire more classic or foreign cinema.
New media is popular because of its novelty factor, hype pre-release, the social aspects of discussing whats popular, and the convenience of having a choice be top of mind. I doubt many people only watch whats new or think that new is better. There are many facets of life and few people are interested in making deliberate and contrarian choices in all of them.
I disagree. If something is long-term popular, that doesn't mean it's really good, it means it hit the average taste pretty well. The average taste is very bland, because it's, well, average. You can't really deviate too far from the lowest common denominator if you want to hit the average taste and be super popular.
Even Disney films - the most idealistic in many ways - can hardly be considered bland.
The typical Summer bland film or airport book which really is bland and overladen with tropes is rarely popular after a few years.
I find most block buster movies very predictable. The end is generally obvious (hint: the good guys win) and they follow a fairly common setup. That's not necessarily bad, you can produce very entertaining movies that way, and they're often very well produced and supreme in technical aspects, but they're not something I'd watch twice and usually not something I recommend to anyone.
Look again, and compare them to a Summer release rom-com.
Unique gems have niche audiences . See The Leftovers.
I think The Wire is a masterpiece so great that it graduated from niche appeal to broad praise.
Just to be clear, I praise all 3 examples
I guess we can agree, that a badly made and acted move is likely to be unpalatable to most. But beyond that, its hard to gauge. That's why there's so much money in better predictors, they all suck so much now.
But yes, you're right. It's funny how recommendation engines seem to rarely get it right as well. I find that the best recommendations come from friends that know me well enough to know what I'd enjoy.
Badly made movies have a huge hurdle - hard to watch, hard to understand, hard to even see what's going on. Hard to want to keep watching. Like all those Monty Python jokes about somebody boring - they didn't amuse me, they were just boring.
Much of the AV media (Not necessarily art) consumed these days by the younger generation a is transitory, part of a conversation, and short: Podcasts and YouTube videos in particular. They take up a lot of the media consumption time. I see this as our new dominant mode of sensemaking, a section of the populace isn’t going out into the world make making mistakes to learn from them, they’re watching YouTube to learn and make sense of the world. (This is why YouTube’s recommendation algorithm is so dangerous socially and politically.)
As for consuming art... even that has become a bit different. People watch the latest tent pole Marvel movie or whatnot , yes for a multi hour thrill, but also to join in the conversation with their friends and acquaintances and to not get left behind in the labyrinthine plot continuity. Same goes for the evolution of music genres.
In short, much modern media consumption seems to me to be about the current meta-narrative, and that makes it hard to place older stuff in context unless it’s curated by someone that is clever enough to fit it in.
For what it’s worth, I love historical art house cinemas, but know almost no one else in real life or my close online circle that does. But I find it provides a lot rewarding depth.
The Criterion Channel is my preference - it has a great selection on demand.
I agree on the principle, however there’s a trust issue.
Out of n reviews on IMDB and RT how many of them are authentic? And how much weight does a critic’s review bear on the overall score?
In my case, be it for a movie or a book (not so much for songs though) the Lindy effect applies.
By sorting on average you miss the most unique.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt4975722/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt2024544/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1454468/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt5580390/
This is a long-winded way of saying, "Don't just look at numbers, be aware of context."
I think High Hopes is from 1994 (not 2003 as the article states). I think I know this because I bought the CD single in the 90s.
Probably an innocent typo and not a indication of a less than carefully crafted post.
It gets weirder when he later says that we should go by the average rating and what a minority found great instead of what a majority found out to be ok... Except if the movie is Star Trek (2009), I guess (it has a lower rating in imdb than in either RT or MC).
And then he says that we should like stuff that has stood the test of time... But all the examples of his favorites are within a decade and a half of each other and the oldest is 33, which is young if we take in account the history of motion picture. In fact, his anti-example is closer to most of his examples than any of them to our time. And, of course, people are still talking about that movie, including him even if to disparage it.
He finally gets to what I assume is his thesis that we should pay attention to what has stood the test of time... Except if we do that we miss a ton of great content.
Sturgeon's law is a thing and it has always been. For every Godfather part II there were a hundred exploitation films. All the time, most of what's produced is garbage, but also every year (except, of course, the anomaly known as 2020) more media is produced. So, again by Sturgeon's law, that means that more great media is produced every year.
Apropos of nothing, my two favorite movies are a biopic/lawyer drama and a campy spy action movie. I can't choose between the two, and both were released the last decade (2010-19). I've also watched dozens of classics and I've liked most of them, but I've also hated a few.
So, ultimately, this is a matter of taste, and there's nothing wrong with having different tastes.
Netflix and all others track every minute of the shows they release. They track where people drop off, what they spend watching, for how long, what scenes they repeat. They probably track which scenes and stills are capped and shared on social media.
This alters the content, especially in something like a TV show which has time to be created in a reactive way.
The hallmark of a 2020 streaming show is a scene with 2-4 spicy, post-able bits of dialogue with a glaringly obvious connection to the political, social, or cultural malaise of This Month. TV shows are increasingly becoming just a chain of those.
This was always the case (studios have always had a profit motive) but with the internet it's turned up to 11. Like everything else in our culture, I guess.
Edit: I guess I'm also interested in your quality-CGI scifi films as well :)
Something like... Ten years ago Senate was voting to appoint John Doe a new supreme court judge. At that moment FNN Channel claimed it would be the end of the free world as we know it and Cox News praised the appointment as returning to the good old times. As we see now, ten years later neither prophecy was correct: the world has not ended and good old times did not return.
People in society want to have jobs in creative pursuits, and for that they need money, they need people to consume the newest products.
So on the other hand, isn't it better to support living people who are incorporating the current times into their art than to support old content where perhaps the creators are dead and won't see the money?
There'd be a lot of gems that would have been hidden from me if I just enjoyed what everyone else liked.
I've been invited to similar groups that have esoteric music tastes. They think that because I have a good taste in music I will fit into those groups. But I can't stand them. It's all about finding the most obscure thing possible. The kind of thing that isn't popular for very good reason. It's just not that good.
Beethoven's 9th Symphony has virtually universal appeal. Die Hard is considered one of the best action movies of all time. Those are the kind of things you need to make sure you see. After that, whether you watch the latest mindless popcorn thriller or crap that nobody really likes is up to you. I'd rather watch the popcorn thriller, though.
True elitism is assuming your subjective preference is objectively better than other people's subjective preference.
In the end, if you like something, that's all that matters.
M
Dersu Uzala
Battle of Algiers
Z
The Third Man
Touch of Evil
Planet of the Apes
In The Mood for Love (OK: It's not that old)
The Killing Fields
The Lives of Others (OK: It's not that old)
The Straight Story (OK: It's not that old)
On The Waterfront
12 Angry Men
Mary and Max (OK: It's not that old)
Marty
Matewan
The Girl With the Red Scarf
City Lights
Umberto D
Fireworks (OK: Not that old)
How Green Was My Valley
Ordinary People
It’s what you’re buying
And receiving undefiled
A quick dig around suggests the etymology described in the article is correct though. TIL, etc.
There was a day before Star Trek:TNG came out, and then the next day it premiered. By the author's own reasoning he or she wouldn't have watched "the best tv show ever made" until after the invention of IMDB and its listing there.
I personally enjoy watching new content because it's a bit like real-time anthropology. The media we create and consume says something about the society that forms the context around its creation and consumption.
I suppose not everybody feels this way, and that's fine. I don't really have any desire to tell people what or what not to watch or listen to. This blog post being so sure of its content is a bit... odd.
For example, using the term "best album" over "the album I enjoyed the most" kind of indicates a surety that feels somewhat like they're talking down to you. I guess my question here is "Why?"
What is defined as "best" is a constantly moving target because audiences are getting more and more sophisticated. Every time the industry breaks new ground with new media or a new concept, the audience learns from the experience and the movie industry can only regurgitate that concept so many times before the concept becomes redundant.
You think something like game of thrones could have been made two decades ago? What drives the sophistication of TV shows up to the point where they kill off the main character in the first season just to keep you interested? Doing outlandish stuff like this was never needed to keep audience engagement in the past... In fact movies made nowadays are waaaay to intense for audiences back in the 60s.
This isn't something I'm just making up. Movie execs are very very aware of this issue, they know that the bar needs to be constantly raised to engage viewers and ironically by every time you raise the bar you train the audience to be even more more sophisticated and you gotta raise the bar again.
I'm only a matter of time before audiences are so sophisticated that they begin realizing this fact as well.
Right now, in general, the audience isn't intelligent enough to recognize this positive feedback loop. To the audience this phenomenon mostly appears as "all modern movies are stupid except for the classics."
What's going on is that the "classic" you love so much was the bar raiser and all the other movies that came after it are filler in attempt to capitalize on the concept and raise the bar further. The cycle continues until one random movie actually successfully changes the game.
How many marvel movies need to come out before the whole franchise becomes boring? I'm enjoying the franchise right now but I know that eventually it won't be as good as the classic original movies that started it all.
(you have a stronger point than I first thought: film and albums are nineteenth century, while tv series and music videos are twentieth, so these are all young media by comparison with dance, drama, literature, poetry, etc., and so may still be in the steep phase of their development curve.)
[1] Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
This is also what makes films from the past so interesting. It’s literally time travel. There’s no better way to learn where we’re going than seeing where we’ve been. It’s like a backtest for the stock market of human culture.
I feel sorry for anyone who lacks the ability or curiosity to detach themselves from the zeitgeist.
Meanwhile, the series writing got much mutch better then it used to be and of one just can't compare.