The Fatal Flaw In Metacritic.com

When I first discovered Metacritic.com it was like finding a statistical El Dorado. The idea that all movies, books, CD’s, games, and now TV shows could be assigned a mark out of a hundred was an elegant concept. The site assigns a number out of a hundred to each review it has collected and then averages them out to give you one overall number based on sometimes dozens of reviews. No more hit or miss review reading – such as when you happen to go to a movie based on the one good review of what other critics thought was a terrible film. (Unless you don’t listen to critics anyway and tend to go to whatever movies you feel like.)

But the system has a huge flaw that can’t be fixed. Well, it could be fixed if we were to change the nature of society. But that might be more than the people of Metacritic.com signed on for.

Let’s say I was planning on seeing a movie like Inside Man. I would check the Metacritic site and find out the movie had scored a 76 based on 39 reviews ranging in score from 58 to 100. I can also check and see that the film has received an overall score of 7.3 out of 10 based on 62 votes from visitors to the site. Fair enough. I go to the movie and find that as a heist genre film it has a lot of good twists, but no real character arcs and no ultimate payoff ending. No heart. Well, you can’t win ‘em all.

But the interesting thing is that Inside Man is one of the few so-called ‘genre’ films to have done well recently on Metacritic. The films that tend to get the top scores are dramas, documentaries, tiny indie flicks and foreign films. Does this mean that genre films have all taken a dive? (Given the last 18 months of film releases, I wouldn’t discount this possibility.) Or is the system revealing something about the divide between critical and popular tastes? Even the voter’s choices tend to reflect a readership that is mostly steeped in film culture, although non-film geeks sometimes get in the mix as well and this accounts, I suspect, for some of the differences between the critics’ picks and the voters’ picks.

But critics I have watched and read seem to also have their genre favorites. Roger Ebert, for example, has a thing for well-made science fiction. But when you lump all the critics’ votes together, their favorite genre films are being mashed down scorewise because of other critics who don’t share those same genre interests. So the films that come out on top reflect only the critics’ more ‘arty’ tastes.

Which brings us to why those tastes are so arty in the first place. Many people over the decades have complained about the films that critics tend to prefer. Let’s face it, though, if we were in the position of these critics having to watch hundreds and thousands of films over the years, we might have somewhat different tastes too. We would start to prefer films that were as far away from the formulas as possible. The sad result of this natural tendency, though, is to create a dichotomy between the people who know films and the people who want to see a film to be entertained. And what entertains a film critic is going to be different from what entertains the average moviegoer.

Am I saying that there are two different standards of quality when it comes to judging films (and, for that matter, literature and the arts)? There are at least two different standards. How we sort out the good from the bad is something that literary theorists, politicians, religious leaders and everybody else have been arguing about for centuries. Most recently, some people have proposed that tastes are so relative, anything could be called good by somebody and maybe that’s enough for, let’s say, Showgirls to be called a great movie. If that’s the world you want to live in, you can have it.

I still think it’s worthwhile debating the relative merit of works of art, but we have to be aware of various cultural contexts that are affecting everybody’s judgments. And if you decide to throw up your hands, like I often have, and say let Time sort it out, then I’d almost agree with you. But the cultures of the future will have their own agendas when it comes to deciding what was the best that ever was. The only thing I believe is possible and worthwhile is to experience art, come to some sort of judgment about it, and then be ready to argue argue argue. That is how art finally shapes us – not while we are the audience, but when we become the work of art’s champion and are forced to think about why it is important to us.