Film critics. I hate them. These people who are paid to watch movies. I hate the ones that are paid to watch television, too, but they aren't my focus at this current time.

It's disgusting. You might argue that they are actually paid for their opinions on these movies. As if having one is some kind of accomplishment. Great gimpity, I have opinions! Where's my lifetime employment? Where's my newspaper column? There are thousands of newspapers, and you'd think there'd be some positions open, but no. Every one of them has a pogspammed film critic. Cheeses, they all tend to agree anyway on productions over a certain budget mark, and since these things have only been costing more money to make since the medium was invented, this will probably account for 98% of the new releases in a few years. So we only really need one critic, if indeed we need any.

I can understand maybe, back in the 1950s whem MGM, determined to backrupt themselves, kept churning out insufferable musical drivel, there was a need for consumer advocates to warn people not to waste their greater American dollars on that trash. Of course, movie companies didn't like that, so they decided to target the film critics instead, knowing that critics will recommend anything that they find to their own liking. Let me tell you, it takes a certain shallowness and sick pride to cash weekly checks for staring at a screen and saying whether you liked it or not, so this is not a hard group to please, once you find out what they like. And what they like are Italian men, cliches and cartoons. And lately it seems they also enjoy stuff that's “smart, hip, sexy,” whatever those might mean, because they're commonly used buzzwords that are supposed to make me want to watch whatever they're attached to. Anyway, if critics like these things for long enough, they become an authority, somehow. Roger Ebert's thumbs apparently have better taste than Richard Roeper's. And what about Siskel? Good ol' dead Siskel. Their show lost a lot of credibility when he became dead. What?! No it didn't! The only people who gave a gram what Siskel thought were the movie advertisers who delight in forcefeeding undeserved praise for whoever hired them into my brain via my magical noise and picture box whenever I make the mistake of turning it on. Real people seem less concerned with how old a critic is, preferring instead to place their trust in whoever agrees with them the most. This is why critics like to wait until a movie's been released to errr... release their review of the private screening they were granted the previous week. I can only ponder how many of these jopes lost their jobs because they said bad things about the needlessly popular Patch Adams.

But the academy, surely that infamous academy knows a good movie when they see one? Right. No. Wrong. Do you know who's in the academy? People who pretend for a living, and I don't mean the kids that follow Barney around. No, it's actors, and I don't mean the ones who play those kids, so shut up about that already. Actors, one of the few groups less spicable than the critics. Rather than think for themselves, they just nominate whatever the critics like the most, and then they vote for whichever ones the most of their friends worked on. Why? It's a well established fact that actors, in general, are morons. Or at least it should be a well established fact. Celebrity endorsement theory, of course, denies such things. If actors were morons (at least the ones who accept endorsement deals), how could they possibly know which long distance telephone service was the best for everyone?

My question is, whatever happened to criticizing? That's what the critics get their name from, and yet they spend quite a bit of time doing just the opposite. Perhaps I'm just negative (I suspect I'm occasionally more than that), but I don't want to base my decision on whether something is bad or good. I see them more in terms of bad and less bad, with particular focus on how precisely they are or are not bad. They are bad on different levels. That star-based rating system particularly bothers me. How am I to know if something has five 'expectedly unlikely hero with wise-cracking animal sidekick' stars, rather than five 'Tom Hanks doing anything at all' stars? Certainly, I wouldn't watch either of those, regardless of the amount and types of stars they had, but how am I supposed to watch anything else? If Blockbuster hadn't made it their quest to devote half their space to new releases for rent and the other half to last year's new releases for sale, I swear, I wouldn't go to theaters anymore, and I wouldn't be concerned with what fools the critics are, and I most certainly wouldn't be wasting my time writing things like this.