8 votes

‘Top Gun: Maverick’ first reactions: ‘Hollywood filmmaking at its most rah-rah ridiculous’

12 comments

  1. NoblePath
    Link
    I can’t wait to not see this!

    I can’t wait to not see this!

    5 votes
  2. [11]
    cloud_loud
    Link
    What I find interesting is that the types of movies that would have been critical bombs back in the 80s-00s, the broad schlocky action movies that used to dominate blockbusters, are now getting...

    What I find interesting is that the types of movies that would have been critical bombs back in the 80s-00s, the broad schlocky action movies that used to dominate blockbusters, are now getting positive critical reviews. Ambulance, the new Michael Bay film, got decent reviews. It's like these films are being seen as a breathe of fresh air from the Marvel movies that all feel a little samey, at least to critics.

    3 votes
    1. [10]
      vili
      Link Parent
      I think it's related to the question what constitutes a positive review. While decently made action films tend to score relatively high on Rotten Tomatoes, I wouldn't read those as "universal...

      I think it's related to the question what constitutes a positive review. While decently made action films tend to score relatively high on Rotten Tomatoes, I wouldn't read those as "universal acclaim" type of results.

      For instance, if I absolutely had to describe the experience of watching Ambulance as either "positive" or "negative" (which is the hard binary question that Rotten Tomatoes asks), I'd go with "positive". But if I had to rate it from one to five stars, I'd probably go with something like 2 stars. It was harmless, brainless, fairly enjoyable couple of hours. I wouldn't watch it again, but I'm not disappointed that I saw it. This is actually how I feel about most decently made action films.

      And it seems to be the same for a lot of film critics. If you look at the positive reviews that the film has on Rotten Tomatoes, words like "dumb", "ridiculous" and "forgettable" keep repeating. Because of this, for me, while Rotten Tomatoes is a fairly good source of information for drama and comedy films, a "fresh" rating for an action film means much less. With action films, all I can personally derive from a Rotten Tomatoes score is that if an action film scores very low there, it's usually not worth watching for me. But if it scores high, it may still not be worth watching.

      Metacritic is a little bit better in that sense. For instance, while most Marvel films seem to score 85% of higher on Rotten Tomatoes, they tend to be in the 60s and low 70s in Metacritic's point system. Ambulance appears to have scored 55 there, translating to "mixed or average reviews". In some ways, Metacritic's system is a little more granular. But they also tend to have much fewer reviews in the system (closer to the "top critics" numbers on Rotten Tomatoes).

      As a society, it feels like we are constantly moving more towards the Rotten Tomatoes type "black or white" thinking. Granularities and complexities are lost. "You are either with us or against us," like George W. Bush declared around the time when these binary divisions somehow started to become the social norm. I don't know if it's a response to the complexities of modern life, the result of our lives being increasingly influence by algorithms, or just something that has actually always been there. Maybe a little bit of all that.

      In any case, I'm looking forward to the new Top Gun. I just recently watched the original. It ain't Shakespeare, but it was fun. It's a pity that Tony Scott couldn't be involved with the new one.

      4 votes
      1. [6]
        lou
        (edited )
        Link Parent
        I feel I'm the only old dude who cares about IMDB 🤷 It's not perfect but I know IMDB's biases so well that it's easy for me to arrive at useful conclusions. And it's probably the only place where...

        I feel I'm the only old dude who cares about IMDB 🤷

        It's not perfect but I know IMDB's biases so well that it's easy for me to arrive at useful conclusions. And it's probably the only place where I find thousands of ratings/reviews for obscure movies from the 1940s.

        Edit: and the IMDB Advanced Title Search is a gift from the Gods. I feel dread and anxiety just imagining it ever going away. There's nothing like that on the internet, not even close, and I am being literal.

        7 votes
        1. [5]
          vili
          Link Parent
          I too absolutely love IMDb, it's one of the best things about the internet! The search functions are brilliant, especially the "Credited with" / "Collaborations" search, which I use all the time....

          I too absolutely love IMDb, it's one of the best things about the internet! The search functions are brilliant, especially the "Credited with" / "Collaborations" search, which I use all the time.

          If only someone made something similar for music releases. I'd love to search albums by producers and engineers, for instance. Or everything with a specific bass player, as I very much enjoy a good bass line.

          But interestingly enough, I've never really been able to meaningfully use IMDb's review ratings. They just don't seem to align with my preferences at all, however I interpret them, and even when keeping IMDb's typical biases in mind. Do you have some tips how to interpret those ratings better?

          I do sometimes check the reviews though, especially for older and more obscure films. They are often quite well written and give a good indication of whether I'd like a film, regardless of what rating the reviewer has given. Especially for non-English films, IMDb reviews tend to be a better source of information for me than something like a Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes rating, as non-English films there tend to score abnormally high (for quite understandable reasons).

          5 votes
          1. [4]
            arghdos
            Link Parent
            You want discogs

            If only someone made something similar for music releases. I'd love to search albums by producers and engineers, for instance. Or everything with a specific bass player, as I very much enjoy a good bass line.

            You want discogs

            1 vote
            1. [3]
              vili
              Link Parent
              Discogs is great, but I haven't been very successful with its search functions. I'm not sure if it's because I can't figure out how to do proper combined searches, or if the data there isn't quite...

              Discogs is great, but I haven't been very successful with its search functions. I'm not sure if it's because I can't figure out how to do proper combined searches, or if the data there isn't quite as extensive as with IMDb, especially for older releases. But thanks for reminding me about, I'll give it another try!

              2 votes
              1. [2]
                arghdos
                Link Parent
                Yeah, the search definitely isn't as nice, but most of the info you're looking for is there. Typically the way I use it is to find an artist (or the like), then on the side-bar you'll see (e.g.,):...

                Yeah, the search definitely isn't as nice, but most of the info you're looking for is there. Typically the way I use it is to find an artist (or the like), then on the side-bar you'll see (e.g.,):

                https://i.imgur.com/VW5Q4B5.png

                Then, if you follow that and click on a particular album / EP / etc., you can find a list of producers:

                https://i.imgur.com/qSW3cR7.png

                and then you're on a producer's page, with all their stuff listed:

                https://i.imgur.com/6rUAN0N.png

                There's probably a way to do this with the search function, but... this is the easiest way I've found.

                MusicBrainz is another site with this level of detail, e.g.:

                https://musicbrainz.org/artist/fb2e2987-c49f-49e5-bc95-78e4193f4a26/relationships

                But I've found it's even less intuitive to navigate (and is primarily aimed at DB lookups)

                3 votes
                1. vili
                  Link Parent
                  Thanks! Your comment made me go back to Discogs and see what my issues with it actually were. It's been a while since I last tried it, but it looks like I may have been using it under mistaken...

                  Thanks! Your comment made me go back to Discogs and see what my issues with it actually were. It's been a while since I last tried it, but it looks like I may have been using it under mistaken assumptions.

                  For instance, since I'm currently listening to George Benson's album Give Me The Night, let's say that I want to find more music that includes the team of Quincy Jones, Rod Temperton, Louis Johnson and Bruce Swedien.

                  Now, I can just do a search with their names, and it will give me a lot of releases. However, because the first gazillion of them are Michael Jackson's albums Thriller and Off the Wall, I have tended in these cases to click the "Master" tab, expecting this to show me each album just once. But that's not quite what's actually happening. Some releases just don't show up in the Master tab. For instance, in this particular case, I can immediately see that James Ingram's It's Your Night is missing, although it included all of these gentlemen. Maybe in this case, Ingram's Greatest Hits is somehow blocking the album from showing. I don't know. I don't quite understand it.

                  But the album is actually listed in the main tab though, if I scroll far enough -- it's somewhere around the 400th release, if sorted by "relevance". It's just that in cases like this I haven't had the patience to scroll through the main search results, and have concluded from the "Master" results that a lot of data is missing from the website.

                  I think this, combined with some more obscure data actually missing (understandably so), has made me mistakenly think that the Discogs search is not very good. But it actually is quite good, just I've been using it wrong, or at least with wrong assumptions.

                  Thanks for making me go back to try it! Now I just have to come up with a filter to remove duplicate entries from the main results.

                  3 votes
      2. [3]
        cloud_loud
        Link Parent
        I’d still categorize a 55 on Metacritic as decent reviews. Especially for Michael Bay who’s highest rated films are films he produced and didn’t direct like A Quiet Place. I’m familiar with...

        I’d still categorize a 55 on Metacritic as decent reviews. Especially for Michael Bay who’s highest rated films are films he produced and didn’t direct like A Quiet Place. I’m familiar with Metacritic and the way RottenTomatoes works mate. I don’t need the speech that is usually given out.

        The point I was trying to get at is that critics have become more lenient at schlocky action movies with personalities in a post-Marvel movie world. The original Top Gun didn’t get good reviews, but this is one is probably going to get pretty positive reviews. It’s possible it ends up with a Metacritic score in the 70s, similar to Rogue Nation’s score of 75..

        Like the way certain critics look back at critically derided action films from older times or the way that Michael Bay’s reputation holds different weight than it did in the 90s..

        1. [2]
          vili
          Link Parent
          Sorry if my reply came across as trying to over explain things. It wasn't my intention. I also didn't mean to assume anything about your knowledge of these websites. I could probably have worded...

          Sorry if my reply came across as trying to over explain things. It wasn't my intention. I also didn't mean to assume anything about your knowledge of these websites. I could probably have worded things better.

          I think Roger Ebert put it quite well in his review of the original Top Gun: 'Movies like "Top Gun" are hard to review because the good parts are so good and the bad parts are so relentless.' That's sort of what I was trying to get to by asking what actually constitutes a positive review, and trying to explain why action film reviews are so difficult to parse, for me at least.

          In any case, regardless of how we define a "positive review", you may very well be correct that the new Top Gun will be better reviewed than the original was at the time of its release. And I think you are also correct that critics as a group are giving more positive reviews for this type of films than before.

          I wonder why that is? Could one reason for it be that the role of a film critic has changed, as have the critics themselves? The critics who reviewed the original Top Gun worked for magazines and newspapers during a pre-internet era when such publications still had much more control over communication, and therefore also carried more assumed or portrayed prestige? Many if not most of those critics had also grown up with the films of the 60s and 70s, before the blockbuster era really kicked off. In contrast, most film reviewers today grew up with blockbuster films, and their relationship with that type of films is perhaps different because of that. I don't know. Just a guess. It's an interesting question.

          4 votes
          1. lou
            Link Parent
            That's a good summary for The Batman.

            Movies like "Top Gun" are hard to review because the good parts are so good and the bad parts are so relentless

            That's a good summary for The Batman.

            1 vote