So, here’s an odd question: To what extent do you want a movie (or music or theater) reviewer in a daily newspaper to express his own preferences and interests, rather than her estimation of her audience’s?\n
That is, say your hometown newspaper’s movie review has a kink for (f’r’ex) women wearing gloves. The correct thing for such a reviewer to do about such a kink is to keep her mouth shut about it, right? I mean, it’s all right to mention it, or even to have it as a sort of running gag, but we don’t want her to review the movies based on how they appeal to her glove fetish. Right? I mean, if when she sees a movie with beautiful black elbow-length ones, she doesn’t want to give it five stars, even if she knows that she’ll be buying this one on DVD and watching it over and over again, with the blinds down. Her personal preferences, in such a case, should be kept as separate as possible from her reviewing job.\n
On the other hand, take an example of a reviewer who really thinks that (again, f’r’ex) fart jokes are funny. When a new Will Farrell movie comes out, it there are a bunch of good fart jokes, that’s a movie that should get some extra stars, yes? There’s no reason, there, for the reviewer to hold aside her own taste. Why not? Because it’s a taste that lots of the potential movie audience seems to share. So, from these examples, it seems as if the reviewer should consult her own tastes insofar as those tastes represent common ones<\/I>. But that can’t be right, can it? I mean, if a reviewer appreciates, say, a well-edited movie, and is irritated by a movie where the editing is for crap, should she not take the editing into account in the review, just because most of her readers don’t really understand movie editing at all?\n
OK, what about good acting. Jane Reviewer likes good naturalistic acting, and Joan Reviewer likes good stylized acting. Does Joan have the responsibility to learn to recognize what Jane would like, and if not appreciate it for herself, up the recommendation because it has good naturalistic acting? What if Jane really can’t tell good stylized acting from ham acting, because it all looks fake to her? Is she automatically a crap reviewer? Would she be a better reviewer if she just panned everything that wasn’t in the naturalistic style?\n
I’m not talking about good magazine essays, by the way, which aren’t meant (mostly) to persuade the viewer to see or avoid a movie, so much as to persuade the viewer to adopt the writer’s views on that movie, movies generally, and the entire culture. No, I mean the daily newspaper, which reviews two or three movies every week and gives them a certain number of stars, or thumbs, or motion-sensitive laughing pumpkins. You might say that such a newspaper should hire a reviewer that shares tastes with its readers, but (a) how can you be sure either what the applicant’s real tastes are or what the readers’ tastes are, and (2) every reviewer must have some element of her taste that is unusual, if only an appetite for seeing more movies than the rest of us could bear to sit through. And if Jane Reviewer doesn’t start the job with a kink of some kind, surely she will develop one after the first fifty movies, yes?\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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