Bad Criticism, Cinema Sins, and The Shield Effect · 5:03pm Jan 9th, 2018
Hot take: Cinema Sins are terrible movie critics.
Okay, that's a lukewarm take at best. I'm hardly the first person to notice that Cinema Sins are actively terrible at serving as movie reviewers; in fact here's bobvids on youtube explaining some of my problems with them better than I can. They are terrible, they are shallow, and they are kind of hilarious to nitpick back in kind. Seriously, watch any film they've ever "sinned" and their videos become some of the most hate-watchable content ever produced. They are bad at being critics and their popularity sometimes feels like a bigger travesty than the success of Fifty Shades.
I could forgive all of that, though. Popular things that are bad are a proud, American tradition. We are the land of the Black-Eyed Peas, Michael Bay, and Stephanie Meyers; not to mention reality television. One more drop in the bucket of popular mediocrity is hardly cause for panic.
I'm less inclined to ignore CinemaSins than I am any of those other things I've just mentioned though because most people at least have some idea of why Meyers, Bay, and the Peas are terrible. The underlying thing that makes CinemaSins terrible is something that's not usually recognized as bad, and is in fact borderline enshrined in nerd-dom.
See, CinemaSins aren't just bad because their criticisms are often inaccurate (they are) or because they make stupid jokes (they do) or even because they subscribe to that weird idea that just because something is a writing convention it's automatically bad. They're terrible because they help spread the idea that criticizing a story means talking about minor inconsistencies and odd choices, rather than discussing literally any other element of it.
This is nerd fandom's favorite pastime. Nerds are obsessed with the idea of authenticity and accuracy. It's part of why we have community pushbacks against things like ret-cons and reboots: we want the real, the original story to be a thing. It's also part of why we're so vulnerable to nostalgia. These traits lead to passionate fan communities, but unfortunately they don't always lead to good fan readings of popular media.
Nerds also tend to read stories in a very particular way. If you've ever watched one of RedLetterMedia's now-infamous reviews of the Star Wars prequels, something you'll notice is that they have a slightly different perspective on the films than hardcore Star Wars fans. They still hate the prequels, but most of their objections are based on things like storytelling structure, theming, poor direction, bad scripting, and the over-use of CGI compared to practical effects which interferes with viewer immersion.
One thing they don't do is, say, stop the entire review to question the logic of heading to a place through the Planet Core in a submersible, or question the plausibility of space travel. This is because RLM at least understands that movies are stories, and that to a certain extent it's the responsibility of the audience to cop to the logic of a story. Nitpicking every detail will always result in a sub-optimal experience, and your outrage should be saved for when the story really does do something absurdly immersion breaking. Say, writing Jar-Jar Binks.
The Nerd drive for 'authenticity' and 'accuracy' and 'originality', fueled and embodied by we're-joking-but-not-really review channels like CinemaSins, doesn't really see the difference between something like a planet core filled with water and making a literal trade war the center of a pulpy space action romp. Both of these things are weird, but the planet core filled with water isn't actually that important - it's just another exotic locale for the characters to move through. The larger issue of trying to force exposition about the Trade Federation down the audience's throat? That's actually a problem.
But in bad critique, those two 'sins' are treated as fundamentally the same kind of problem. They're both compromising the 'accuracy' of the film, and are treated as if they have the same weight in terms of storytelling. Obviously this is not the case; implausible and exotic locales are generally accepted as genre convention in space opera and even "soft" science fiction to an extent. But popular internet critics spread the idea that they are.
The problem with this style of criticism is it's very easy to manipulate to make even good stories seem less good. Very few stories have an inaccuracy count of zero, or don't cop to their own internal logic on some level. Aside from minor errors in more standard stories or historical inaccuracies in fantasy this style of criticism is also deeply unfair to works that use magical realism, or straight-up surrealism.
In many cases, the desire for 'accuracy' also leads to fucked up ways of reading spreading through the internet. Here's a timely example: I'm a huge fan of Magic: The Gathering. I love it more than life itself and if I die a violent death, I hope for it to be at the hands of an opponent who's ready to flip the table after I cast my fifth Time Warp effect in Taking Turns. I'm also a huge fan of the lore and worldbuilding of the game, which I think embodies modern pulp beautifully.
Recently in my fan quest, I encountered a nameless internet person asking a question of Mark Rosewater, the director and public face of Magic Design: namely, why do the pirate cards in the newest set, Rivals of Ixalan, skew female?
This seems like a weird question to ask, and Mark pointed out that generally, Magic tends to split genders pretty evenly across all characters depicted in a set - so if one faction skews more to one than the other, it's likely another faction skews the opposite. This is true. It's also true that the pirates don't actually skew female if you go through the art card by card but hey, never mind that. Then this question got asked.
Mark gave the questioner more information than they really needed, but I'd like to pause for a minute and appreciate the sublime idiocy of this criticism.
Rivals of Ixalan is an expansion of a fantasy trading card game set in a world where humans and dinosaurs co-exist, there actually is a fantastic city of gold in MesoAmerica, conquistadors are literal actual vampires, and the sun has incarnated as King Ghidorah. One of the pirate cards this person is talking about is a goddamn minotaur from another plane of existence entirely.
This isn't just bad criticism of the fantasy worldbuilding, it's also transparently stupid. Pulp fantasy has no obligation to conform to real history on that level. If you've already copped to the idea that the Aztecs rode dinosaurs and that the Mayans were actually elementalist merfolk shamans, the existence of more than two notable lady pirates isn't exactly a stretch. That's not a criticism, that's genre-blindness on a shocking level.
Now mind you, I'm perhaps being a bit unfair here by assuming the person asking Mark that question did so in good faith and wasn't using historical accuracy as a shield for his real objection: more women/minority characters in his favorite fantasy franchise. This is almost ninety percent certainly what happened there, but hey, my optimism about other people's incompetence usually outweighing their malice springs eternal.
The problem is that even if this particular guy was transparently using nitpicky, internet-reviewer-style criticism as a shield, the reason it works as a shield is that what he's doing really isn't substantially different from internet-nitpick criticism. It fits right into that style of critical discourse. Socially-conscious or minority-focused stories often get way, way more of these nitpicks than ordinary media, and that's because it's very easy to dress your moral objections to them in more acceptable clothing because criticisms this inane are already widely accepted on the internet.
That's bad for two reasons: first, it's going to unfairly spread misinformation about the quality of stories, which I think is obvious enough it doesn't need more explanation on my part. Second, it leads to the dissolution of critical discourse itself. Let's look at my previous example: there is perhaps a ninety percent chance that the individual asking why there are so many lady pirates in his fantasy card game was not doing so in good faith. Given that, it's easy to dismiss any subsequent criticisms he has of the storyline as being similarly motivated.
Which would be fine. Except sometimes, that future criticism they make might still be valid. Not about lady pirates, perhaps, but maybe in the future they talk about character dynamics or pacing or even dialogue and end up having actual, valuable things to say. Even the worst people are right by accident sometimes. Even if he says nine stupid things and one smart thing, that one smart thing isn't going to be less smart for him saying it.
This is the real problem with nitpick-criticism made by channels like CinemaSins, and why I'm trying to boost awareness of how inherently dumb it is. Nitpick-critics often mix their terrible criticisms together with a handful of fair points. This has two effects. The first, and more intended effect is that it shields their bad points from counter-nitpicking by making them look more legitimate.
The second, and less intended effect is it makes any legitimate points they have seem less legitimate by association, though, and this is a serious problem for anyone who wants to have a conversation about art. If I try to start a conversation and people recognize points I'm making when I criticize a film as being made by Cinema Sins, I'm now in the bad position of accidentally making CinemaSins look more legitimate by association - or of looking like a hack to people who know CinemaSins are garbage.
This is also a problem somewhat unique to criticism, and why channels like CinemaSins piss me off far more than hack creators like Bay, Meyers, et. al. We don't call explosions in action movies less legitimate because Michael Bay overuses them. Criticism, however, is often so wrapped up in personal investment that it's easier to dismiss by association with hacks. And if we're at the point where we don't even collectively recognize the hacks as hacks yet... oh dear.
Criticism, done right, isn't easy. It requires a strong understanding of the medium of the work you're criticizing, transparent base expectations of what you wanted from the work and why it failed, and a genuine appreciation for art. My general rule of thumb is that if you can't explain why you love something as easily as you explain why you hate something else and by using the same kind of critical tools, you're probably not a very good critic.
Nitpicking as CinemaSins does really doesn't work in reverse. They're not focusing on scripting weaknesses, or editing problems, or casting choice or use of frame or any of the things that make up "film". They are focused on finding details that work as 'jokes', and highlighting them as evidence of a film's "sins", elevating them to the same plane of importance as structural storytelling.
This is the air which we breathe. This is the world in which we live. This is the kind of critical discourse we're stuck with.
Fuck CinemaSins. They're ruining everything. And that's only minor hyperbole.
(Looks at his half-nitpicky, half-story-criticizing pony review blogs. And that ratio's being very generous indeed.)
Well. This is awkward.
Very salient points, and ones I'm going to have to give a lot of thought to. Thank you for this.
I agree with this blog! I also like CinemaSins. Mostly 'cause, yeah, they're not reviewers.
I mean, if they are, they sure aren't good at it. I watch their videos whenever they 'sin' a movie I don't like or I'm interested in hating -- think shit like the Emoji Movie -- for a quick, easy-to-digest laugh, and then forget about them.
They just... don't really talk about the story? And they don't actually, y'know, review films. They just pointlessly nitpick shit and that's it. They're like those old shitty AVGN clones, in that they just angrily shout at the screen and call it a day. I sorta classify them in my mind as a slightly more polished version of a subpar Rage Review: funny, if you're lucky, but you ain't gonna learn anything new from them.
I do still think their videos have entertainment value if you just watch them as what they are -- i.e., funny internet videos that don't take a lotta brainpower. They're the WatchMojo of storytelling critique. I've been told a couple times that they're "satirizing" film reviewers, because "the entire point of CinemaSins is to be terrible at their job". Which mostly makes me think that whoever defends them this way doesn't know A) what a fim reviewer does, and B) what the word 'satire' actually means.
Good blog, overall, really. Regarding the rest of the content, and dwelling a bit in the subgenre of fanfiction -- I'd love to see you blog about people who think that nitpicking about headcanon equals criticism, too, because it's a completely new layer of stupid in this dumb sandwich we're cooking.
But the point of CinemaSins is that their content shouldn't be seen or treated as serious criticism, at all. As a matter of fact, the few times they have done reviews , they post them in Jeremy's channel, appart from sins videos. And those do focus in criticism on the movies instead of nitpicking. For example, while in their sins video of BvS they teared the movie to pieces and shot down any defense there may be, the review (here) is calmer, more analytical and addresses the movie's global message and intent.
If there's a problem in media review involving CinemaSins, that would be its audience (and sometimes creators) taking it seriously to begin with. Quoting the channel's own ntroductory video, they're not reviewers, the videos are comedy content and sins don't have any real value. So, from there to using CinemaSins to attack a movie or 'prove' it's a bad film should be counted as a fault for the person using that argument, but not the source material.
For example, someone saying that Iron Man is better than Citizen Kane just because their sins count (93 and 48, respectively). While in reality it's more likely to say that Iron Man's video is simply shorter because it's from earlier in the channel's life, while Kane's is approached with the intent of make more sins in order to contrast with it being the codifier of mot of modern cinema.
In abstract, CinemaSins shouldn't be addressed as reviews, period. The sins videos are just quick sumaries of the movie with a joke framing device .
Please never change
Nerds are Bad tbh
4770095
Unfortunately, many people do use CinemaSins as a source of review and commentary. And also unfortunately, since Jeremy often uses criticisms from his own review channel in CinemaSins videos and the channel itself will often lean into the idea that it's run by reviewers, ultimately I think they're bad for critical discourse in general, and will remain bad until people point out how bad they are for criticism.
Like, if the creators are leaning into their audience's misconceptions about whether they're reviewers or not basically whenever it suits them, then they bring this kind of analysis upon themselves.
It's funny you know, I just re-watched Bobvids' series on cinema sins yesterday, what a funny coincidence to find this blog today.
Anyway, I've been seeing more and more of those call for better criticism, and not just about movies and cinema sins, but about the whole "nerd-dom" (I love that word), movies, tv series, video games, comic/manga, tabletop games etc. Having being around internet for a while, I find it refreshing when I do find people really trying to look at those media from an artistic perspective. That is reinforced by the fact that growing up, I started to want more from those media then just dumb blind cheap entertainement; I do need that kind of fun just like anyone else, but some of the story I read/watch/played became a big part of who I am and seeing those grow up with me and bringing up more to the table is a special feeling.
And all in all, even if I was not concious of why, some of those story were not as good as others, and more often then not, taking the time to analyze it, I realize that it was due to technical reason I am more aware of, or made aware of by good reviewers.
So yes, all this to say, thank you for adding your voice to this "movement" and as a side note, also thank you for being one of those good reviewers.
Couldn't agree more with the premise of this blog. I've always disliked Cinema Sins and what feels like a poor excuse of "it's just parody" to deflect criticism of their poor criticism, not to mention how they're inherently unfunny in my opinion. Those who copy their style, namely that one guy in the MLP community, somehow tick me off even more, but I'd rather not dwell on such a thing.
Anyway, I learned a lot more about what differentiates good criticism from bad, and it explains why I enjoyed things such as RLM's critique of the Star Wars prequels much more than anything Cinema Sins has ever produced. Such knowledge will definitely help out in the future, and thank you for sharing this blog post.
I would've agreed with this blog, but I was too busy counting the sins...
69 by the way. Just because.
4770088 To be honest, satire has gotten so distorted nowadays that it's the poor man's excuse for "What, you mean what I said was offensive? I was just satirizing them! C'mon!"
Not two minutes before reading this, I saw somebody wailing about how (supposedly) the next MLP reboot will make Fluttershy a unicorn, and that means it will be terrible. It made me roll my eyes SO HARD. This version of MLP is a reboot, you Nimrod, and the original "Fluttershy" was an earth pony! Oh no, they changed it, and that made Friendship is Magic so much worse than My Little Pony the TV show, right? Right?
Idiots. Just.... idiots. Maybe they'll reboot it and maybe it'll be awful, but if so, it won't be because Fluttershy is a unicorn now or what the flip ever.
But it's satire! Don't you know that makes it okay to be a lazy narcissistic jerk?
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Although I disagree on Jeremy and co. provoking the reaction on purpose, there's something to be said about fan reaction and self-destructive fandoms. I think the problem is rooted on the fact that it's easier to just make and repeat a list of "sins" rather than analyzing a work as a whole. In the same way, it's easier to keep a single perspective that's easy to repeat than to start, develop and follow up on a conversation.
For example, coming from the comic book fandom, I've seen more "Watchmen is perfect" and "Liefeld is the devil" threads that ones discussing how Watchmen has its own faults, as well as being the reason of the Dark Age of Comics, while ROB! Liefeld is one of the kick-starters of the creator-owned movement that brought independent comic into the spotlight in the Modern Age. That's because it's easier to repeat than to elaborate. But I digress.
I'll keep the argument that CinemaSins shouldn't be addressed as criticism or review, in the same vein people using sins video as an argument shouldn't be acknowledged either. If anything, the best we can do, in my opinion, is to keep the discussion analytical, careful and open to diferent arguments.
P.D.: It could help if there was a clearer separation between criticism, reviewing and opinion. Each one is its own layer and don't really work on the same dimension. Something that a a critique would integrate into its discourse, a review may as well lambaste against the wall and an opinion wouldn't even mind it. Which, at the same time, is the reson they should be addressed in equal terms, because they complement each other.
A good example of this is Suicide Squad (sorry, comics kinda are my thing). Critics pretty much destroyed the movie for its lack of global message (never going beyond playing straight tropes and clichés), while reviews centered more around the terrible editing it had (structured as an hours long trailer with music video elements), and opinions went around the actors' performance (like comparing Margot Robbie with Arleen Sorkin or complaining about Jared Letho)
P.P.D.: I wonder hy my comment got so many negatives. I swear I wasn't trying to be confrontational, but if it came out as that, I apologize.
4770176
I never said they provoked a reaction on purpose. I simply pointed out that they provoked a reaction by exhibiting the behavior they do. If you're going to intermittently say "no, we're at least partially a review channel" and your fans consistently use you as a review channel then you open yourself to criticism as a review channel. That's just kind of how it is.
Actually, it's because of a number of factors. The first is how readily available some of that information is: Watchmen is one of the most critically-acclaimed graphic novels ever written, and part of what helped attract serious criticism to comics in the first place. It's penned by one of the best writers working in comics and drawn by one of the best artists. It's challenging, interesting, layered, and generally one of the strongest books I've ever read. Even the bits about Watchmen that I don't particularly like are interesting to me.
While Liefeld has ultimately been a good influence on the industry as a whole, the reason he gets brought up as terrible is that he's not primarily known for his work behind the scenes, but for his work as an actual artist and writer. And Liefeld, bless him, has always been godawful at that in a very distinct and interesting way. Don't get me wrong, I think what he's done for the industry is a net positive, and I'm glad he did it, but Liefeld the artist is in some ways a very different person than Rob Liefeld the founder of Image Comics. And there's way more information available about Liefeld the artist, too.
Plus, for all the good Liefeld did, he has penned and drawn some of the worst material in all of comicdom. And that's saying a lot. His best imprints on the industry have mostly been the things he's done for helping other creators break through.
Except keeping discussion analytical, careful, and open to different arguments is made inherently more difficult by people's willingness to accept CinemaSins and their style of "reviewing" as a legitimate form of criticism. Hence my larger points about the potential dissolution of critical discourse. Having that conversation with CinemaSins in the middle means always talking uphill, in one way or another.
Literally everything you just described about Suicide Squad is an example of criticism. Some are more opinion-based than others, but all of those contain elements of criticism. The lack of a global message is a criticism of the film's plot and theming, the commentary on the terrible editing is a critique of the film's fundamental structure and - erm - editing, and opinions on the performances of the actors are critiques of those performances.
Now all of these critiques aren't necessarily equally valid when you compare them to the film. But all of them are examples of critical discourse. Criticizing Lero's performance may in some ways be opinion-based, but an actor's performance is a part of a film and is legitimate grounds for criticism.
I don't think it's because you were confrontational, I think it was the tone-deafness. Aragon made similar contents about liking CinemaSins but he also immediately qualified it with "but yeah this is legitimate criticism of what they do". The way you phrased your post made it sound like you were basically throwing up a shield on their behalf by arguing that because they say "don't take us seriously" (sometimes) we should not take them seriously. The problem is that so many people do that you're more or less missing the point of calling out how bad they are as critics.
You named so much trash right there that I'm surprised you weren't invading a Detroit landfill to pick so much utter garbage to use as examples.
I mean that in a flattering way, of course.
Ah, magic
makes me miss Mage Knight all the more.
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But there is a disclaimer saying they're not reviewers. It's in their front page. That's why I say I feel people taking CinemaSins serious shouldn't be acknowledged. Their own source disproves their argument, making the use of CinemaSins in a discussion a fallacy on itself. Now, fallacies on themselves have been a problem since Socrates was around. In fact, he (allegedly) had to defend himself from some of them to save his own life.
This calls for how serious can a conversation go if one must argue with a fallacy once this has been identified as one. In my opinion, for people who do want to keep a serious conversation, it makes little sense to keep arguing over a fallacy.
Now, on my Watchmen/Liefeld argument, I didn't mean it to come as saying that Watchmen isn't a great comic (arguably the greatest), or that Liefeld is a good artist (although he does put heart on his craft, which is still respectable). What I mean is that there's a point where a discussion about art stops when a general opinion becomes dominant.
In Watchmen's case, the series has been treated as a sacred cow and the very first of its kind. This last one is the one that irks me the most in view of Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams' Green Lantern/Green Arrow, Frank Miller's Daredevil and Moore's own Miracle Man. All of those pioneering the themes that Watchmen would later codify, and later other works, like Kingdom Come would expand on. But these comics that do get on Watchmen's level (specially Kingdom Come) tend to be shrug off under the base that "they're not Watchmen", thus preventing any discussion to begin with.
On Liefeld, I'd hardly say his comics are the worst ones, and it's become more of a demonization than fair criticism. I mean, One More Day, Holy Terror and Cry for Justice fill the bill a lot better (worse?) than any of what Liefeld ever produced. If anything, his worst trait is being swallow and lazy, but even then the guy true enthusiasm for what he does. While the other three examples where made to antagonize its readers, preach racism and void of any self-respect respectively, Liefeld's Godyssey is just childish at worst.
Point is that fandoms tend to take the majoritarian opinion as a fact, thus stopping any discussion. And I see something similar in taking CinemaSins into a discussion as if it was an argument instead of a fallacy. If anything, it should be treated as unfounded rumors are treated in (good) journalism; don't listen to it, don't spread it and offer an alternative that contains a better base and brings more to the discussion instead of preventing it.
Also, wouldn't it make more sense to call out the people taking CinemaSins serious instead of the channel itself? I mean, they are the problem, or at least the active part of it. Since the own channel advises to not be taken seriously, it's more of an audience problem than a source problem, IMHO.
Calling CinemaSins bad reviewers is about the same as calling Daily Show a biased news agency.
That's kinda not their job.
P.D.: Maybe a solution would be for Jeremy and co. to put a disclaimer on each video's intro or description, like Soundsmith does in his Team Fortress 2 Stereotypes, or GCN did in their Mortal Kombat sins video
4770357
Literally irrelevant to your train of thought other than to show off you know what a logical fallacy is and that you, like most of us in high school, got to read Socrates.
And while they outright disclaim their status as "reviewers", that disclaimer is undercut by 1) times when they're directly answered fan questions and said "we're parody, review, and satire all rolled into one", 2) the fact that many of Jeremy's criticisms from his movie review channel are themselves used in CinemaSins EWW videos, 3) occasional points like his declaration in 2015 that CinemaSins is intended to criticize hollywood (for, of all things, making a Winnie the Pooh live action movie), and 4) the fact that this disclaimer has not stopped fans from using CinemaSins as a source of review and commentary.
Therefore, it is absolutely appropriate to evaluate them as if they were a source of review and commentary, if a substantial portion of their audience are using them for this purpose. And that evaluation reveals that they are a terrible source of it.
I linked a 35 minute video making these points way more articulately than I am, so watch that if you want more detail, but at this point I am repeating myself.
...or Watchmen is a better known property due to the interest created in it by the Zack Snyder's inferior film, its featured spot in Time magazine, etc. etc. et. al. Like, not in comics circles but I can tell you that there's a difference between things getting discussed because people don't like them as much as Watchmen, and things not being as well known as Watchmen.
Plus you just brought up like three completely new and different examples of comparison than your original comment did. If you're concerned about Watchmen overshadowing equally strong or stronger books, maybe spend more time plugging those titles yourself instead of spending time blaming Watchmen for their not being discussed. The interest will not be there until you can successfully create that interest.
Liefeld's combination of terrible art and juvenile storytelling helped contribute to the glut of "dark age" stories during one of the worst periods in mainstream comic history. And literally every book you just listed is similarly held up as an example of terrible comic writing. Nobody claimed LIefeld was "the worst', the claim made was "some of the worst", which is far more broad.
I agree. CinemaSins bring terrible observations into every discussion. It dilutes and destroys critical conversations. I wrote a whole post about it, even.
No.
Because again, CinemaSins leans so heavily into their character and muddies the waters of their videos so badly that they end up inviting the evaluation.
CinemaSins claims they are not reviewers multiple times, yet at others they seem either willing to lean into the idea that they are reviewers, or willing to incorporate elements of review into their nitpick comedy videos. This leads to questionably good comedy and abjectly bad criticism, and either way they're terrible.
Plus, the body of this post is mostly about how shallow and worthless nitpick-criticism is, so.
4770374
But if they're being evaluated as if they were a source of review and commentary, doesn't that dignify them as such? I mean, the message can be interpreted as admitting they are a source of criticism, but because one doesn't agree with it, it shouldn't be taken at face value. Which on itself comes off as just complaining about things one doesn't like more than a discussion on the matter. I know it's not the intended interpretation, but just like the sins videos, the reaction to anything is subjective at its core.
On Watchmen being treated as a sacred cow, that's a problem that predates the movie by years. Or at the very least, I've seen it from as far as 2007. Anyways, I don't blame Watchmen for being more popular. I blame people who prefer to go along with the most common opinion instead of discussing about it. It's like what I say about CinemaSins. If the problem it's the audience reaction, you don't blame the source material, like prohibiting Catcher in the Rye because of John Lennon's assassin.
Regarding that video, I did see it some time ago and I did comment then. I wanted to discuss it with you because it seemed like a good way to spend the time. But if you don't want to go on, I will stop and leave on "agree with disagree". So, that. See you later in another post.
P.D.: I don't think I ever thanked you for your reviewing material. It's good and I enjoy reading it. Keep it up.
For the record, I did have a point to make with the Socrates line, but I got distracted and then I forgot to delete it. I wanted to say that there isn't a definitive way of dealing with fallacies, which is why they're still around.
This is so strange. Literally the first time I ever heard someone say CinemaSins was bad was MovieBob, in a video posted last month at the latest. And now here this blog is. Like, my knee-jerk reaction is that last line is complete hyperbole. I'm sitting here, trying to figure out what's bad about them and I can't.
Maybe it's because I don't understand what's weird about this idea. If something is unoriginal, it's bad unless it's somehow subverting its own trope or elevating it via a new spin. Pointing it out as a flaw otherwise is fine. Right?
I mean, if you ask me, the big problem with them is they have a tendency to post 15-20 minute videos when I don't have time to devote to watching them. I don't watch a lot of movies, but CinemaSins is a great way to see the highlights (or lowlights, if you will) of shit you already know is bad, like Trolls. Which is kind of entirely not what the channel is meant for. >.> And like, the sin counts at the end are completely irrelevant to anything, so if people are actually holding those up as a standard of quality, yeah, that's a problem.
I dunno. I think CinemaSins is funny. Of course, half the time they're not funny at all because they are just a string of nitpicks -- "45 seconds of logos" is fine as a running gag, but that's like complaining the end credits go on for over five minutes: that's inherent to movies as a medium, you're not getting rid of it anytime soon; in the same vein, "Milla Jovovich is not my girlfriend in this scene" is just a weird, nonsensical, possibly creepy thing to say and I don't know why they stick to that joke -- but when they're on, they're good entertainment. Maybe not enough people take it that way, is that what you're saying?
4770452
I'm willing to defer to personal taste for the rest of your post, but:
No.
This is unequivocally false.
If something is unoriginal, it's... unoriginal, and that's where it ends. Unoriginality is not a flaw. Millions of stories are retellings, including the ones that were "original" to you when you first were exposed to them.
4770452
No. That is not what the term "writing convention" means. A writing convention is usually so common that it's invisible until pointed out specifically as something that exists within a massive sample of stories. It can be a fresh take on it, it can be a polished use of it, or it can be boring, but mostly it just Is a Thing.
If you watch CinemaSins exclusively for movies you know are going to be bad, you aren't using CinemaSins in the way a significant portion of their fanbase or, or in the way that CinemaSins themselves occasionally says they are useful for.
Like. Seriously. Do yourself a favor and watch Cabin in the Woods. Then their EWW of it. Then slowly begin to lose all respect for the universe.
I feel like if they're neither good comedy nor good analysis but are instead somehow the worst aspects of both, then they are neither flesh nor fowl nor hot nor cold but lukewarm, and I shall spit them the fuck out.
4770452
Originality is slippery.
Judging a story for its originality means you’re blatantly judging it against a context that the story itself can’t control. The most hackneyed story in the world will look original if it’s your first exposure to its genre. And on the other hand, a flippant reviewer can make nearly any story sound unoriginal if they generalize the plot enough.
If originality is always a good thing, why do so many nerdosphere critics make a fuss every time a movie adaptation deviates from the source material?
I never really could put my finger on why I don't care for them.
Sometimes nitpicking is fair, but critique is much more valuable, and has the potential to be much funnier. I could spend years nitpicking The Trial of Billy Jack, but it would just be boring compared to ripping into why that self righteous, smug, alt-fact POS is an assault on cinema.
But point out the inconsistencies in a film, and you've dealt it some mortal blow. How many episodes do the fans loathe because of some "plot hole" that hardly matters?
4770507
I think I was taking that to mean "trope", which gets into my intense dislike of TVTropes as a Thing. :B
4770528
Iunno. Aren't adaptations already unoriginal by their nature? Why deviate more than is necessary to adapt?
4770719
Even then, tropes are not necessarily bad things. Stories could not exist without most common conventions and tropes. Discard enough of those and all you have left are experimental works like Finnegan's Wake or Dadaist poetry, of interest to scholars and artists, but incomprehensible to nearly anyone else.
Linear narrative progression, The Big Reveal, omniscient third-person perspective, limited first-person perspective, unreliable narrator, in media res, metaphor, flashback, The Power Of Friendship, hell even standardized spelling and vocabulary are all examples of literary conventions and tropes that are necessary in order to tell the overwhelming majority of stories. Not sure why anyone would dislike TVTropes, since it's nothing more or less than a reference, the same as any dictionary, grammar textbook, or style guide. It simply provides a standardized vocabulary for discussing media, much of which did not exist prior.
4770719
Deviations are necessary for adaptation. Sometimes drastic ones. Two hours of film =/= a novel in terms of how much information can be packed into it, and how you'll deliver it to an audience. Ditto television to film, comic book to film, or vice versa. The medium transfer alone necessitates deviation in order to tell a clearer story, onboard new potential audiences, and justify the work.
Also, if you want an example of larger deviations being good, you may have heard of this movie. This was based on a book, and it is an extremely loose adaptation - and yet, it's glorious. Miyazaki deliberately just made the kind of movie he wanted to make, and it was a better film for it.
But even then, it's not that the film is "terribly original". Miyazaki's an auteur, and you see his style in everything he does. And yet he still gets massive acclaim for it.
4770760
Those aren't tropes, though, those are like, your toolkit for writing? c.c No one goes, "Oh, god, not another third-person story! How unoriginal!" (Though I have heard people complain about first-person narration being "pretentious"...)
But TVTropes is all about pointing out the ways in which plot points have been used and reused again and again. And it's fine making fun of things for being unoriginal when they're bad -- I mean, those are the CinemaSins videos I find I enjoy -- but when you're talking about things people have made, making pages for them on TVTropes... Well, I don't like it. I recognize that's just me. But I find it insulting. Like, yes, maybe everything is unoriginal, ten stories and all that, but don't point it out and expect people to like it.
Ugh, it's impossible to explain this to anyone, I'm sorry for wasting your time. :(
4770776
I feel like you're answering your own previous questions now.
Criticizing things for 'originality' is difficult, and not necessarily even a great gauge of quality. The original Star Wars films are metamyth slamming into a series of film trends that were emergent in the decades leading up to their production, but that doesn't make them any less good. The prequels helped pioneer the use of the "digital backlot", where actors were shot in front of a greenscreen and exotic backgrounds were edited in during post, but that vein of 'originality' hasn't exactly worked in their favor.
in CinemaSins land, though, the mere fact that a thing exists often gets it a point and a ding. Watch any of their longer videos and count the number of times they just describe the plot of the movie without actually dwelling on it.
Like, fuck Cabin in the Woods. They can't even do Guy Richie justice.
4770784
Well, if it helps, I unfollowed them. Not like I watch their videos much these days anyway...
4770776
I'm not sure you understand what tropes are, since you're creating a false dichotomy. Tropes are part of the toolkit for writing. I'm also not convinced that you read all of my post, since I specifically included "The Power of Friendship" and "The Big Reveal" as examples of, for lack of a better word, non-mechanical aspects of the writing toolkit.
Tropes are not cliches, they are building blocks. They can become cliche'd if they are used excessively, and are not adapted to the needs of a particular story, but they are not automatically cliches in and of themselves. It's patently impossible to tell a clear and understandable story without the use of tropes. They are the ideas, the basic structures, the fundamental components of storytelling. Some of them are strictly cultural, and some are universal. There can be good tropes, and bad tropes, but there cannot be a story with no tropes at all.
To use an example that Scarlet already pointed out, the original Star Wars film was heavily based on common storytelling tropes; most notably the monomyth, aka the "Hero's Journey", which is one of the oldest and most universal tropes in the history of human storytelling. You can read a variant of it in the oldest known example of recorded human literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh. But that's not the only trope in the film, far from it. Numerous ancient and universal tropes abound -- Black and White Morality, the Call to Adventure, Coming of Age, Redemption Arc, and so on. The story simply would not exist without them.
4770784
For some reason, I can’t help but think about C.S. Lewis’s description of flippancy from The Screwtape Letters.
(Emphasis mine.)
4770776
I’ve been an editor on TVT for ten years (... oh crap ...) and I can tell you that we don’t mean it as criticism when we point out that something’s been done before. We’re more motivated by a sort of nerd-compulsion to see just where our favorite stories fit into the grand scheme of every story that’s ever been written.
We allowed more snark and complaining back in the early days of the site—when there were fewer editors and we were all more naive about the viability of crowd-sourced humor—but we’ve consistently tried to move away from that ever since. Tropes that are actually criticisms (like ”narm”) aren’t allowed on the main trope list for stories, and have to instead go on the “Your Mileage May Vary” subpage. Our various articles of factual inaccuracies used to be titled “You Fail [Subject] Forever”, but now they’re renamed “Artistic License – [Subject]”, even though many examples are basic research failures and not artistic license at all. And so on.
I find it funny that people think TVT is trying to mock everything by cataloguing these story similarities—while communities that actually are closer to a “Mock everything” mentality, like Something Awful, consider us a “hugbox” because we put limits on how you can use the site to complain about stuff you dislike.
You know, I can sort of see where the drive to nitpick factual inaccuracies and continuity errors comes from. Yanking the audience out of the story, breaking their willing suspension of disbelief, is a bad thing. Mistakes and continuity errors are a prime cause of that.
But Nerd Culture has taken that and turned it into some kind of contest where you point out mistakes the author made in order to show off how smart you are. CinemaSins is the effect of this, rather than the cause; I distinctly remember various websites that catalogued science errors and continuity errors in movies, back before Youtube even existed. But CS is certainly doing their part to perpetuate that obsession.
The crazy thing about all this is: what does or doesn’t break the audience’s WSOD is outside the author’s control and hard to predict. How many people noticed, on their first viewing of Jurassic Park, the huge continuity error when the T. rex pushes the car over the cliff (namely, the cliff just wasn’t there at the start of the scene)? How many people, on their first viewing of North by Northwest, question why the bad guys would try to shoot the protagonist down with a crop duster, when just a guy with a gun would have sufficed? How many people notice the wonky timeline in The Empire Strikes Back before it’s pointed out to them? Movies like that depend on the audience being too caught up in the action to question any mistakes, yet they’re still considered classics.
And there’s no telling when your audience will come in with some fact in their heads that’s actually complete bunk, and give you grief for disagreeing with it. People have argued that (spoilers for The Last Jedi): General Leia shouldn’t have survived her surprise spacewalk, when that’s actually one of the few times Star Wars has ever portrayed space realistically. NASA experiments have shown that people can survive exposure to a vacuum for up to two minutes, and make a complete recovery afterwards. So even when the author does their due diligence, some clown in the audience can get pulled out of the story by their own stupidity, then act like it’s somehow the author’s fault.
And anyone who insists that a fictional universe with dragons needs to have “historically accurate” gender roles is either an asshole or dangerously lacking in self-awareness.
4770811
This is the argument thrown at me last time I got into this debate.
Tropes are cliches. If they weren't, they wouldn't be tropes. Like, that's it, that's the end of my argument.
4770842
All I know is people have made TVT pages for my fics before, and I don't take it as a compliment. I appreciate they put work into this and consider it a positive thing, but please just leave me out of it, I'd like to at least pretend the ten stories I'm writing have the lingering odor of originality to them. :(
4771027
Dude.
Most trope pages are curated by series fans.
I.
What....
That's kind of a smack in the face of anyone who liked you enough to try and elevate your shit like that.
Okay, your argument is reductive and short-sighted. That's it, that's the end of my reply.
4771043
I know, and that's why I try to keep quiet about it. :( Doesn't change the fact it feels like they're mocking me.
4771045
Which indicates you might have horrible attitudes about writing conventions and tropes, and a bad understanding of what they are and how we should respond to them.
Attitudes like this are the reason I call out CinemaSins. They're bad for self-evaluation, they're bad for evaluating outside art, they're just not good to have. If your response to someone contextualizing your story in the literary canon of like a million other stories is that they're making your work less special or original through that act of comparison, you're expressing a serious lack of confidence in your own abilities as a writer.
4771051
No, that sounds about right. :B
I would like to know why TVTropes is lauded and CinemaSins derided. As far as I can tell, they both point out how things are similar, the latter for comedic and mocking purposes. I honestly do not understand why TVTropes exists, what its purpose is.
Of course, I'd much rather someone just go, okay, you're wrong about why they do what they do, but I understand why you might think that, and literally no one has, so I guess I'll just go be wrong somewhere else. :/
I don't mean to be too sarcastic but c'mon, man, an editor just explained it to you.
As for what the difference is, TV Tropes exists to catalog reference points and, erm, "tropes" that exist across stories told into multiple forms of media. Their approach to tropes is "they exist".
CinemaSins presents tropes as if they were criticisms, which is a very different thing.
4771134
A bunch of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans noticed how much Joss Whedon liked to play around with common conventions of TV shows, which got them interested in building an online encyclopedia of those conventions. It caught on with people outside the Buffy fandom and just snowballed out of control.
4771157
"It exists" is... okay, I guess that makes sense. It still seems like a weird thing to catalog, to me, but that's me.
I'll leave off by saying your initial thesis, that CS is bad reviewing, is valid and legitimate and actually totally outside this TVTropes diversion I somehow made. D: I apologize for that.
Wait...CinemaSins are meant as jokes, not actual serious reviews. They make fun of their “Sins Counter”, have a video where they “Sin” themselves, and, unless I’m miss remembering, even out right say in a video that their videos aren’t serious reviews. I guess everything really does need disclaimers if people do take those “reviews” seriously.
Edit: to be clear, I am not disagreeing with what you are saying in your blog post. I am just pointing out that those who take CinemaSins seriously don’t know how to differentiate between a reasoned critical analysis and a joke.
4780230
I've literally discussed variations on what you've just brought up twice over in the comments already, as well as linked a video directly in the post itself explaining why I don't give CinemaSins a break for being "not real reviewers". The tl;dr is that not only do CinemaSins fans often use them as a source of review or criticism, CinemaSins themselves sometimes lean into the 'reviewer' label- as long as it suits them.