A friend recently sent me a link to the Amazon streaming page for my first feature film, All the Rage. At first I was surprised by the choice of image they'd selected. But it didn't take me long to notice that out of 5 stars my film is listed as having earned only 3.5
And, look, 3.5 stars ain't bad... unless you know that in most newspaper reviews the film got 5.
So in that context, I'm thinking: What happened?
Of course we know what happened. Not unlike a Roberts Supreme Court decision, the facts on the ground may not have changed one bit. Only the referees are different. Amazon merely posts the average of all the consumer posted reviews to the site.
Consumer-Only Reviews Support the Amazon Narrative. Amazon is God.
From one perspective—the business interests of a platform eager to remind us of its own hegemony—the choice is sound. No need to look beyond the feedback posted directly to Amazon by consumers just like you. Because as long as there's never a need to leave the site to help choose your next purchase, it gets just a little more awkward to argue with the fundamental Bezos belief: There is nothing for you beyond the walls of the kingdom.
But You Want Help Picking the Best Movie to Watch. And Consumer-Only Aggregates Are Not Very Helpful at All.
But from the perspective of the person browsing for their next movie to watch, the exclusion of any other source of feedback on quality seriously hinders our ability to find a quality film... So you know what happens in my house?
So, let's say I'm choosing between two films with a 3 star rating. One has a creative team I've never seen or heard of. The other stars Cate Blanchett, an actor I always enjoy.
I'm looking to veg. I don't have a lot of time for research. I just want the next two hours to be fun. So I go with Cate Blanchett cause even in a poorly made piece of nothing, I'll enjoy watching her performance. (I know that about myself)
There's nothing remotely tragic about spending a Sunday afternoon watching a mediocre film starring Cate Blanchett.
But what about that 3-star rated film that had a cast and director I'd never heard of and did not recognize at all?
It's not too hard to imagine a movie starring Cate Blanchett getting more stars than it deserves and a film with not one recognizable name getting fewer. Suppose the unknown film tackles a subject matter most people find unpleasant! So of the 12 reviews posted, 9 are negative and 3 are loving and it's quite possible that half of the 9 negative ones are negative because the person posting was upset by disturbing subject matter. The problem with the absence of any input from the professional critics is that there are questions a professional critic will tend to want to ask that my cousin Itzik in Hoboken might not consider.
Also, the more unknown the book or film or musician, the fewer reviews the population is going to bother to post in the first place. So it's very likely that the unknown film will be reviewed by as small a number as 12 people while the one starring Cate Blanchett by more than 100. In that case, the weight of the naysayers as an overall drag on our sense of it is felt more heavily with a smaller pool of response.
The paid critic is (at least mostly) writing their reviews with an eye toward the audience. The mission is clear: declare something Not-to-be-Missed or tell us why you think it fails.
Cousin Itzik's focus? Let's be real. It's on himself. And so is yours whenever you post a review online. As is mine. It's human nature.
Most of us can't resist bringing our ego to the task; we post our thoughts on X, Y or Z in the culture without taking our eyes of the our concern for how whatever praise or disappointment we post might impact an image of ourselves we are forever curating.
Do I really have to explain why that's not exactly helpful?
The Consumer With an Axe to Grind is More Likely to Post Than The Neutral Observer Who Just Liked Something They Read or Watched.
Recently I needed to explore the Amazon listing for my mother's memoir Dry Tears. I was surprised to find some lengthy negative reviews posted there. And I was curious to read them to uncover just what might have inspired one man to give the book one star.
It pretty quickly became clear that in the case of Mom's memoir which deals with the Holocaust, most of the negative reviews were the work of folks who just also happen to have a lot of "issues" with the accepted facts of the Holocaust as a historical event and a human tragedy.
The people with an axe to grind are always going to be more motivated to post their 500 words of complaint than those who read something or see something and like it. Unfortunately it seems wired into how we experience the world. The negatives seem to have a much easier time grabbing hold of our attention. (And in the case of your typical Holocaust denier, never letting go.)
As much as I've written over the years to bitterly complain about the outsized power of one particular newspaper on the staying power of new works of theater, film, literature, music, we may one day (and maybe sooner than we imagined) look back wistfully to the days of Frank Rich and Richard Dyer and Pauline Kael who, even when we may have disagreed with their conclusions certainly knew what their mission was: to help the reader make a choice.
No one would suggest that a beautifully written review can ever substitute for the actual thing itself. Nevertheless most serious critics have over the years (with varying degrees of success) at least attempted to provide some clues as to where the emotional center of some new show lives. They didn't always get it right but at least these attempts to understand were made by writers who were paid to watch, listen and then think. And think some more. Think and synthesize and then write. The think again before turning in their final review to the boss.
