Y'all need to learn you can pump up the things you love without tearing down the things you hate. That critique is more than simply being critical.
If you aren't asking yourself why a project made the choice they did with curiosity, then you aren't doing critique.
You are being cinema sins. Here's a thing I don't like ding.
The best advice I have ever heard about critiquing art is to simply describe what it's doing and to ask why. But this requires curiosity. It requires being willing to give something the benefit of the doubt. And most of all it requires leaving your cynicism at the fucking door.
And that can be hard, I get it. Online media analysis has been ruled by the idea that it is something to be done angrily. It's how people have seen it done. More than that people are taught to write persuasively, to not use passive language. It can't simply be "I didn't like this" it has to be "this is bad".
This sort of sensationalism also leads to people trying to come up with takes instead of critique. The problem being so many people work in reverse. Instead of engaging with the work and then coming to an idea about it, its having an idea and then reverse engineering scaffolding to hold it up. And people are fucking vicious about protecting their takes because it's often seen as the end product of engaging with art. What do you have at the end? Your take.
And it's completely reductive. When I watch a movie I have thoughts on the different actors, the scenes, the shots, sound, and dialogue. They synthesize together and become my opinion. And the thing is that my opinion can shift overall or on smaller things inside of it that may shift the whole. But takes are a single, pithy opinion. They are, by their nature, easily repeatable and get in your head. That's the function of their design. And damningly it leads to people not engaging with the work at all because it's been replaced by the take. But it also becomes sacrosanct. It's a single line, one opinion, so it can't be changed less the whole thing crumble. And more than that it belongs to somebody, it's theirs- so they viciously hold onto it.
Here's the thing. I do this all the time. I truly wish I was kind and nice, but grew up clever and cruel because that's what made people laugh. I love that serotonin hit I get when I make someone laugh with a pithy insight. Even if it's mean. When I played We Know the Devil, I came away liking it but hating the "true ending". It felt monstrous to me and while I knew what it was going for it just didn't hit for me that way. I had friends try and explain it over and over, and again, I understood the message and themes- I just felt the finale wasn't successful. But I could feel myself starting to calcify around my opinion, my take that the ending of this game sucked actually and HERE'S WHY. Then one day I saw someone explaining their read on the game and I got it. But I still tried to fight it, to mentally hold onto my take. Because it was mine, so it has to be better than anyone else's. It was precious. But then I let it go and it all clicked for me. It wasn't due to someone else coming up with wittier retort, or trying to prove me wrong. They just spoke about how they read it and I realized oh that makes perfect sense. I got it know. The Grinch's heart grew three sizes that day. It's an amazing feeling and not one you can get if you don't leave yourself open to having your mind changed. Not open yourself up to the idea that maybe you are wrong about something. Or even the idea that maybe your opinion can change.
Anyway this was art analysis 101, come back next week where we discuss dialectics and that you can enjoy something while taking issue with it.
