Hi friends! 👋🏻
I haven’t been actively reviewing books or movies for about six years ago, and it’s unlikely that I’ll ever return to that outside of doing joke reviews on Goodreads and Letterboxd. One of the big reasons for me not reviewing anymore is the fact that I don’t read reviews for anything that is entirely subjective. If it’s a piece of technology or clothing I’m more likely to take a look since those are objective things, but art is subjective and something more personal, so I tend to stay away from reviews of that.
reviews just don’t interest me.
Plain and simple, I just don’t care for reviews. I don’t find them entertaining to read, so I don’t seek them out and I don’t click on them.
i prefer to go into something without any expectations at all.
I know that I’m not alone in this because I’ve known people who don’t even want to hear a simple “I liked it” about things they want to read or watch. I personally don’t go that far, but I still don’t want to have my experience altered by anyone’s biases, especially since we live in a time where if something is not the greatest thing ever created and should be shot into space for hypothetical aliens to see, it’s the worst thing ever made and the person who made it must be a secret bigot or something. This brings me to my next point.
some reviews are barely reviews.
If you watched a lot of YouTube in the mid to late 2000s, you’ll remember the trend of “angry reviewers” - a bunch of (usually) white guys in their 20s or early 30s who put on an exaggerated character to review something from 20 years ago and act like it was the worst thing in the whole world and was the cause for their anger. Think the Nostalgia Critic, Angry Video Game Nerd, those kinds of videos.
Those videos were fine for the time because they were committed bits, but over time, audiences have forgotten that those people were playing characters and think that they’re genuine critics. Now, we get some reviews that are just thinly-veiled personal rants towards an artist rather than something critiquing the art itself and it can be very uncomfortable to see.
Thankfully, this isn’t something that I see in the book blogging community, but it is something that runs rampant on Movie Twitter. I’m part of the Zack Snyder fandom so I have seen some of the worst things people have said about a person just because some people didn’t like their work. I’ve seen people call him an Ayn Rand fanboy (when he actually thinks she was a nutcase), I’ve seen people try to claim that he’s a far-right bigot for adapting 300 (which was written by actual racist Frank Miller and emulates Spartan propaganda), and worse of all, I’ve seen people make fun of him for losing his daughter to suicide. All because he made a couple of movies that people didn’t like.
These days, it feels like reviews are more about nitpicking and pointing out everything “wrong” with something that talking about why it’s enjoyable or boring or whatever. Again, this is not something that I see very often in the bookish community, but there’s bound to be some bleedthrough somewhere.
reviews are not facts.
It shouldn’t have to be said, but there are too many people who treat critics’ views or, even worse, aggregated scores like the gospel truth. I truly believe that there is no such thing as an “objectively bad” piece of art because art is entirely subjective. I love the movie Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, but it has a low Rotten Tomatoes score and got eviscerated by critics and audiences, but that doesn’t matter to me because my opinion matters to me more than the opinions of some person I’ve never met or even heard of.
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t listen to what other people have to say in relation to art, but if you want to read a book or watch a movie that got bad reviews, you should still go into it with an open mind. It’s up to you to decide whether or not you like something, not someone else.
talk to me!
Do you read reviews? Do you ever purposely avoid them?
