Category: Essays

I Hate Metascores, And You Should Too

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Metascoring, in case you aren’t aware, is the process of gauging a movie’s quality through aggregating lots of different reviews and spitting out a score based on the percentage of positive reviews it’s gotten. Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic are two very popular websites that metascore, and you’ve probably visited one or both at some point in your life.

The entire concept is bunk.

Even just the idea of applying a ‘score’ to a movie is stupid, and yet it’s become customary for critics to tack them on at the end of their reviews for some reason. We’ve all seen the five-star system, the four-star system, the percent-out-of-a-hundred system—or out of ten, but with decimals—or maybe the most offensive, the A to F grading, which treats the film as though it were a High School essay on Wuthering Heights rather than a comprehensive piece of art.
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I Want To Talk About The Internet

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When YouTube started to happen, it seemed like the great leveler.  Kids in their basement suddenly had distribution equal to that of the major Hollywood studios.  And following in the wake of cheaper and better video equipment, it looked like the control of all media had shifted from ‘The Man’ to the everyman.

The results of this have been dismally revealing.

Thanks to the internet, and YouTube, we now have confirmation that 99.999% of all art completely sucks.  Before, we could only look to the establishment and their putrid output to see how bad everything is.  But with every person on earth making stuff, and throwing it up on there, we now have proof that almost nobody can make anything good.
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My Streets: The Best ‘So Bad It’s Good’ Movie You’ve Never Seen

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My Streets (2009)

When I was sixteen, I made an extremely bad feature-length film called The Velvet Autumn.  It’s two hours and thirty minutes, and it makes absolutely no sense.

The reason it doesn’t make any sense is because at that time in my life, I was obsessed with the visual construction of a movie, and I didn’t yet understand that you don’t just construct images, you construct them in a way that expresses a story. I was consciously working off of the Raging Bull hypothesis—that you create the images first, and your story will come later. Scorsese did a better job at this than me, although he had access to much better materials and had way more experience.  But in any event, The Velvet Autumn, and Raging Bull alike, are proof positive that the hypothesis is incorrect—you gotta have the story first.
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How (And Why) To Collect Blu-Rays and DVDs

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A small portion of my collection.

If you’re reading this site, you probably love movies, and if so, you should probably collect them. Now, before you say “No way, collecting is for turkeys!” and turn me down like I’m a bad influence out of a Ninja Turtles PSA, let me explain—this is for your benefit. Collecting gets a bad rap these days, what with shows like Hoarders and whatnot, but a real collector ain’t like those people. A real collector is fucking G. Not to toot my own horn, but I own over a thousand Blu-Rays and DVDs, and if I sold them all off right now, not only would I break even, I’d turn a profit. My collection pays for itself. I repeat—the movies I love pay for themselves. Wanna be like me? Here’s how.
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Special Effects: Why They Look Right When They Look Right

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The late, great Ray Harryhausen. (1920-2013)

When I was a little kid my grandpa showed me King Kong, the 1933 one.  King Kong doesn’t look real, but it looks good, because it looks right.  Looking ‘right’ is the key.

Special effects are perhaps film’s biggest point of separation from the other arts.  In literature, if you want a monster in your story, you just describe it.  But a movie has to convince you what you’re looking at is real, even when you’re looking at the most not real things humans can dream up.  This takes a perfect synthesis of human imagination, technology, and innovation.
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