Half-Full v. Half-Empty Movies
11th September 2009
Steve Sailer is always worth reading.
You can get a better overview of how good a film is by looking at the average scores on an aggregator site like Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB that give you the wisdom of crowds. (You just have to keep in mind the biases of the various crowds, whether underemployed ex-English majors on Rotten Tomatoes or bachelor fanboys on IMDB.)
My general prejudice is to view over-achieving films made by underdogs through the glass-is-half-full lens and underachieving ones made by overdogs through the half-empty lens. Thus, recent Quentin Tarantino films tend to annoy me because Tarantino long ago demonstrated his enormous talent, and elaborate meta-explanations about why it’s cool that he’s wasting his powers making ingenious crud bore me. It’s not that I’m not intellectually sophisticated enough to understand the rationalizations. I just don’t care.