Amazon Reviews and Pissing Contests

Whiny bitching is not a progressive topic, but I feel like getting this off of my chest.

I love movies. I am a film major. Sitting down and just watching a movie with friends in no way constitutes a wasted night for me. I love visuals, I love well placed music, I love interesting characters, whatever. I have a high respect for the art of film making.

I was recently perusing Amazon for good deals on some movies missing from my meager , college kid collection and decided to read the reviews for Full Metal Jacket. I already own the movie, but it can split audiences both ways with its structuring. So, in an admittedly slightly masochistic mood I began to wander through the reviews. Most people gave it high marks, and those who didn't like it blithered their opinion and said they should have rented another movie. They should have if their review is nothing but, "Bleh, didn't like it." You should watch snoopy returns or something so that your intellect can be matched by the effort and intelligence of those involved with a movie.

I don't really care that people didn't like it though. The movie kind of keeps its distance and doesn't quite flow like your usual movie does. It feels more like 3 or 4 shorts following a single character. As surface as most of these bad reviews were, it was a couple of the positive reviews that just blew my mind.(On a side note, my journalistic writing teacher would be so mad at me for not doing my inverted pyramid.)

Within the first twenty or so reviews, I counted four that devoted two paragraphs to their HD TVs and a sentence or two about the movie. Maybe I should get out of the film industry. Apparently it is far more important that a decades old movie look like it was shot specifically for your montrous HD TV than that you review the content and art of the thing you claim to be reviewing. When I go see an art exhibit I don't spend ten times the space devoted to the art with comments about how my $1000 dollar Armani shades really brought out some of the flaws in the canvas.

THis worthless techno scum more concerned with pixel depth and minor clarity issues is claiming some kind of judgement on a movie? IF for some reason the manufacturer had screw up a batch and the DVDs looked terrible or wouldn't play on HD set ups such comments might have been warranted. Who are these people that feel it more important to brag about their state of the art video equipment than to address the movie people are looking to them to review. Even in video game reviews graphics are usually tiny section unless there is something stunning or something incredibly low quality.

I don't care how many stars you give a movie that got two sentences in your review while you blathered on for two paragraphs about aspect ratio and picture clarity. When you post a review of something, you should focus on whatever that is. When I read something that claims to be a review of a movie, I don't expect to hear 90% about how Blu-Ray compares to other disc formats. When I read a review of a book I don't expect you to bitch about your fucking reading glasses being dusty and the paper being kind of thin or something.

Are we so obsessed with image that anything below the ultimate new standard is worthy of being derided? Does the film stock quality of a movie matter more than the story now because it just doesn't look as good on your flat screen, HD integrated entertainment coccoon? No. Review the movie, talk about what you said you'd talk about. Don't throw in some pointless crap about your technological set up.

I can't help but think there is a bigger theme here.