Now I’ve been thinking about this for a very long time, but it strikes me that most movie reviewers, most especially these days found on YouTube, really aren’t that hot. In fact, I find that most of them come off like frustrated filmmakers who, in the absence of their own success, they just want to go after other movie makers to assuage their own failed egos.

So let’s talk about that a bit.

I love movies. I always have and always will. I will sit down and watch a black-and-white movie from the 1930s or a color flick from the 80s with the same fervor. Good movies, bad movies, sci-fi, monster, adventure and mystery, I’ll watch them all. I even did a segment around here where I’d talk about the week’s TV shows and review popular movies that came out in theaters.

I just never expected any of it to be taken seriously because I’m just an individual expressing my own opinions. The Internet is full of people like that.

Unfortunately, some of them take themselves way too seriously.

Most of them come off like frustrated filmmakers describing how they would have done it, reviewing movies they wish they had seen and not the movie they saw. I’m not saying that you can’t express your opinions, in fact, you absolutely can, but let’s be honest about what you’re  doing. It’s not demonstrable fact, even though some love to pretend that it is.

So I want to look at a couple of YouTube reviewers that I do watch and why I either have problems with them, or don’t. In no case do I take any of their views as anything more than a single individual’s view.

Let’s start with Chris Stuckmann. I think he’s been a prime example of what I’m talking about on both sides of the spectrum. He started off years back doing tear-downs of bad movies, which is perfectly fine. There are plenty of bad movies out there. Recently, he’s reversed course and now he refuses to go after bad movies because he, a struggling filmmaker himself, doesn’t want people to do that to him. In fact, he’s currently trying to get a movie project off the ground, something I certainly won’t begrudge him, and now, he wants to be completely positive. It’s also a channel I really don’t watch much anymore because I want honesty, not an artificially rosy outlook.

Then there are channels like Nostalgia Critic, which I’ve watched since it began, back as far as when it was That Guy With The Glasses and he was doing movie riffs. To be honest, he  doesn’t so much review movies as he makes a production out of them and so long as he’s interesting, I’ll probably keep watching. Doug Walker and his crew have pretty much become filmmakers in their own right, working in spoof and review as an art form. I might disagree with a lot of what they say, but so long as they entertain me, I’m along for the ride.

Yet there are a lot that seem very down on everything, as though their dour views are somehow objectively true. They really seem to be reviewing movies that they wish existed instead of the ones that actually do. “I wouldn’t have done it that way”. Great, then go make a movie your way and we’ll see how people like it! This is probably the group of reviewers that I like the least because they tend to be full of themselves. I can’t tell you how many I find that think that if the movie isn’t the way they would have made it, if it wasn’t aimed directly at them, then it has to be bad, no matter how financially successful it was. Not everything is made for you. You’re welcome to your opinions but that doesn’t make your opinions fact.

Then you get into CinemaSins territory which, granted, is a spoof, but there are even counter-channels pointing out all of the really stupid crap that CinemaSins say in their pursuit of spoofery. They tend to piss me off a little because it’s really just making jokes with a movie as a backdrop and they don’t much care about the movie.

There are painfully few actual reviewers out there who are just giving their honest opinions, presented as opinions, consistent and not grumpy because someone else got to make a movie and they didn’t. There are relatively few who are actually talking about the movie that exists, not the movie they wished that they’d seen instead.

This is really a problem that goes back to people like Siskel and Ebert when I was a kid. They had a lot of opinions and frankly, half of the movies they reviewed, I didn’t think they really understood who they were made for. That continues to be a problem to this day. I personally think Michael Bay movies are crap but they make billions and clearly, I’m not the intended audience for those movies. Same with Twilight. I think they’re garbage but they certainly resonated with someone.

That’s why I’m never telling people how it is, only what my views are. There is no right or wrong answer. If someone makes a movie, it survives or fails on its own merits, not on any reviewer’s opinion. If I’m looking for an actual review, not entertainment, not comedy, then I want someone to tell me what the movie was about and if it’s done well. All of the opining is meaningless. I don’t care about your preferences. I care if the movie is worth watching and most reviews, they entirely fail to even address that. Even those that do, it’s all still opinion and has to be taken with a grain of salt. People really need to stop pretending that they matter. If you think you can do better, go for it. Let’s see the next batch of self-important reviewers going after your flick. I doubt you’ll like it very much.