Blockbusting theory #1

My first post on theory crafting snatches on a weird paper I found a few months ago while net-surfing. Before showing it to you I'll just introduce my gagged rationale.


Now let's all admit movie reviewing is something almost everybody can do. Reviews and critiques pop out in every portal, vortal, newspaper, online bulletin and wherever, like wild flowers during spring.

But the truth is not everyone can do it well. Why? Because there is no natural law or academic axiom saying in a plain way what makes a good movie or a bad one. There are thousands of viewpoints and angles to "read" a film from, inasmuch as many parameters there are.

 

Normally there would be some contemporary theory crafting on how we can judge a film. Like, say, from the nice good old experts: academics, cultural scientists and performing arts researchers. But it's stunning that today most academic literature on movie reviews pays no attention to the reviewing process itself. In fact it elaborates on the effect reviews and critics have on the film industry, instead of ever giving a tip on how it's done.

 

It's sad to know most researchers, professors and film/media students just drain their talent and thinking capacity in order to see how much more or less money a film will make because of the reviews. People in the film industry want to make money - which is very reasonable to a very great extent, as it's their business; but I expect more from the wise guys.

 

This is what I talked about in the beginning of this post then:

 

We conclude that text features from pre-release reviews can substitute for and improve over a strong metadata-based first-weekend movie revenue prediction.

In simple English this means that "we can say how much $$ a film can make the premiere weekend by reading what critics say". Taken from the paper "Movie Reviews and Revenues: An Experiment in Text Regression", this is the conclusion of four US based Carnegie Mellon University authors (Mahesh Joshi, Dipanjan Das, Kevin Gimpel, Noah A. Smith). Oh really...you don't say.

Certainly I don't doubt these people's work, neither their dedicated methods; but really this is all about money and gives a nice business tool to the industry but nothing to me as a subject of cinematography art.

There are many other examples of scientific resources spent for this kind of business purposes. I have to keep looking for a more suitable start for my Movie Gag theory...