DanteHoratio wrote:No, there is not. It's all opinion based. I rather liked Star Wars episode 1 though 3. That does not make my taste batter or worst then anybody who disliked Star Wars episode 1 though 3. Just different.
I disliked Avater(You know, with the blue alien people), despite the fact that alot of people liked it. That does not make my taste better or worst, just different.
What do you think?
I think this sounds like
exactly the sort of thread someone with terrible taste would start.
But to be serious, I have to echo Max. There are some cases where opinion is sharply divided and you get basically a bimodal distribution. The most famous example is
Napoleon Dynamite, which gave its name to the Napoleon Dynamite effect: there's a few movies which people either love or hate, with very little middle ground. But most things follow a normal distribution. If you're on one end of the curve of the other, you might argue that something is overrated or underrated, given the tastes of the time.
And popularity does not equal goodness. People often have unsophisticated tastes, and consume media uncritically. A lot of people like potato chips (I like potato chips), but if you suggest that they're the height of culinary achievement I'm going to call BS. On the flip side, critics and be pretentious and overrate some things I think are pretentious garbage, but I don't think I've ever seen anything universally critically panned which I thought was objectively good.
I've found that the Rotten Tomatoes audience score is a good marker of whether I will enjoy a movie, but the critical score is a good marker as to whether I'll think it's a good movie. And I can recognize that something is good even if I dislike it, and bad even with I like it. I can enjoy something for one reason and know it's bad in other ways.
Avatar is a good example. The visuals were amazing, and I enjoyed seeing it in 3D. The plot was shit, the characterization was shit, and overall I'd say it's a bad movie I enjoyed. Not "so bad it's good," just that it had some good parts that made it worthwhile. I'd happily see it again in 3D.
Now most things, tend to fall in terms of consensus towards the middle of the spectrum, and there's room for legitimate argument. But if you tell me Shakespeare was a hack, or
Santa Claus Conquers the Martians is the pinnacle of cinematic excellence, I'm going to call bullshit. Shakespeare wrote some bad plays, and I enjoyed
Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, but the brilliance of the latter is entirely accidental, and I challenge you to find a major flaw in
Othello.
52xMax wrote:I'm also a firm believer in
Sturgeon's law (which says 90% of everything is shit, though suspect the number's probably closer to 95%)
The amusing thing is that Sturgeon was one of my favorite SF writers and I own most of his work in collected form. Upon which I realized: the brilliant Sturgeon stories I knew and loved made up only a small part of his oeuvre. With Sturgeon himself I'd say he writes about 20% great stories, 80% forgettable dross.