A thing about Metacritic

[trashcanman]

A lot of people hate Metacritic's compiling and averaging of critics' reviews by numerical score because it reduces art to a number. A lot of trolls love it so they can take to the site and write nonsense reviews with 0 scores to protest some tiny perceived slight from a video game developer or whatever. But it's actually a useful resource to gauge the critical community and track trends. Here's a thing I notice.

Let's look at all of the current films out there.

www.metacritic.com/browse/movies/release-date/theaters/date

Average to poor with a few genuine recommendations. Regardless of the titles of the films, the scores all pretty much look like this. Captain America 2 was awesome sauce, but only scored an average score of 70. Factoring in that Avengers only managed a 69 and you can pretty much see that there's nothing a comic book movie can do aside from be directed by Christopher Nolan to gain real critical traction. Andd anything from Tyler Perry is going to be deep in the red.

But what about music? The scene has never been uglier from a radio standpoint; let's see what the music critics think.

www.metacritic.com/browse/albums/release-date/new-releases/date

Stunning, yeah? Again, regardless of what albums are on that list, it's always an ocean of green with a few yellows, usually reserved for mainstream artists. I think that's the first red I've ever seen, though. So anything current that sounds like music is pretty much 70's-80's, anything old and classic is 90+, and anything formerly mainstream but out of fashion is 50's for the most part.

So film critics are pretty fucking tough to please when it comes to what's out there and music critics seem to love just about anything. I mean, they're both pretentious bunches, but one set seems like it's out there to cut down anything and everything while the other seems to think there is virtue in nearly everything. Why is that?

[The Curmudgeon]

You know, that's the first time I've ever actually been on Metacritic. Chalk that one up.

I think the main difference between the vastly different ratings for music and movies is, with movies everyone has an opinion because most people are going to line up to watch the Avengers movie, but not everyone is going to sit and listen to a Band of Skulls album.

There's more room for fault with a film as well, certainly in the eye of viewers. Don't follow the comic origin exactly? Ugh, like, WURST MOV1E EVAR.

It's interesting though, but it would make me take Matacritic's ratings with a huge pinch of salt for most things. I usually base a movie on the magazines I subscribe to (in this case, Empire and Total Film) and music is NME and Q. I often disagree with a lot of them, though. What reviews do you read, Trash?

[trashcanman]

I've been kind of avoiding reviews because I feel like the quality has turned to shit. It's now common knowledge that companies pay pro reviewers and even find ways to punish publications that give bad reviews so I tend to track trends using metacritic out of curiosity more than anything else.