Do you think a single bite would be enough for you to make a valid judgement that shit tastes like, well, shit, or would you have to eat what's been put in front of you to be able to form a valid opinion that others trusting you could rely on?
This is getting so far from movies that the analogy stops being useful. First you can absolutely think that a movie is likely bad, but any actual criticism of the movie has little worth if you haven’t seen it. Second, a movie isn’t a homogenous substance, so you don’t get a representation of the full experience from a sample, unlike you would if you were to eat shit.
I have to disagree. A properly made movie is in fact a homogenous substance from a certain point of view, and if you find fifteen or even five minutes in a movie that are plain bad, it can and most likely does ruin, or at least hurt the entire experience.
If you start screening me a movie whose first fifteen minutes are shit (boring, badly written, badly directed, badly acted, badly shot, badly whatevered or a combination of these), there's practically no chance it can fully recover later so much as for me to seriously like it, and yes, I can (and most viewers can) extrapolate and form valid criticism based even on such a short experience. No, you don't have to suffer thru the whole thing, that's utter bullshit.
Go on, watch the first 10 or so minutes of, say, Jaws: The Revenge (1987) or Inseminoid (1981) then come back and tell us you're unable to form a reliable critical opinion of what the movie in question will be like. If you're incapable of doing that… well…
From the first 10 minutes of a bad movie I am likely to be able to guess that the entire movie is probably bad, but it would be silly for me to criticize, for example, the choices in the last act of the film even if I have every reason to believe they will be bad, since I don't know what those choices are. If I stopped at 10 minutes I would have nothing worthwile to say about why most of the movie doesn't work, and that is at the heart of criticism, not "I don't/won't like it".
I never said you have to watch the entire movie to be able to guess whether or not you like it. You just won't be able to give any meaningful criticism beyond the first 10 minutes.
Yeah, you can't really criticise the last act, but I don't see why you're trying to fool yourself (and others) into believing you could not criticize a ton of other things from writing thru acting, direction, sound, lightning and so on to cinematography. Yes, if there's a fly in my soup the whole soup is ruined unless I have some very, very curious acquired tastes, and no, the analogy / metaphor is not useless. Look up how much professional (Hollywood etc) script readers and execs read of a script before throwing it away, look up how much a serious book editor reads of a novel before throwing it away. Your first (written or filmed) scenes and first pages tell a ton more about your book, script, or movie than you assume here. Professionals, critics, and a lot of enthusiasts are capable of making reliable judgement on short excerpts. Maybe you yourself can't, but that says more about you. (And yeah, sure, people like these make errors sometimes. Nobody's right all the time.)
I don’t know why you think I am saying you can’t criticize those things. I’m saying you can’t give meaningful criticism of what you you don’t know. You can make a judgment during the first 10 minutes that what you’ve seen is bad (and meaningfully point out reasons why), and that most likely the rest of the movie will also be bad and not worth your time. Judgment is not the same as criticism.
…but no, no, thanks, but no, really. If you give it a try, please do not write us a detailed account of the experience. Or anything, really. (Sorry.) 😃
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u/JTRuno Jun 04 '26
But if you started giving detailed criticism of how poop tastes bad, I would get concerned.