What is it with critics these days? I mean, you’d expect them to know something about movies, but ever since Roger Ebert ripped on Harry Potter for being too silly, I’ve begun to see movie critics more like I see politically-opinionated 12 year olds: worthy of being humored, not trusted to actually know what they’re talking about.
Such is the case with the past couple editions of Pirates of the Caribbean. Everyone loved the first, even the critics. They claimed it was the rebirth of the pirate genre. Then they went and ripped on the second and third for being too overblown and confusing. Eh, what? Now, I’ll concede that At World’s End, the most recent, wasn’t the best. But I’ve heard numerous claims that the story was so confusing that no one could possible understand it. This is straight from (I assume) professional movie critics. If they can’t understand a movie, then no one can, right? Wrong. I watched the third Pirates not too long ago and I knew exactly what was happening the entire time. Yes it was a bit confusing at times, but it wasn’t that hard to follow if you possessed a brain and two eyes. Okay, one eye might suffice, but you get the point.
I’m not quite sure why I’m even bothering to write this, considering anyone smarter than a fifth grader (a small number if Foxworthy’s show is any indicator) knows that movie critics and moviegoers are on vastly different pages when it comes to what makes a movie good. The Pirates franchise is a good example of that. The second and third movies raked in the big bucks at the box office, even as critics touted them as the downfall of pirate movies and prayed to the gods of Hollywood that there would be no more sequels.
I could go on about how high-brow entertainment that makes you actually think is consistently being torn down as too confusing, which is a direct result of the decreasing attention spans of Americans, but I think that’s a blog for another time, given I don’t get sued by any movie critics any time in the near future.
(The title of this post is a reference to a movie review in Time, if you were wondering.)
