Shitty Reviews: A Review.
Let’s be honest, the reviews that everyone loves to read aren’t the gushing, five star kind that sing the praises of something worthy and brilliant. Very few people at all, meanwhile, read the middling reviews.
The reviews we all look forward to are the absolute maulings. The one-star kickings of terrible projects. Those are the ones that everyone secretly delights in.
For this reason, I’ve been secretly quite excited about the release of the new musical “Uncanny Valley: Revenge of the Furries.” I believe that they may have changed the title to “Cats” just before release.
We’ve all known “Cats” was going to be a disaster right from the first trailer, which caused everyone to have the same handful of reactions. “What the fuck is THAT?!” was a common one, or “Why does it speak in the tongue of man?!”
Because the sort of hubris which can create these abominations cannot be stopped by bad reviews, common sense or even the prayers of millions to an unfeeling God, “Cats” went ahead and the reviews are predictably a mix of the baffled, the horrified and the just-plain-bored.
I Googled “Cats reviews” today on my lunch break, gleefully, waiting to see who had torn these cats a desperately needed new asshole.
That was when I got distracted.
When you Google reviews for movie, it turns out, Google “helpfully” shows you reviews by other members of the public as well as by professional critics. In theory, this is a great idea, but in practice it means any fucking idiot can have a say. Which, now that I think about it, is basically a summation of the entire internet.
This person gave “Cats” a one star review because it was a talkie. Or perhaps because it wasn’t a meowie. More frighteningly, forty people thought this was a useful opinion. I’d like to stress that none of these reviews are inept because of any laguage barrier. These hot takes would be dogshit in any language.
This fucking idiot didn’t even SEE the film and still felt the need to weigh in with a score. The next two reviews were just oddly sexual, although I’m pretty sure they didn’t see the movie either:
Some of the blame for this must lie with Google, which apparently has a minimum number of characters for all reviews. As a hint to the good folks at Google (because let’s not kid ourselves that they or their algorithyms aren’t reading everything, everywhere), asking the mentally ill to make their internet comments LONGER is never a good idea.
Speaking of the perfect storm of mentally ill and “didn’t see the film,” by far the comment that bothered me most was this little gem:
This is one of the better musicals released this year, apparently — and I’ll give you cash money if you can name any of the others without a search engine — except for Les Miserables, which came out so much earlier in the year that it was 2012.
Anyway, after some gibberish which I’m not going to try to untangle, this asshole says he’s going to go and see Star Wars instead, which also neatly explains why Star Wars gets the shit kicked out of it by audience reviews every time it tries to do something different.
There’s normally a point here where I’d be expected to say “I’m not trying to silence people’s opinions,” but fuck that noise, I am. I want fewer people to be able to express their opinions if this is the best that they can do. Please understand, I didn’t go digging through all the Google reviews to find the craziest ones. These were the ones that popped right up as soon as I hit “search.”
People like the ones above are also why nobody knows what they’re buying online anymore, by the way. There felt like there was a point where items you were considering buying got reviewed by other people with functional brain stems, but now everything you browse online has a truckload of reviews that say “This item was adequate, five stars!” or else “It wasn’t the colour I thought it was, one star.” Neither of those reviews tells us anything, and between them and Chinese review farms we now might as well treat any internet purchase as a sort of extended lucky dip.
Here’s some free advice for anyone thinking of writing a review of anything: Imagine your friend asked you what you thought of the new “Cats” movie. These conversations often come up in the form of “Hey, have you seen the new Cats movie?” so there’s an important clause introduced right away.
If you haven’t seen it, you’d probably say to your friend “I haven’t seen it, sorry,” and that would be the end of that. Take this approach when you’re reviewing something. If you haven’t seen it or bought it or otherwise experienced it, don’t review it.
But if you have seen or bought the item in question, and your friend asked you what it was like, and all you could respond with was a string of word salad that saw people around you checking to see if you’d had a stroke, and then ending with “Star Wars,” then STILL DON’T REVIEW THE THING. You’re helping nobody.
Another way to look at it is to treat languages like Maths. They were both subjects in school, and still will be for another few months until the Tory cuts really start to bite, so imagine that there was an online platform to solve equations. If you know you’re not very good at maths, you probably wouldn’t try to solve equations in public. Somehow, however, the people who aren’t very good at writing in English still feel they should be broadcasting their failures to the rest of us without a hint of shame. They shouldn’t.
This isn’t about being nice, or fair, or balanced. It’s about being capable. If you hate something for any reason, feel free to write about how much you hate it, but ONLY IF YOU KNOW HOW TO WRITE. Because it’s never been true that “if you can’t say anything nice, you shouldn’t say anything at all.” You can be as unpleasant as you like, as long as it’s interesting. The key thing is knowing how to be interesting. Consider the story that Donald Trump was overheard congratulating himself over calling Canadian leader Justin Trudeau two faced. “That was funny,” Trump mumbled to himself, convincing nobody.
You can tell Justin Trudeau is two faced because one of them is black.
There. THAT’S how you do funny at Trudeau’s expense, Donald, you fat, idiot hack. The point being, if your insults aren’t worth reading, don’t have the arrogance to attempt to make people read them. Don’t insist “that was funny” to yourself when nobody’s laughing. Either come up with something funny or shut up, because the alternative is being Donald Trump.
The same applies if you’re going to be nice about something, or even just give something an okay review. Because the okay reviews are important, too. If you see a movie or buy something and it’s just okay, explain to people that it’s okay, and maybe point out where it could have been better and where it still succeeded. Crucially, save the rankings of “Great!” and “Terrible!” for things that genuinely are great or terrible.
We live in a selfish, lonely age. We can play chicken and egg with whether the loneliness drives the selfishness or the selfishness drives the loneliness, but everyone these days seems desperate to be heard even as they wall themselves off behind more digital anonymnity. Nobody talks to their friends in real life but everyone is screaming to be listened to on the internet. I’m as much a victim as anyone else, demonstrably.
It’s an increasingly lonely society, and maybe people are broadcasting into the online void so they don’t have to listen to the silence. But for Christ’s sake. If you can’t improve on the silence, shut the fuck up.