Thing is, and sadly Hagen along with many other reviewers, seem stuck on the process of DEDUCATION, instead of INDUCTION.
Deducting reviews is where you take a film, and you strip the movie apart, and automatic subtraction occurs, to which then the film is criticized for "it could have been great, if only BLAH and BLAH". Thus, people "deduct" points, say 100 being MASTERPIECE, until the reviewer is done with their deduction, onto the final score.
As I see it, along with others who follow the Induction process, we actually GIVE points to films for cool shit. A point there, a point there. Perhaps the cinematography is beautiful. Maybe the editing kicks ass the lord. Thing is, we add up all the things we liked about the movie, and then see our score.
Let's consider these two schools of criticism compared to a movie I recently reviewed: Michael Cimino's YEAR OF THE DRAGON (1985).
The New York Times review, which you can dig up over at the NYT website, really blasted the film as a "great film imploded within" and some pretentious ramblings I still don't compute. Either way, its a decent example of a deductive matter of reviewing.
Check MY review of it in the BB.Net archives, and notice how that I gave points to Rourke's acting work, Cimino's nice detail for really a genre-fluffer material piece, and so on, and so on. I didn't subtract points or star-ratings for my problems with the picture that I noticed in my review.
P.S. - Hagen, dude you didn't hurt my feelings. I mean, why should I be pissed when basically, you said that you liked my reviews?
I only wrote that bit of constructive criticism towards you because, well honestly, I didn't understand your post. "Err What sonny?!?"
