I don't use movie critics to determine if I see a movie or not. I go see the movie, I read reviews to remind me why I don't read reviews.
To be honest I never understood the point of reviews. People should be able to form their own opinion of whether they like or dislike a movie or game or whatever. At best reviewers are glorified spoiler delivery systems, at worse they serve a "purpose" so superfluous it boarders on criminal that they get paid for doing so.
In a perfect world they'd just tell you what happened in a movie with the fewest spoilers possible, maybe post some links to other films that are similar in case you like the description. And now that we have Wikipedia and IMDB to do that, and do it with less 'tude, well...I really don't see the point.
An aside...
I'm not a huge Bob Chipman fan, actually--I find many of his views archaic and almost deliberately backwards-thinking, especially in his guise as the Game Over-thinker (a.k.a. "OMG U GAIS MARIO IS AWSUM!!1!"). He seems openly dismissive of almost everything I enjoy, belittles people he thinks are beneath him, and judges people based purely on what movies they like or what games they play. Or am I the only one who found his repeated assertion, HIS COMPLETELY GENUINE ASSERTION before anyone claims he was "joking", that everyone who plays multiplayer on XBL is a hoodlum? Or that anyone who enjoyed the Transformers trilogy was a retard who needed to be prevented from voting (yes he says that) because they're dangerous? Don' even get me started on how ridiculous and myopic his views on FPS games are. I frankly have no problem with people disagreeing with me, I do, however, have problems with people who think they're better than someone based on something as arbitrary as game or movie preferences, and who are openly contemptuous of people because they don't share his. That's not elitism, that's asinine, and frankly it betrays just how ignorant, impotent and immature he really is.
That and he tends to fetishize his own childhood in a way that strikes me as either:
A--he's lying.
B--he's almost certainly not remembering it right.
I mean, I had an awesome childhood, with loving parents and a grandmother (rest her soul) that spoiled me, but I don't pretend that life began and ended during the 5th-10th years of my life. Nostalgia is fine but sweet Jesus...
Anyway, I know I just pissed off all the MovieBob fans, but whatever. I'm not going to stifle my opinion just to keep from stepping on toes. Flame if you must but at least try to do so in a constructive matter, maybe in the form of a rebuttal even.
