Review Talk

I don't usually talk about the critiques themselves here. In fact, I try to avoid talking about the critiques at all, as I feel it makes me look like I don't have anything better to do than stalk YouTube and hit F5 every thirty seconds just in case there's Another View. 'Cause, you know, I would never do anything like that.

But three days ago I posted The Mentalist and I did my usual rounds of Facebook and The Escapist and then walked away from the computer for awhile. Okay, I went to sleep, but point is, I didn't stalk it. And then it got sixty four views in twelve hours. For scale, even Heroes: The All Bad All the Time Edition, my most watched video to date, took a week to hit sixty five.

I know it's not crazy-viral or anything, but for me, that's a lot of views, really fast. Well, yesterday The Mentalist passed 100 views and as of writing is sitting pretty at 107.

And it's freaking me out.

I mean, yes I know that for my videos to become popular, people actually have to watch them, and yes I've been getting steadily more views as I keep doing this, and yes the fall premiers are coming up so searches are up, but damn, ya'll.

So, yeah. Thanks, Everyone Who Watches My Videos.

Oh! And since I'm taking this week off to start a rolling schedule, I shall link a the video that's selected by The Audience. There's a poll here if you want to vote, or just comment with your choice from the list below and I'll add the results together. I really don't expect to get a whole shit-ton of results, but The Mentalist has surprised me this week, and ya'll might as well.

Criminal Minds
Glee
Castle
Eastwick
Numb3rs
Heroes: The Good Stuff Edition
Heroes: The All Bad All the Time Edition
The Mentalist

Make your choice!

More on The Mentalist

As predicted, there are some things in my notes that didn't make it into the video. Most of them are little things, like that occasionally the background noise (footsteps, traffic, ringing phones) drowns out the dialogue, or that the camera during fight scenes has no desire to show us what's going on, or the myriad continuity errors from multiple takes. So I won't go in to those.

A big one though, is that, like his inspiration, Patrick Jane is occasionally wrong. Sherlock Holmes was wrong all the time, he frequently edited his theory as he got more information to accommodate the new facts, and on one spectacular occasion (Wisteria Lodge, I think it was), he was out-and-out wrong. Jane is outright wrong more often than Sherlock was, but it's usually about minor things, and he brushes off his mistakes with such savvy that it's difficult to notice when he's wrong. Which is a great thing from the actor. The writers made him wrong, yes, but a minor tweak to the way Simon Baker plays it, and the scripted mistakes could be glaring.

The other major thing is the way the show treats the supernatural. Early on there's an episode with a psychic, and it's heavily implied that she's a faker, but no undeniable proof ever comes up, and her insights provided one of the best "Awwww" moments in the show. She wasn't even the bad-guy-of-the-week, just a minor character antagonist.

There's also an episode with a "Wiccan," whose depiction is just about as stereotypically neo-pagan as is possible. I hates her, because she's... well... fluffy. For some reason that's the only satisfactorily descriptive that I've got. She does cast a couple of spells and, if you interpret it that way, they come true, but it could also be chalked up pretty easily to coincidence. Thankfully.

From the Audience

Now that The Mentalist is ready to go I can slow down a touch and talk about something that's been bugging me since it came up. This is a comment that I got on my second Heroes critique:

"your review was pretty good and well tought out. But it was very subjective, which is fine considering your review title." -- wasalp


I could rag on the lack of a fifth-grade level editing skill, or the spelling, punctuation, grammar, word choice, and clause placement mistakes. It would be mean of me, and probably pointless, but I could. Instead though, there's a concept here that deserves some thought: the idea that subjective reviews are a problem.


Quite simply, no review is objective. Part of objectivity is the ability to quantify, or assign a number to, the object being reviewed. And while, yes, you can give any feature of anything a numerical score, you have to do so arbitrarily, so that number has no meaning to anyone but you. Bit of a waste then, huh? And that's assuming that your perception of the object being reviewed isn't filtered through your experiences, opinions, and prejudices. If it isn't, then we've got bigger problems than subjective reviews because you are a robot.


So, since no review can possible be objective, why is subjectivity a problem? It seems to me that since objective reviews don't exist, if we bitch about the subjective ones, what have we left? Nothing.


And if you think about it, every time someone expresses their opinion, that's a review. "Hey, you went to see Scott Pilgrim last week, right? Whatja think?" "Oh, it's awesome you should totally check it out!"


Review!


Not a great one to be sure, but a review nonetheless. And that's really what professional written reviews are about. Not just the opinions, but also the reasons behind them. What's good and why. What sucks on a saguaro and why. So when we read reviews, we're not looking for opinions, we're looking for someone else to justify our opinions.


Ponder that one.

Still Watching TV...

I'm afraid that without exceptional amounts of comments or questions the blog is going to run a tad dry the first half of the week, since I'm just watching shows and there's not much that's exciting about that.

With The Mentalist, though I've got a shit-ton of notes and they may not all make it into the video so there may be an expansion pack of sorts here once the review hits the web. No promises, but I'll keep you posted.

I'll just stop typing here, since I'm inclined to just ramble to my hearts content and probably give away a good many spoilers to the review, and we wouldn't want that now would we?

From the Audience

Way back in my Numb3rs review thread that I posted to The Escapist, there was some discussion about Castle. A viewer expressed disbelief that I'd actually liked Castle, to which someone (who I can't assume actually watched my review) responded:


"Castle's main problem is the cops. Nathan Fillion's character is great, the scenes with his mother and daughter are great, and the core concept is sound. Then they bring in the annoying female lead and her comic-relief friends and ruin the whole thing. The writing team on Castle need to take a long, hard look at The Mentalist to learn how to write Comedy Male Lead and Serious Cop Lead."  --sosolidshoe (emphasis added)


I responded to that thread, but I think there's a concept here that deserves some thought. Sosolidshoe has implied that Castle would be better if it were more like The Mentalist. But they're different shows. Now, I haven't actually watched any of The Mentalist yet, so this is pure pre-review speculation, but it seems to me that the more one show is like another, the worse off it is. After all, they have to share an audience, so wouldn't it be prudent to be as different a cop show as possible in order to attract people that the other show doesn't?


That's the entire point of the gimmick. All procedurals have them to avoid being completely generic, some fail, but most do alright in that regard. And I'm sure this will earn me the ire of the Internet, but I actually hate procedurals. If I judge them by the standards of character shows, some can do alright, but procedurals are massively overdone and some just have to reach so far in order to provide a unique gimmick that my suspension of disbelief has fallen right from the start. Like Numb3rs. And White Collar (which I also have not yet seen, but it looks like a pile of shit with a side of fries, so I despair of the day when it comes up on my list).


And the Heroes: TABAtTE is ready to post tomorrow morning, so in response to sosolidshoe, next week's critique will be on The Mentalist. I just hope it's not as agonizing as Heroes.


Edited to add: Oh yeah, it's 9/11. It's not that I don't care... well okay, it is that I don't care. Living in the past never helped anyone, the dead are still dead, and we're still locked in a pointless war with a concept. Can't fight a concept, and it was a major conceit to even try. You can say that makes me un-American. I can say, "Bite me."