Screenhead

Today I want to personally thank the Miller-McCune Group for blowing a whole lot of time and personnel dollars to engage in some serious spreadsheet fun, all meant to reveal one of the greatest truths of the media universe–not all critics are created equal, and some of them just love or hate things unaccountably.

As a token of my appreciation, the Miller-McCune Group will be receiving a large novelty pre-voided check for one hojillion dollars.

Anyway, they’ve built a whole lot of interesting graphs here revolving around a smattering of data from Metacritic, the critic amalgamation site that gives you a general idea of what a whole bunch of critics said.  On a side note, as though anyone would want that–I mean, come on…half the point of reading film criticism is to enjoy the wordplay and the clever comparisons and whatnot.  If you wanted raw numbers you’d play with a calculator.  You want the advance word from a person you can trust.

Some other interesting points include that Michael Wilmington might want to sleep with one eye open lest he be branded a quote whore sometime in the future (most of his work seems to be positive, and interestingly, so does Roger Ebert’s!  Ebert a quote whore?  Say it ain’t so!), Marc Savlov is a tough act to please, and Rene Rodriguez and Mick LaSalle seem to have the best balance of positive and negative work.

Look, I’ve said it before–the best thing you can do is find a critic you can trust.  And the only way you can do that is not with charts and graphs, but rather with a long term commitment and regular readings.  Find the one you know you can trust, and stick with them.  It doesn’t matter if it’s here at Screenhead or somewhere else (though we’d prefer it if it were here at Screenhead), just as long as you can trust it.