GENERAL-AUDIENCE MOVIE REVIEW SECTIONS: Many of these assume there’s only a handful of films opening this weekend, most of which you’ve seen ads for, all of which are already clearly segmented for different audiences/genres, and therefore they will (a) deem a couple worth watching and shrug or grumble about the rest, plus (b) maybe allow one critic to rave about a foreign or independent film now and then.

GENERAL-AUDIENCE MUSIC REVIEW SECTIONS: Many of these assume there are a billion albums coming out this week, most by artists the reader has never heard of, and that it’s the publication’s job to assemble them into little taste-packages for the imagined reader — therefore they will (a) pick a handful of releases to praise, creating like a 10-album “listening station” designed for whatever tastes/lifestyle is the publication’s imagined brand, plus (b) pan a few things, either to round out the other end of that “brand” (what we DON’T like), or because it’s from an act that’s well-known to the audience.

I.e., movie sections discern between options, music sections package and offer a little nugget of recommendations. This actually seems really natural to me, and part of it can be expressed in a much simpler way: people go out to a movie and have 4-5 convenient choices and have an actual need for being warned off bad ones via critical pans — people looking for something to listen to, though, are in no danger of buying stuff they’ve never even heard of; they’re facing endless options in a store or on a computer and are better served by hearing what’s good.

As mentioned in the conversation on this subject on The Lollards Radio Show, the word Average has a different meaning as applied in criticism as applied in mathematics. So we should not be surprised when applying mathematics to criticism odd results come out.

When I was writing features about (not reviewing) films for the papers, people would always be genuinely shocked if I hadn’t seen that week’s big release, something that happened much less with music, where people accept the idea that you might be a specialist (not that I really was, but…)

Metacritic’s film list is dominated by big US papers and general magazines like the New Yorker, while its music list is much more skewed to music magazines/websites.

Of course, on the monthly movie mags things work in a fairly similar sort of way to the music monthlies: they’ll be movies at Empire that will always be “better get Kim Newman to do that” or at S&S, “do think Tony Rayns should do that?” in the same way as assorted writers colonise genres at Q or Uncut.

Re: 3 – I think that’s a matter of personal feeling. I’d be disappointed if there weren’t twenty films I really wanted to see a year, and shocked if there were more than five albums I actually wanted to buy.

the other thing to consider with scoring systems is the indices (which you have talked about elsewhere). Marking out of five stars will give a midground of three stars which in a percentage score will be 60%. Out of ten 5 will be a midground (though of course 5 seems like an insult, and is too low for an average movie say, because an average movie should be professional and good enough to be enjoyed).

But the sheer weight of reviewing takes its toll. Along with the experience differential – you cannot write a review of a narrative movie in a screening theatre, wheras it is quite easy to write a review of the new U2 album while you are listening to it (and indeed do enough prep that you have your thesaurus open on the “rubbish” page).

http://www.hitsville.org/2009/03/06/what-hath-popism-wrought-ii/

a genuine popism — a critical movement that argued that everything was good and you were culturally deprived if you hadn’t heard EVERYTHING — would be a weird and a radicalising movement i think: not least because it would generate an anger that this deprivation was enforced (by pricing; by the fact that we have to work some hours of the week; or sleep; or etc)

I seem to recall a recent letter in one of the music mags pointing out how Oasis had got a 5 star review for their album early in the year and then failed to make the top 50 albums at year’s end.

…any road, more of the pop soon please

I seriously wouldn’t underestimate how sophisticated — if makeshift — the audience’s understanding of a given publication’s music reviewing system is, though. This is different than in film criticism, where when there is a score, it’s almost always somewhere in the “thumbs up” “thumbs down” spectrum, e.g. in a list of capsule reviews for films in a given major paper, a few of them might have a special star next to them to note “go see this,” or the difference between a 2 (bad) 3 (good) and 4 (great) star review.

Good discussion covering this same ground via Mike Barthel (I THOUGHT I’d remembered this conversation coming round before!)

Another possibility of course is that it’s a lot easier to make a quite enjoyable 6-out-of-10 record than a quite enjoyable 6-out-of-10 film. Maybe music is just better! ;)