This Movie Sucks!

I like to think of myself as something of a storyteller. I enjoy reading. I enjoy writing. I enjoy watching movies. To put it quite simply, stories are something of my world.

Which of course means that I am always looking for new stories to read/see/watch. I tend to look for both "good" and "bad" stories to take in. You can learn a great deal, perhaps more so from a bad story as you can from a good story. Effectively, this has made me something of an amateur critic or reviewer.

To those that review things, you probably may realize that it is virtually impossible to be completely unbiased in a review. outside factors and prejudices will always affect how we perceive the stories we take in. However, it is important to try and remember never, if you can avoid it, to read someone else's review before taking in a story; because if you do, your review is very likely going to wind up compromised by a self fulfilling prophecy.

The thing is, when one reads an in depth, or even just a fairly short review of any movie or book before you watch/read one yourself, your perceptions have already been colored before you get into the story. If you read a full review of a movie that claims that there are numerous plotholes or inappropriate or misplaced elements or character issues in a movie, you will actively try to look for them. When you sit down in that movie theater and watch that movie then you will be already expecting the movie to suffer from a ton of problems, and even if the review you read totally over-analyzed or took its words too far, you will actively seek out the issues in the movie. It doesn't matter if the movie is great or not. In fact, to use Back to the Future as an example... a great movie and perhaps my favorite movie... there was a review on cracked.com that panned it after over-analyzing it to the point of ridiculousness and considered it a creepy, all around depraved movie. Odd certainly. But what was weird was the number of people in the comments who said they rewatched it and said "OMG ur right!" After actively looking for the issues they pointed out in the review, thanks to belief perseverence, they found what were really minor if even existent issues and their perceptions were majorly colored.

The same holds true for the opposite. If you read a book that got a glowing review, no matter how many problems the book may suffer from, you will likely be blinded to them because you're actively looking at the good aspects of the story. This just goes to show how affected we are by our prejudices and our peers influence.

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References:

Rosenthal, R. & Jacobson, L. (1968). Pygmalion in the classroom: teacher expectation and pupils' intellectual  development. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.