Get Smart

Ebert gave Get Smart a great review (3.5 stars). But if you go to Metacritic, it's really getting average reviews (53). Mal Vincent at The Virginian Plot was the first negative review I'd read, and then I went to check out metacritic and saw that Ebert was the outlier, or at least the upperbound. So FYI. I still want to see it, though.

Which brings me to my excellent metric for determining ex ante whether I want to see a movie I'd never heard of. If I'm at Blockbuster, walking around, and a movie catches my eye, I look for the reviews. Of course, 99% of the time, it's got rave reviews. So I simply look for who wrote the reviews. If it's Jeff Craig from 60 Second Preview, and that's featured front and center, you know it's going to be the worst movie you've ever seen. I mean, you know it. Ebert once asked, “Has anyone ever actually seen Jeff Craig of ‘Sixty Second Previews’ at a movie? For that matter, does anyone know what ‘Sixty Second Previews’ is? I ask in all sincerity.” NPR tried to find him once, too. So if you see this guy, run.

Which gets to my metric. If a company has a bunch of reviewers, and they choose to pick obscure critics, then it's obviously horrible. Another metric is if they pick known film critics, but only post things like "Nicholas Cage does some of the best acting he's done in years" or something like that. That the best they can say is that the actor is doing a good job, and not that the movie is a good story, is another clear sign that it's a bad movie. (Okay, gotta run. There's a bug in the house and kids are freaking out).