I think that I will do Netflix for one more month before I stop. One of the neat things about Netflix is they let users review movies, like Amazon does with products it sells. Reading several reviews by normal people you can get a pretty good idea of whether you will like the movie or not. Based on those reviews, I checked out Secondhand Lions, which I thought was actually pretty dismal. So it doesn’t always work out. Because it had gotten such amazingly positive reviews, I thought I needed to write a review and warn people like me away from it. When I went to post a review, I found a link to see or edit reviews I had written previously, including the ones from three years ago. While I have a ton of reviews on my website, I have only written 3 reviews on Netflix and I had to laugh when I read another review of discontent from three years ago for Farewell My Concubine which I gave 2 stars out of 5 (I like the simple Netflix system: 1 star if you hated it, 2 if you didn’t like it, 3 if you did like it, 4 if you really liked it, and 5 if you loved it):
“This might be a well-made movie. I wouldn’t know since I didn’t make it all the way through. It appeared to be a movie about beating and otherwise mistreating orphans before the Gang of 4 comes in and does worse. I didn’t realize that it was primarily about orphan boys learning Chinese opera, in particular an opera called “Farewell My Concubine”. From the title and the description you might be looking for some seductive movie about a love triangle. I was expecting something on the order of The Last Emperor. This isn’t like that and I didn’t care for it, but I could see how the patient or those interested in Chinese opera before Mao with a high tolerance for violence against children could really enjoy it.”
It tells me that 14 people found my review useful. Fortunately it doesn’t say how many did not.
I think the problem for you is that you consider the majority of people writing reviews to be “normal”. People like me (normal) do not write reviews.
I will however suggest that you check out The World’s Fastest Indian before you drop Netflix.
You should stop being mean to your little brother.
I don’t think Ted has a problem since he is earning hundreds of dollars per year thanks to people looking for the many things he reviews (movies, batteries, iPods, remotes.)
Reviews are normal, since we all give each other advice all of the time. Ted is just capitalizing on sharing through the internet and getting paid along the way.
The movie reviews earn no money for two reasons: I don’t have ads on those pages, and nobody visits them. Movie reviews are just way too widely available on the internet for people to be pointed to my site (unless I misspell names). But writing the reviews is a way to eek out a little additional enjoyment from the movie for me and help me remember it.
I didn’t take Carol to mean that I wasn’t normal because I write reviews, but that the normal people I claimed were writing reviews on Netflix weren’t normal at all since normal people don’t write reviews. What I meant was that they weren’t critics. Critics watch too many movies and know too much about them to evaluate them in the same way as non-critics. I watched Invincible this past weekend and enjoyed it. But I never saw The Rookie, which was the same story but with baseball.
Speaking of Netflix, both Carol and Mom have joined.
I was reading through some reviews tonight and had to revisit this movie which a large number of people just absolutely love. But I did find a similar review to mine that made me laugh. Netflix gives a similarity score and this person only was 57% similar to me whereas some people are in the upper 70’s. Also, above I say that Netflix doesn’t say how many people did not find reviews useful, but now they do, kind of, since they say 14 out of 41 people thought my review was useful.
“If you like extreme child abuse and perversion, self flagulation, torture, unrequited love between a gay man and a straight man, suicide and betrayal, all wrapped in a history of revolution with a background of “opera” that sounds like pots and pans banging and cats wailing falseto…..well, my friend, this is the movie for you.”