What is Malchats' Reel Reviews?
Malchats' Reel Reviews (or MRR) is a database of short, to-the-point reviews of hundreds of movies, mostly titles that are available on disc or download or streaming. Once in a blue moon I get out to the theater to see first run releases, but for the most part these are films that are available to watch on your TV or computer or other device.MRR is a spin-off of a personal blog I maintained for a couple of decades. Yes, that's right: decades. (Alas, the blog is now defunct.) As you might guess, that blog contained any number of posts about various and sundry events in my life, as well as commentary pieces on subjects covering a broad spectrum of modern culture. (One of my many hats is as a freelance writer.) It also featured movie reviews: summary reviews of (almost) every movie I've seen in the last couple of decades. In fact, at a certain point the movie reviews started to dominate the postings, to the point where they had begun to take over the site.
Eventually, it dawned on me: why not give the movie reviews their own site so that the blog's other materials can have room to breathe? After all, the reviews are very much their own thing, an assemblage of critical opinion on a big collection of movies both recent and classic--the sort of thing that was not just useful information for myself, but also something that others might be interested in.
So I created a new site and shifted the whole set of reviews over here, and thus Malchats' Reel Reviews was born.
What do the reviews PURR!, MEOW, and HISS! mean?
Explanations for the site's three-part review system can be found on the Ratings page.Why should anyone bother with MRR when there are sites like IMDB and Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes?
Good question. I hope this is a good answer:Those are all fine movie review sites, to be sure...except...when I look at those sites, I'm not really sure I trust what I'm seeing there.
They're all set up as fairly big business kinds of things, sites that are in it to be money-making enterprises, or so they seem (can't say I've looked at their books anytime recently). And that means they have bottom-line considerations, the kinds of things that can make a business, and the people who run it, make compromises--the sorts of compromises that might lead them to give approval to a movie that maybe doesn't quite deserve that level of approval, in order to keep from pissing off the movie studios, producers, stars, etc. Those are, after all, partners with those sites in a de facto sense. If that relationship goes really sour, you can bet actions would be taken on either side to ensure that either things are set right (posting even better reviews than are deserved) or completely broken (unfairly negative reviews, or from the other side, lack of cooperation and access). Either way, you, the movie-watching reader, will not necessarily be getting honest opinions about the movies listed there.
No such problem here at MRR. While I'd like to monetize this thing (I'll update this section if I ever do), as of right now, this site is ad-free (by my actions, at least; my host may act otherwise), independent, and strictly a one-person, ad hoc, and ultimately very personal show.
That's also something that factors into the reviews. The other review sites tend to aggregate reviews to get their posted scores. That's all well and good for getting a general sense of a movie--but when you aggregate reviews like that, everything will ultimately tend towards settling into the middle of the crowd. As with a "bell curve" data plot, the majority will tend to neither love nor hate a movie, but fall somewhere in the middle.
A good movie may get a 75 out of 100 on Rotten Tomatoes (just for example; not picking on that site in particular), which indicates that it's good but not great...And yet, maybe it is great. Maybe it's just that that score is artificially pulled down by the few reviewers who, for some weird reason, didn't like it at all. That's the problematic nature of aggregating viewpoints, of trying to rely on the wisdom of crowds: a few oddballs can change the sense of the thing fairly dramatically.
It should also be noted that many movie-related sites--Letterboxd comes to mind--allow any of their users to post reviews. And, of course, many of those users are idiots.
So what you should really want when you want to know what someone thinks about a certain movie is not that kind of hive-mind (and often mindless) experience. You want a specific, personal perspective; you want identifiable individuality in your movie reviews; you want to hear from a reviewer whose intelligence you trust and whose sensibility matches (at least somewhat) your own.
Am I that reviewer? I'm sure I can be for some; others may find themselves not agreeing with me at all. The only way to find out is to check out some reviews and see if they jibe with your experience of the movie in question. If they do, perhaps these pages can be of service to you. If not, vaya con dios, and I hope you find the movie review site that serves you best.
Some of your reviews seem really short. I mean, REALLY short. What's up with that?
In the early days of the Reel Reviews, film critiques were often just one line assessments without much in the way of actual, deep-dive criticism. That was the point, at first. I wanted to keep everything short and sweet.However, eventually I came to realize that a one-liner about a movie was not going to be particularly helpful to the average reader. So I started to say a bit more about each film, until the reviews got a little longer and deeper. Today's MRR reviews remain fairly short, but now they contain enough insight that a reader should be able to get a pretty good idea of what I really think about a movie. The reviews may be a bit too long for Twitter, but I'm fine with that. (For the most part, I despise Twitter, so no big loss.)
As I have gone through old posts and formatted them for the updated version of this blog, I've expanded on some of the oldest and thinnest reviews--but not that much. I prefer keeping the reviews as honest and authentic as possible, and sometimes that means just leaving a one-liner intact. So it goes.
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