Her (2013) - is it not boring?

[ShogunRua]

If "boring" is not "legitimate" criticism, then neither is any other adjective, because guess what? Every adjective means different things to different people. For that matter, what is "legitimate", anyways? Another meaningless term?

I wonder if during the course of that 50 page grand debate on Rumplesink's forum, anyone realized that it's fundamentally impossible to use objective concepts to rate a subjective medium, like a film.

And yes, Her is frequently boring. The "reason" is likely because I have seen many similarly shallow, content-light romance movies before it.

[Stewball]

And yes, Her is frequently boring. The "reason" is likely because I have seen many similarly shallow, content-light romance movies before it.

Is that legitimate or illegitimate criticism? First you say that criticism is subjective, then make a declarative statement that it "is" boring. And there's more content in Her than in ten normal movies. But we've been here before.

[ShogunRua]

And yes, Her is frequently boring. The "reason" is likely because I have seen many similarly shallow, content-light romance movies before it.

Is that legitimate or illegitimate criticism? First you say that criticism is subjective, then make a declarative statement that it "is" boring. And there's more content in Her than in ten normal movies. But we've been here before.

Stewie, don't turn into Suture Self. Writing "I believe" before any and all statements on a film is an absurd waste of time.

[Stewball]

There's hundreds of ways to qualify things, many of them simple, but when you say something "is", that leaves no room for opinion.

[thehynes]

I think 'boring' is a reasonable description to use for a film if you are indeed bored by it. If you follow it up with why you were bored by it all the better but I know I've probably rated a fair few films on here that I was so bored by I couldn't be bothered offering up any explanation whatsoever.
As for the film Her - nope, I wasn't bored by it. I found it an extremely thought provoking film on love,the future,technology,humanity and lots of other stuff along the way (well, that's what I wrote after I saw it 13 months ago and I trust my 2014 self implicitly - even if that was in the time before I joined a hive mind and reached a higher state of consciousness).

[ShogunRua]

There's hundreds of ways to qualify things, many of them simple, but when you say something "is", that leaves no room for opinion.

It's official; Stewie considers "is" a dirty word that has no place in reviewing movies.

[VinegarBob]

Every adjective means different things to different people.

Well no. Otherwise we wouldn't have dictionaries. Adjectives obviously have a meaning assigned to each one, although some are relative terms. But relative isn't the same as subjective. Take the words 'cold' and 'delicious'. One is a factual albeit relative term, the other is purely subjective, but they're both adjectives.

If I say ice-cream is 'cold' then that's a statement of fact. It wouldn't be considered that cold when compared to, say liquid nitrogen, but using the word 'cold' gives the listener some solid information about the properties of ice-cream, whereas saying it's 'delicious' doesn't because 'delicious' doesn't tell the listener anything about the properties of ice-cream - it's purely a subjective opinion about one's personal preferences, and is therefore a pretty redundant adjective to use to describe an ice-cream for the purposes of imparting some sort of useful information to another person.

Saying a 4 hour film is 'long' is stating a fact. Saying that same film is 'boring' is stating an opinion. The former says something about the film, while the latter only says something about the reviewer.

I don't think the problem is that the medium of film is too subjective to criticise in a meaningful way (that's another debate entirely, and you may well think that it is) - it's that the word 'boring' is too subjective an adjective to be worth using as a criticism of film (that was the intention of the word 'legitimate' in the forum thread).

Having said all that, if you believe that film criticism is 100% subjective and that every opinion is equally valid then 'boring' may be a useful term, but only if the reviewer and their personal taste in films is known to you, in which case you can kind of measure the probability of agreeing with said reviewer's opinion on a film given their past opinions on other films. This is how Criticker works. But if the only valid form of film criticism is checking your 'alignment of enjoyment' with other people whose tastes are known to you then why not just give everything a score with no explanation? It seems obvious to me that it's much more complex than that, and while Criticker's good at what it does there's a whole world of film criticism out there that doesn't operate that way.

TL;DR
If I say a film is 'boring' I'm going to have to explain what I mean by 'boring' and why it bored me. If I have to do all that anyway then the word is redundant, and if I only say the film is boring with no other explanation then it's useless.

This topic is interesting.

[Stewball]

It's official; Stewie considers "is" a dirty word that has no place in reviewing movies.

Out of altitude and ideas all at once is we? As often happens in such cases, sarcasm is hurriedly crammed into the gaping crater.

[mattorama12]

TL;DR
If I say a film is 'boring' I'm going to have to explain what I mean by 'boring' and why it bored me. If I have to do all that anyway then the word is redundant, and if I only say the film is boring with no other explanation then it's useless.

I get the point you're making, but I think if a review says the film was "boring" and nothing else, that gives me some information on the film itself. Implicit in that is that the pacing was slow, there wasn't tension carrying you from scene to scene, etc. Would a review be better for stating that rather than just saying boring? Sure, but that doesn't mean that saying a movie is boring is useless.

[TheSaberfool]

TL;DR
If I say a film is 'boring' I'm going to have to explain what I mean by 'boring' and why it bored me. If I have to do all that anyway then the word is redundant, and if I only say the film is boring with no other explanation then it's useless.

I get the point you're making, but I think if a review says the film was "boring" and nothing else, that gives me some information on the film itself. Implicit in that is that the pacing was slow, there wasn't tension carrying you from scene to scene, etc. Would a review be better for stating that rather than just saying boring? Sure, but that doesn't mean that saying a movie is boring is useless.

Person A finds Once Upon A Time in the West "boring" due to its pacing. Person B finds Transformers "boring" due to its lack of meaningful story or characters rendering the action mind-numbing and pointless.

Unless you know the person using the term and have a good sense of their likes and dislikes, "boring" tells you nothing about a film other than the viewer's reaction towards it. Useless without sufficient context or elaboration.