Tuesday, September 21, 2010

One Photo Reviews: Reducing movie criticism to a single snapshot

For people who think star ratings are too complicated for movie reviews, here’s a website that reduces film criticism to just one photo of the reviewer’s face.
Movie fan Scott has created a website on Tumblr called One Photo Reviews.
“I give thorough reviews of the movies I see. And by thorough review I mean one photo of me,” he writes.
I like the idea of his website more than the execution. For a lot of his “reviews” I can’t tell from his facial expression alone whether he liked the movie or not. But maybe that’s the point, because so many films are just OK and merit a blasé response.
Judging from his one-photo reviews, you can tell that Scott hates chick flicks (“Eat Pray Love,” “Sex and the City 2” and “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse”) and likes guy flicks (“The Virginity Hit,” “The Expendables” and “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World”).
One Photo Reviews is more evidence for the end of movie criticism. We’ve gone from thoughtful film critiques to star ratings and letter grades and thumbs up-thumbs down summaries. And the web has brought us Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, which aggregate reviews into numerical ratings. Then there’s the real-time input of Twitter, which limits posts to 140 characters. And now One Photo Reviews.

Photos: Scott’s reviews of “The Virginity Hit” (top) and “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse” (bottom).

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