RandomFailure

Former UCLA basketball player (and current Philadelphia 76er) Matt Barnes was quoted in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer in a sidebar piece about the Duke-UCLA 2001 East Regional Final. (Sorry, there’s no link to this sidebar.) He said, “It was exciting just getting a chance to be in the tournament, and then playing Duke and getting cheated by the referees. Duke got all the calls in the game.”

Un. Fucking. Believable. You can’t let it go five years later? And you believe this crap? Let’s take a look at the box score from that game. Duke won 76-63. Yes, there was not an equal number of fouls called on both teams (UCLA whistled for 24 fouls, Duke 16). UCLA was 12-18 from the line, Duke was 24-30. Maybe you’re bitter because you fouled out of that game. Maybe you should be more upset that your team only shot 38% from the field and committed 23 turnovers. But you’re not.

Why don’t you complain about the NBA referees now? Oh, wait. That’s right, you can’t without getting fined. But then, how would you know about foul disparity in the NBA since you spend most of the game on the bench? I imagine I would be pretty upset too, if I only averaged 4 points and 3 rebounds for my career. Here are your statistics in case you forgot.

Idiot.

Or Crash-lash, or Brokeback-lash. Your choice.

I thought I would have heard the plaintive wails coming from my neighbors here in the Gaybourhood. Instead, I find it online. See the article from the London Free Press and from Roger Ebert.

It’s rather amazing to see that some people are saying that they’ll give up going to movies because a movie they liked didn’t win a freakin’ award. Will someone please explain to me how that diminishes their enjoyment of the movie?

“Oh, it didn’t win an award. So all those critics, etc. must be wrong. It probably sucks.” (I haven’t been to see a movie in months, and have not seen any of the nominated films. Nor is that ever my criteria for doing so. See why below.)

Umm, I hate to be the one to break this to you, but if you think that way, then you’ll never see a movie, since there’s always at least one critic who doesn’t like something (that’s why they’re called “critics”). Which is why I will skim maybe one movie review a month. I used to write movie reviews in law school for the student newspaper, since I would see about a movie a week. But I purposely kept the reviews to a paragraph and limited to stating whether I liked the movie and why (or why not). My thinking then (and it remains so today) is that if you think that a movie sounds or looks interesting enough for you to see, then you’ll go see it no matter what anyone else says.

For instance, my all time favorite movie is Raiders of the Lost Ark. See the IMDB entry and the official Web site. I’ve seen it over 225 times. At least that’s when I gave up counting. There was a point where I could recite every line of dialogue for every character; that’s how much I enjoy the movie. But other people don’t like it. And I don’t care.

The truest test for the quality of a movie is word of mouth, not word of critics. If you’re interested in this, look at the drop-off in box office revenue for a movie between the first and second weeks of release and then again between the second and third weeks of release. If the percentage is high, that generally means that the movie doesn’t have much staying power and that the people who really wanted to see it already did, and they told their friends that they didn’t like it. People are far more likely to trust their friends’ opinions than they are the opinions of some critic whom they’ve never met.