Note what's wrong, appreciate what's good

Image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Love_vs._Hate.jpg

Note what's wrong, appreciate what's good (CW: some strong language)

by Jen Davies, nerd

July 15, 2026

In an era when people earn an income on social media via watches and click-throughs (and ads), I find myself being choosy about what content I engage with because there are lots of such people who aren't interested in truth. They don't feel the need to fairly represent whatever thing they're talking about. Their headlines are typically  clickbait (surprising or controversial) because all they want is to get paid by having you look at their content.

And I can tell from the trends in the bylines for all that click-so-I-get-paid content that negative things get more clicks: shitposting, criticism, and tearing down must get views, even though I myself choose not to engage with it. It actually isn't hard to write that stuff either, I don't think, just put your blinders on and get mad, so I resent how low-effort it is to present these one-sided "everything sucks" posts for which I see bylines.

Opinions are like assholes, everyone has one. But so many people trying to make a living on the Internet don't bother to provide a complete and supported opinion. It's just "I think it should be this way, so anything that doesn't align with my vision is bad" without explaining on what basis they have developed their vision. Are they well-read? Are they also movie makers or writers or otherwise involved in the kind of production they are criticizing? Or is it just because they happen to like X and not Y, and can't really say why?

I don't mind a movie or book review that critiques something I happen to like. Constructive criticism is how we can improve our crafts and fine-tune our taste in things, after all. But that also requires looking for what was good or effective or interesting in a work. It's rare that something is all bad.

Example #1: Dune (1984)

If you haven't seen it, it's a treat (love it or hate). It's wild. You can get a sense for what's good and bad about it via Rotten Tomatoes where it has a 36% fresh rating.

The criticisms you will read on Rotten Tomatoes are entirely accurate: The special effects were poor (except maybe the spice harvesters, I'd argue - thank goodness for Kit West). Some sets were lovely, while other settings used such bad painted backgrounds it's laughable; for instance, if you know the movie, the scene where Paul rides a sandworm for the first time has a line of Fremen in the background who are so painfully clearly just painted background... if you're looking there (and I never really was, actually!). And it's pretty hard to care about any of the characters in spite of some really strong performances in the David Lynch style. And there's the key: it's a David Lynch movie. Think Eraserhead. Mulholland Drive. Blue Velvet. Weird shit. If you like surrealism, it's utterly fantastic, and I would argue that there is only a handful of actors who could have surpassed Kenneth McMillan's Baron Harkonnen (which was surprising since most of us probably know him for the Police Academy movies!). 

But I love it. I love the grand scale of Dune. I love surrealism. I love that they had Frank Herbert available to check pronunciation on the names and language in the universe (because I'm a big fan of the book first). I love that David attempted to film an "unfilmable" story - it takes a lot of courage. I heard  him say in an interview that he knew the film was "in trouble" when he learned he wasn't going to get the final cut, but he bravely went ahead and did the best he could anyway, knowing that a studio editor would go in and mess up his vision in the end.

Example #2: Brazil (1985)

You can also get a sense for what's good and bad about Brazil, by Terry Gilliam, via Rotten Tomatoes which gives it a 98% fresh rating. It's a really interesting film and I encourage you to see if it you never have - but I won't watch it again. I saw it around the same age I saw Dune, I think (early adolescence), and nothing about it captured my imagination. I hadn't yet worked in a mindless bureaucracy so maybe I'd think differently now, but... meh. 

Maybe the difference with this one is that it's a comedy, so it gets forgiven the same issues for the laughs that Dune doesn't have? Because Dune is also a dystopian universe, but there's nothing funny about it - Muad'Dib is about to bring the whole thing crashing down! (Maybe that's the problem, the dystopia isn't personalized the way that Brazil's dystopia is personal.) 

Brazil's special effects are also not great, neither are the sets, and yet critics don't comment much on it. Maybe we care a little bit about Jonathan Pryce's character, Sam, because we can also imagine ourselves daydreaming the day away if we lived in the sad, gray society that he lives in, whereas we don't care much about what happens to most of Dune's people. (If you can find the extended edition of Dune there's some pathos for Thufir Hawat, his death scene was actually filmed and got edited out for some reason - Lynch did not get final edit rights, so blame whoever did the editing.) There's lots that we could harp on that's not good in Brazil, but we forgive it those issues for other reasons than the filmmaking technicalities.

Dune and Brazil are both arguably surrealist (though Gilliam also aims to be funny). And yet somehow they're not being measured on the same yardsticks, because Dune is widely disliked, while Brazil is in a lot of people's 'soft spots'. 

Am I bothered that so many people see these two films so differently from the way I do? Not at all.

This is just an illustration on why I rarely read reviews, especially not reviews with highly opinionated bylines / clickbait titles, and try to make up my down darn mind about what art I will probably want to consume, and what not. It's way too easy to hate on something, rather than find the good things in it.