We at Wonderful Cinema love good movies. But we have three major issues when it comes to seeking out new material:
- Skewed ratings
- Spoilers
- Marketing tactics
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Skewed Ratings
We love sites such as IMDb. It is amazing how much information can be gathered in one place. Are almost all the films ever commercially released mentioned on that site? Incredibly, yes, they probably are.
And therein lies a problem. Time after time, we see good or outstanding films receiving very average ratings on such sites. This is understandable: it is the general public who are voting, so an average vote is what we get.
Now, without sounding too pompous, we think it is safe to say that the general consensus on matters of cinematic taste often do not run parallel to our own. The average audience likes to be entertained without too much effort; they don’t want subtitles; they don’t want long slow scenes; they don’t want black and white; and they certainly don’t want endings with lots of loose ends which leave them scratching their heads.
So, for us at least, such sites are not always great for finding good films to watch. We will too readily discount films for having a lower rating and miss out.
We hear you scream, “Well, why not read the synopsis and user reviews for a film, then, and make up your own minds?”
And therein lies our second problem…
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Spoilers
We at WonderfulCinema.com are an odd bunch when it comes to avoiding plot spoilers. We try our utmost to avoid reviews, we never read the backs of DVDs, we close our eyes and stick our fingers in our ears when the previews come on in the cinema. When a friend mentions a great film they’ve seen, we start shouting LALALALALAAAA! as soon as we’ve heard the title to drown the spillage of details which is bound to follow.
So how on Earth do we find out about good films to watch? It’s very simple: mostly by blindly watching a lot of bad movies and by word of mouth. To be fair, there’s also a certain buzz which manifests itself when a new gem enters the market. And there are other buzzes too – such as the Oscars or Cannes – which rarely get things terribly wrong. When there is a buzz, you often hear nothing more than the title of the film being whispered again and again. Black Swan! Black Swan! Black Swan! You know what we mean.
Hence the creation of this website. Word of mouth. We want to share with you all the goodies we’ve found. But we also want you to share with us all the goodies you’ve found so that we can expand our experiences and write about them here.
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Marketing Tactics
The third major issue we encounter when seeking out new movies is the ridiculous categorisations and pigeon-holing used by marketing teams and the negative effect this has on our expectations.
If a film is a comedy, they’ll slap Outrageous! Raucous! on the front of the DVD case. If it is a serial killer flick, Up there with Se7en! will be emboldened on the film poster. If it’s cross-genre, you will have statements like A cross between Dirty Harry, When Harry Met Sally and Debbie Does Dallas! Okay, that last statement was just a daft joke.
Pigeon-holing is understandable, given that the general public’s average tastes do fit into major categories. But such categorisations can poison our expectations and ruin the subtleties or deviations original filmmakers try to achieve.
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Our goal here at Wonderful Cinema is to share with you tips for the best films, both past and present, that we have seen and enjoyed. If we watch a film and think it mediocre, we won’t be posting it here. In a nutshell, we want to share our favourite celluloid discoveries with whomever is interested.
The hope is that our visitors will share our goals – if not always our opinions – and will provide their own recommendations through the feedback menu option on this site. It is inevitable that many visitors – probably the majority – will not share our tastes and this website will not be for them. Neither will we agree with all the recommendations put forward to us. But we hope that over time a core group of people will form with whom we can share our love for and understanding of wonderful films.
Regardless of tastes or opinions, everyone is welcome to Wonderful Cinema. It would indeed be pompous to assume that one’s taste is better than another’s. They are simply different. What we hope to achieve is a coming together of people with similar tastes.
Thank you for visiting! We really hope you like the site.
Shimky
