My god, it’s full of nuance!

Time to Digest

M.G. Siegler
500ish
Published in
3 min readDec 27, 2016

In my 35 years on this planet, I’ve noticed something about myself. Immediately after seeing a movie, I usually like it. Now, if a movie is total crap, that’s pretty easy to call out as such upon completion (though I still watch such movies all the way through). But I also rarely go out of my way to see movies I believe will be total crap. So most movies I see fall in the great/good/mediocre range.

Having worked in Hollywood for a time, I know what an involved process it is to get anything to the screen. It’s an insanely laborious (and, one might argue, highly inefficient) job across the board, involving hundreds or thousands of people doing what they believe to be their best work at a micro level. So I find it hard to poo-poo anything immediately after seeing it.

On one hand, this sucks because I’m awful at the “what did you think?” question friends ask right after a showing. Given that I’m well aware of my predisposition, and rather than give the bland “I thought it was pretty good” (or the ridiculous: “I thought it was pretty impressive they were able to get a finished product to the screen”), I tend to go with the give-the-answer-most-likely-to-be-the-consensus-view statement. “Really liked that one scene — what did you think?” That type of thing.

On the other hand, I do think I’m pretty good at sitting back and coming up with some nuanced thoughts on a movie several days after I’ve seen it. I find that if a film lingers in my head over that span, it’s a good indicator of it being a good — or at least interesting — movie.

I also often find myself rethinking my initial assessment of a film. Many films that I initially think are “great” immediately after I finish watching them, I often downgrade in my head days later. Whereas with many actually “great” films (subjective, of course), I feel the need to think more about them before definitively declaring them “great.”

This is why I think I’d be a pretty poor film reviewer — despite it being a secret dream side-job. If I were forced to write about a movie immediately after seeing it, to make sure I got my thoughts out before the opening weekend, I think my reviews would play to the extremes. Everything would either be the best film ever, or total crap. Give me a week, and you’ll get nuance. But given the weekly, forward-charging cadence of Hollywood, we’d also be on to the next week’s releases by then.

I know some critics see films multiple times before reviewing. But in general, I find the “hot take” notion of film (or television, or music, etc) reviewing a little odd.¹ But perhaps that’s just me. I need more time.

¹ And it’s undoubtedly part of the explanation for how you get negative reviews of films like Citizen Kane, The Godfather Part II, Casablanca, 2001, Chinatown, and other now-indisputable classics. And how you get good reviews of films like The Phantom Menace

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Published in 500ish

A collection of posts by M.G. Siegler of around 500 words in length.

Written by M.G. Siegler

Writer turned investor turned investor who writes. Now writing at: https://spyglass.org

Responses (3)

What are your thoughts?

Agreed that’s it’s quite hard to trash anything you know has taken a ton of time, effort, luck, and coordination. Am curious as to which aspect of Hollywood you worked in!

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If there can be a hot take and a cold take, can there be a heating take? Films are in part designed to invoke the “nuanced thought” part that arises in the middle of the film, so why can’t we also base a film’s merit on that delicate ability? In the…...

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