hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2527.txt

Episode: 2527
Title: HPR2527: Reviews Vs. Critiques
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2527/hpr2527.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 04:49:43

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This is HPR episode 2,527 entitled Reviews vs Critiques.
It is hosted by Lost in Drunks and is about 14 minutes long and can rim a clean flag.
The summary is Lost in Drunks contrast Reviews with Critiques, which are not the same things.
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Hello, this is Lost in Drunks and today I would like to talk about criticism,
regarding storytelling or stories that might include movies or television shows or books or audio dramas or almost anything.
I've found that people often conflate the idea of a review and a critique.
Both can be useful and one is probably more practical than the other.
But they're not the same things and it's an easy mistake to make and I think a lot of people make it.
The purpose of a review primarily is to rate a thing.
It's to look at a story, say it's a book and give a reader some idea whether or not purchasing this book or spending the time to read this book is actually worth it to them.
That's the function of a review and it works for movies and it works for television.
It's essentially encapsulated opinion is all it really amounts to.
But in theory, anyway, it's from a person that you respect their opinion, you respect.
Perhaps they hold a similar worldview to you or at least have similar taste and stories.
In reality, we tend to take reviews from people in media verbatim.
We read them and we just assume this person knows what they're talking about and that their opinion is even close to your own.
In order to get that sense across, very often a reviewer will have to write in such a generalized way that their opinion comes across.
And it's digestible to the point where you can get a sense of what their values are, what they like in a story and what they don't like and what they liked about this story or not.
They're not always that well written so you can't always tell really where the person's coming from.
The worst kind of these things are the kind where they're really just trying to be snarky and nasty and very often they'll make puns based on the title or the context of the movie.
That's about the worst and that's usually a tip off that someone who's opinion you don't need to respect because they don't respect the material.
They don't like the particular stories so they're going to make a joke out of it.
That's entertainment that's not really helpful.
So a review is really just all about that commitment and that trust value between the reviewer and the reader.
Whereas a critique is very different and critiques by nature are positive.
That's not to say that you only talk about the good things but the purpose of a critique is to understand what a thing is.
And if it's a finished product you can't make it better but the next product might be better by finding out maybe where they went wrong and where they went right in this particular story.
Now there's an awful lot of bleed over between reviews and critiques obviously and I would hazard to say that many reviewers don't really understand the difference either and they don't necessarily understand their role.
A critique doesn't have an awful lot of value in and of itself to a regular reader, a consumer of the product.
A critique is of the most value to a producer of content and the best critiques are from people who know you and your work as a producer of this content.
So a writer getting a critique from their editor or from a close associate or friend who is very familiar with the writer and the work that is a critique of value.
A critique from a scholar of the work someone who understands first off what a critique is secondly understands the work in a great deal of detail and can express themselves well that is also a critique of great value.
However a random opinion on the internet is not of much value even if it happens to be from someone who is very learned.
But without that context without understanding that relationship without understanding that this critique is meant for the producer of the content so that they can see what's working in their story and try to improve on it maybe if it's an early version of the story they can go back and work it or if it's a finished product they can work on the next one and try to avoid either some of these mistakes or to enhance some of the things that work.
Now the primary function of literary criticism film criticism and television criticism and things like this each one is a little bit different and in the approach has to be a little bit different accordingly but just for the sake of this conversation I'm going to kind of lump them into literary criticism just just for now the function of literary criticism is to understand the literature understand the movie understand the TV show whatever the audio drama.
It's to understand it and to understand how it came into being the way it did and sometimes it takes understanding of outside pressures that caused this thing to exist therefore a lot of literary critics especially ones that focus on novels and short stories fiction written fiction many of them are also scholars of particular genres or styles of literature or eras.
Or very often they're specialists in a particular author and why would they need to be why is that important well it's important to understand the context of where this story came from right now when I come to literature you are generally speaking about one author or a small group of people involved in the production of this story when you're talking about a film it becomes much more complex and much harder to qualify what went wrong or right in a story so as a general.
Shorthand very often people will point to a director or a screenplay writer or producer or it's sometimes even an actor and say there to be praised or there to be blamed or there of note regarding this particular film television is just as complex and for the same reasons.
The problem is, of course, that so many hands are in this pie, that it's really difficult
to say that this is the vision of one person, at least based on a single film or a single
production.
When you begin to look at an entire body of work, then it becomes a little bit easier.
Because you start to see the trends that re-occur throughout the film.
So that's why we can do literary criticism of, say, Hitchcock films.
And we can say that Hitchcock did this, and Hitchcock did that, as opposed to the producer
on this particular film did this, or the writer of that particular film did that.
You can still do those things, especially if you delve into the history, if you can find
it, of the production.
However, because you can begin to see the trends in all of Hitchcock's work, you can begin
to see the same thing being repeated over and over.
And then you know it really is him, because it's the only common thread.
So without that larger context, that understanding, say, when we were talking about a novel, that
say, the editor, that understanding that the editor would have of the writer, without
that larger understanding, it's very difficult to point to a particular thing and say,
that's this person at work.
That's important in order to understand the story itself, and the type of tale that's
being told, and how it was told, how the final product turned out.
That is what criticism is all about.
We are looking at the thing, and we're trying to understand what worked, what didn't.
Why is this story important?
Is this story matter in the scheme of things?
Is it purely derivative?
Is it purely direct?
Was it only created in order to make money, or is there artistic merit to it?
Now granted, much of what I'm talking about is subjective.
But that being said, the more you study this sort of content, the more you understand
this sort of thing, the more you begin to see what works and what doesn't consistently.
Content storytelling and quality over the course of a career.
These things only come about through understanding, right?
And a producer of stories, writer, director, a screenplay writer, a producer, a showrunner
for television, these people, they understand when they're doing their job right, they
understand what they're trying to achieve.
Above and beyond, I want to be a movie maker, I want to write a book, I want to be a
novelist, above and beyond that, they're trying to tell a story.
If they're doing their job right, they understand what it takes to tell that story well.
Again, now a writer in the end, a writer of novels and short stories, the onus is primarily
on them.
If a thing works or doesn't work, you can almost always just point to them directly
without really consulting anything else.
Because they're generally at that stage of things, they're the only people involved.
It's important to understand not just that person and what they were after.
But again, since we're often talking about genre, to understand what are the expectations
of this genre?
Did you meet those expectations?
Did you exceed them?
Did you turn those expectations on their heads and deliver us something completely new that
we haven't seen before?
Or did you at least try and fail?
Did you not try?
Sorry about the noise, I'm sitting in the car and it's hailing out right now.
All of these things need to go into a critique.
Now a critique doesn't have to be formalized.
It doesn't have to be anything that you write down and that you need this long scholarly
background to understand.
I don't have a scholarly background myself.
When you're looking at a story, a movie, we'll say a movie this time.
When you're looking at a movie, much of this can be internalized by simply asking yourself,
what were they after?
If all they're after is to make a buck that's often very obvious.
But if they're after something else, when you simply ask that question, now you can begin
to see the nuances of the story.
It's important to look beyond the face of the story, right?
So in the case of a novel, it's important to look beyond the cover.
It's important to look beyond the typeface of the book.
It's important to look at the tale and not the trappings.
In a film, very often, it's important to look at the story, not the actors.
The actors are puppets, essentially.
That's a thing we need to understand.
Or I should say puppets are actors, just like actors are actors, right?
But they all do the exact same thing.
Actors, although there are exceptions and there are films where things were all ad-libbed
and they came up with their own lines.
Or there's sequences and stories where things were ad-libbed.
By and large, actors are acting out someone else's tale.
They are puppets.
And while they may be very good puppets and very, very good at evoking character and
bringing out the best in the line, in the end, it's not their story they're telling.
Someone else is telling the story, okay?
So when you're looking at a movie, it's important not to judge it by the actors, but to judge
it on its merits.
That is to say, what were they trying to do with this film?
And they could include the actors, but it doesn't necessarily.
In my opinion, the most important thing about criticism is in that question.
What were they after?
What were they trying to do?
And did they achieve it?
If they did, they did a great job, right?
That's a wonderful thing.
If they didn't, why didn't they?
What went wrong here?
And again, the purpose of the critique is to inform the production of these things.
However, if we read critique as opposed to review, we ourselves get better understandings
of these things.
So I believe that they both serve a function, reviews and critiques.
They're not the same things, and they shouldn't be considered the same things.
And probably it would be better that if we're looking to spend money, we're looking to have
a night on the town, we look at those reviews, and we judge them for what they are.
But if we want to understand a thing, after we say we go to that movie, and we see one
that we really like, maybe we'll read a critique on the film, or even write one, that focuses
on the tale that they were trying to tell.
Anyway, this was just some quick thoughts about critiques and reviews.
If you have any opinions about this particular episode, I encourage you to leave a comment
on Hacker Public Radio.
Or better yet, make your own episode talking about this or any other topic that you have
an interest in, because you do have opinions, and you do have interests, and we want to
hear about it.
This has been Lost in Bronx.
Thank you for listening.
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