Bragging about how cool I am...

Did you all know out there in the Blog O Speer that I, Casey the Speer, really am a critic?
My undergrad degree emphasized critical theory in movie mediums. I mainly studied horror, but the critical theory covered much of literature, classics and modern, as well as the horror. So when I say something is crap - you can take that to the bank, baby! Not really, the first thing they teach you is that everything is subjective to the audience's preconcieved mindset, so to combat that, there are 5 prongs that I like to use to judge a piece of written work (Yes, movies are written too. Otherwise how would Morgan Freeman know what to say in the voice over?): I have started thinking of them as toes - you need all of them to walk and run correctly, so for a work to stand on it's own it doesn't necessarily have to have all of the toes - but it better have the little toe, which, believe it or not, if you don't have, you're not standing on your own. In my case it is the combination of all of the other elements in a factor that I call "entertaining", which is a little subjective, but sometimes one of the other elements is so distracting it does not allow the viewer or reader to fully enjoy the point of the work. So;
1. Is the movie entertaining? that is the #1 job of any work. If it doesn't do it, why bother?
2. Is the story solid? does it fit in or does something seem out of place or unrealistic for the framing or setting? Wild Wild West does actually work in my opinion, always has.
3. Are the characters believable? Because any story is really about the characters and our reactions to them.
4. Is dialogue solid? Keanu Reeves massacres this in every movie since Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. "Whoa!, like, that was gnarly, dude" he says to Sandra Bullock on the bus in Speed.
5. Does the work move along set norms, or change and break through them successfully or not? Think of Silence of the Lambs with Jodie and Sir Anthony reversed with Jodie being the psycho. Would it work? These formulas for stories have been around since the days of Plato. There are very few that do break through the norms. Million Dollar Baby in my opinion, does, not just because of the girl boxer, but because it uses the vehicle of the girl boxer to move the story line to dealing with euthanasia in a very powerful way - That said, Shakespeare's Hamlet also deals with it..with more traditional point of view (To be or not to be...). Both works work, but take the more recent movie PU-239. It is the story of a guy that is trying to get money for his family before he dies from his exposure to radiation in Russia. He fails and it threw the train off the tracks. There is a snippet at the end that fixes it, but the set norms are broken with the guy's failure in my opinion, fails this #5 test because it tries to break through norms we have but fails.

So there you have it. Speero's 5 prong test. Agree with me, or be wrong...