It's amazing to me how much we as a film & television culture have an opinion about everything and believe that our opinion is somehow morevalid then everyone else's. Before the immersion of film into our culture opinions were religated to the elite few who had studied such works of arts as music, art, and architecture, to name a few. Sure the general public had a "public opinion" but it was never really taken that serious by the upper echilon of society. In fact, there are few instances in history where public opinion ever really mattered when it came to the creative arts.
Then came film. In it's earliest form it was crude and looked down upon by the upper class yet found a home in the poor lower class of vaudville and carnivals as a novelty act. The first few films were experiements that lasted no longer then a few seconds long yet captured the imagination of those who had never been subject to such great spectacle. When filmmaking techniques were honed and perfected (by then times) films became longer and instead of relyng mainly on real life events for entertainment sinereos and stories and plots were crafted and films became longer and the lower classes came in the bus loads to see the amazing moving pictures. The upper class still looked down upon the "novelty act" yet in the privacy of their own homes they became enamored with the "moving picture" as it became one of the newest and fastest speading forms of entertainment in the world.
The funny thing about the moving image is that it was not confined to only one area but people all across the world were developing their own version of the film camera, some successful while others still needed a little tweaking, but nevertheless the "moving picture" was here to stay and it would continue to amass a great following not only in the lower and middle class but soon in the upper class as well and that's when theaters began to pop up. There needed to be a place where all people of all classes could go to watch these moving pictures and the moving pictures thus needed to be longer then just 2-3 minutes. They soon began to be feature length films (at the time) ranging in length up to an hour in many cases.
With the wide spread epidemic that moving pictures became so to did the opinions come to rise. There were (and still are) many publications about films (because films had to travel from town to town at the time instead of being screened via day and date like today) to get the word out when a particular film would be in any given state and with this mass production and distribution of films so rose the "star" and the "star system."
Although I could go into details about this I will only briefly mention the fact that the star system was created through audiences' reaction to certain characters and actors that they liked to see on the screen. This helped early filmmakers decide not only who to put in their films but what type of films to make (in order to get the most buck out of the bang), so, public opinion has always determined the general evolution of the moving pictures (aka motion picture).
Taking this into account you can now see how modern day audiences' opinions matter more then any pofessionally school educated critic. Real critiques don't get people's buns in seats but public opinion does. When a film has good word of mouth it can do extremely well at the Box Office (i.e. THE HANGOVER, UP, or TAKEN) whereas all the great praise in the world can't make people go see a film (i.e. DOUBT, DUPLICITY, or THE READER). We live in a world where everyone (at least in terms of film) has an opinion and their opinion counts for something if not at least can translate into big Box Office grosses.
We may not like it but that's the reality of the world. Long gone is our reliance and dependence on the arthouse critic who has spent a lifetime dedicating oneself to the "art" for art's sake. We, as an audience, know what we want and know what we like whether it be Rob Zombie's HALLOWWEN remake, THE HANGOVER, MONSTERS Vs. ALIENS, or the latest film with Ashton Kurcher.
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