Complaining about Maltins Film Guide.

Maltin's rating are a by vote of the several reviewers writing in the book. You aren't quite sure who to aim at. VideoHound, the other review "bible" has them equal at 3-1/2 stars and "Alien Resurrection" at 3 stars (!)

The most glaring difference is actually "Bladerunner" which is, as I remember, 1-1/2 stars in Maltin's guide and 3-1/2 stars in VideoHound, not to mention that Sight and Sound surveys which includes a lot of European critics rates the film as one of the top ten from the last twenty-five years.

You know..it simply cracks me up...why follow a guide if none of the guides match? Kinda like people and how they rate movies themselves....its going to be different. I dont follow guides, ratings, columns...I simply see it and if I like it, I like it..If not..then thats okay too.
The only thing I have enjoyed seeing information on are those films which I'm not sure I should go see at the theater or wait and get on DVD. But, even then, I take what others say with a grain of salt and my own past experience. I used to have a local film critic I knew that if they rated a film terrible, it was great, I should rush out.
I cant believe he scored Bladerunner at a 1 1/2!!!!!!!!!! May he saw the full screen, non-directors cut or some such thing.
Oh..maybe he just didnt like it.
If these guides were made more towards popular demand, votes, etc it might get close but, then again, I dont like alot of popular films and a vote would only include those who bothered to vote. Its all relative. Its nuts.
Just my humble opinion.

LW,I have lived with Halliwell´s Film Guide for almost two decades which I think is better because he IS so tight fisted when it comes to dishing out the stars.
"Voyager" however received NONE from Halliwell and 3 from Maltin.On this I agree with the latter but when one looks up Barb Wire in Maltin´s it gets TWO whole stars.Incredible...a star for each breast??
I was furious!

Perhaps Maltins editors disagreed with his ratings and changed them all?

That COULD be it Quinn.They just plain sold out.
"Everything´s GREAT folks.You can rent them at your local video store NOW!!"

Or perhaps hes just lost his mind......

you have a point with the whole sell out thing though

Lots of my friends prefer Aliens to Alien. But personally, I think the first Alien is much more compelling- you get to know the people as individuals before they get chomped or whatever. Alien has a 'haunted house' feel to it that I like. In Aliens, there is a lot more action, but lots of the characters are only there for Alien fodder. Sigourney Weaver is Rambo-etta.

The third Alien movie was crap! They ruined the happy ending of Aliens and made it just another 'run from the monster' movie. With their heads shaved, I had trouble telling the Alien fodder humans apart. The fourth was 'just okay'.

I'd give 3-1/2 stars to Alien, 3 to Aliens, 1 to Alien 3, and maybe 2 to Alien Resurrection.

I'd love to see Hollywood take a tip from comic books and the web and do an Alien vs. Predator movie.

Alien was more compelling a film due to the 'less is more' issue it delt out with regard to the alien itself, and also being the first run out.
Dont get me wrong, I really like Aliens as well, I think it was well done for a sequal and only drew on the strenght of Sigourneys character but, I know lots of people who feel she was too much. Like the Alien vs. Predator idea..however I already have a winner in my own opinion

Halliwell's is the extreme of film criticism in that it appears every film must have a profound message or it's mediocre. For many, they are too obviously prejudiced against the Hollywood product. At least if one reads the lengthy reviews of Sight and Sound, the essayist gives detailed and precise reasons why they do or do not like a film. They appreciated the madcap satire of "Mars Attacks" far more than U.S. critics. I think one has to have at least three reviewers who they trust and come the closest to one's own response to films if they are using them to go to the movies, or to rent or view on TV an older film.

"Alien" simply has more suspense and atmosphere -- it still has a fun house structure but you don't notice it as much as in "Aliens." They're prime requisite is to scare the hell out of you and they both suceed in different ways. Cameron's tour-de-force of action/suspense is more gratifying for some while the more dreamlike storytelling and thoughtful character studies in the first one is certainly a valid reason for liking it better. The Goldsmith score for the first one was superior, especially in depicting the lonliness of deep space. The first one also made a star out of Sigorney Weaver with, I believe, an Oscar nomination although I can't immediately verify that (it may have been a Golden Globe nomination and/or win). Ripley is the first genuine female action heroine introduced into pop mythology on film.

I don't get too picky about the number of stars. If a movie has 1 or 2 there is usually a reason. If it has 3 or 4, I figure there's a chance it could be okay for the kind of movie it is.

I like longer reviews. Ebert is good, although he likes many kinds of movies that I don't, such as horror, so when I see him praising one of these, I pass it up anyway. I like A.O. Scott and Anthony Lane. Generally, if one of these guys says a movie is flawed, it turns out to be that way. But then, few movies are without flaws, so if I want to see a film, I see it no matter what the reviewer says.

Hazlitt,I agree with you about not being swayed by reviews.
I set up this thread so I could complain about film guides.

So,gripe #2:Aliens got as many stars as The Godfather:***½

Maltin sets no criteria for his rating system and I simply cannot begin to fathom what made him (or his team of editors) give equal "scores" for these two films.It is beyond all plausibility.

LW,Halliwell was rather extreme but I disagree a little with what you wrote about films having to contain a profound message.
His guide is far better than Maltin´s and it has much more information for the film buff to wallow in.

Back to "Aliens II?" "The Godfather" is obviously a 4 star movie and "Aliens II" a 3 star movie ("Aliens" 3-1/2 in other guides) even within the genre. This is apples and oranges and many guides take their polling of the critics by asking them to rate a film within a genre, thus an equal rating for the two films. But to short "The Godfather" any stars goes against the consensus of world wide critics and filmmakers that places it in the top ten or at least the top twenty-five. There is a preface as to how the ratings are arrived at and these are the ratings which seem to be those used by cable programmers to rate a movie on their menu. I find them more on target than off target and I'm afraid you're always going to find strange comparisons because of the genre differences.

I find the reviews of Halliwell's do concentrate on a critical assessment of the story more often than not and sometimes the reviews don't agree with the stars the film is awarded (especially in the quotations of outside critics). However, they have no compunction in calling what might be rated as an average film in other guides a cinematic turkey and often they are right. Critics have guilty pleasures and prejudices, too, and their reviews don't always make sense when there's a wide disparity to other reviews.

I would still rate Halliwell above Maltin's guide but VideoHound has even more information, albeit it's the thickest, heaviest guide of them all. It awards four stars to both" Godfather I and II." I do think that Ripley's relationship with the little girl in "Alien's II" was a very nice touch -- the film did expand on her character.

I enjoy it when Halliwell´s inserts other critics quotes.It´s almost as if he (or J.Walker now) is saying "but don´t believe ME".
I still have the 12th edition of Halliwell´s and was long overdue for a new one but then I got this Maltin number for Christmas.
Still,it´s great to read because suddenly every film has,for me,a new write-up.
Will be back in tomorrow with a new gripe.

Film critics come with their specific media.

Pauline Kael was good for The New Yorker: massive enough, but with a cultural background and not dissimilar tastes. She would have been unstandable if she wrote in the local Wichita, Ks. newspaper.

Some uptight critics are good only for the few sophisticate connoisseurs who read their papers or magazines.

Maltin's team and other critics aim to the general public, a broad market. Siskel & Ebert, when they did the thumbs thing on TV, had the same target.

I strongly disagree with about 20 percent of Maltin's ratings (Blade Runner's, of course, is the crown jewel). That level of disagreement was good enough for me. So I decided we use Maltin, for several years, as a guide to reccomend on our newspaper (aimed to the general public) some films none of the critics, nor me, had seen, and that were being shown on TV that day or week.

Since we found IMDB in 1997, the site's average rating (watch out for weird weightings, though) has been handier. So I don't buy Maltin's guide anymore, and I don't think the guys in the paper do it, either.

I'd rather read Kael rather than any other critic -- she is not verbose and gets down to the real meat of the film, whether you agree with her conclusions or not. These guides are only meant as assistance to the movie lay person who is renting movies. I can't imagine anyone buying a movie based on a review in any of the guides. I can't imagine if a movie pops up during surfing the cable movie channels is immediately checked in one of these guides (the cable menus include ratings anyway). I don't buy Maltin's guide anymore for the same reason as fbaezer. If I see some film I don't recognized come up on IFC, Sundance or any of the premium channels, I will look up reviews with the links included in this category. Metacritic.com is now way ahead in its database over Movie Query Engine and there are others. Ebert's reviews are easily accessed on the Chigago Tribune site or the Ebert/Roeper site, although I don't place much credence in Roeper's opinions.
I've come across some real gems I would have missed without taking a few minutes and checking it out online -- my VideoHound is several years old now and I still keep it only as a reference as IMDB has everything one really wants to know about film short of being a scholar.

BTW, often the critic's statements in Halliwell don't figure into the rating the book gives, so it isn't always "if you don't believe me..."

LW,I wrote "BUT don´t believe me".