One fairly common criticism that I saw of Quentin Tarantino's most recent film, Inglourious Basterds, is how it is so willfully inaccurate to history - the Basterds significantly altering the events of WWII in a very grandiose fashion. I don't want this to smack of elitism, but this criticism came almost solely from blog commenters, and not from "legitimate" critics - ones who would be familiar with Tarantino's predilection towards cinema history, and not so much world history. These are historical figures repurposed as archetypal characters, for the purposes of entertainment and art - not so much for education. The discordance that the critical historians felt during their viewing experience was brought about entirely from their misperceptions of what the film was trying to be and say.
I don't believe in the existence of a truly objective measurement of artistic merit (see sidebar), but I think that from both a logical and fair point of view, you have to take a piece on its own terms.
I recently got into an online discussion about what summer films we're all looking forward to. I mentioned the Vin Diesel action film Fast Five as a possible viewing experience, to which someone responded with something vaguely along the lines of "It looks like a piece of shit". But by what criteria are we measuring it? For a not-too-subtly homoerotic, car fetishizing, women objectifying, gratuitously explosive thrill ride, it looks fairly well put together. Sometimes I enjoy stately period pieces, such as Barry Lyndon, and sometimes I want to see two muscle-bound dudes grunting at each other before knocking one another senseless. I'm guessing that the person who is preemptively calling Fast Five "shit", or a piece thereof, simply isn't a fan of this type of film.
Even the films that I personally hate the most, such as The Boondock Saints, I have to recognize work for SOME audiences. Troy Duffy made the movie that he wanted to make, and quite effectively - it just happens to be a movie that I don't particularly like.
One criticism levied at Inglourious Basterds, and this one I consider somewhat more legitimate, is that it wasn't the film that Tarantino said he was setting out to make. For years, he'd been developing Basterds as his "men on a mission" film, in the tradition of such movies as The Dirty Dozen or Where Eagles Dare - and it simply ended up being very much NOT that kind of film. There are men on a mission in it, yes, but the movie's focus is spread between a Nazi movie star, a British spy, and a Jewish theater owner.
I would agree that he failed at what he had originally set out to do, but it is again short-sighted to ignore the finished product for what it is. The creative process is not always a straight shot from A to B, and we should recognize that anything we see before the final product is nothing more than a draft.
Sorry for the rambling, but I guess my point is this: When you watch a film (or, read a book, listen to a song, etc), try to figure out what the artist is saying, instead of simply judging the work based on what you think they should have said. When a director claims that his film is full of exciting Kung Fu action, and the action turns out to be fairly anemic, then you can rightly decree his film a failure in that regard. If, instead, he's making a western, it would be odd for you to bitch about its distinct lack of chopsocky.
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