TAC Movies Mission Statement

My name is Tim and I'm here to review movies for you for tacmovies.blogspot.com. I also publish my reviews on flixter, imdb, amazon, myspace, and yahoo! I am primarily writing with the viewer in mind. I understand that there are tons of movies out there that you haven't seen and you only have so much time and money to devote to watching them, so I will attempt to point out some quality obscure films for you to try and find, suggest you steer clear of less than stellar films, and let you know how much money I think you should spend or how much time I think you should devote to locating a particular film.

With regard to review style, I recognize that there are quality movies out there that I don't enjoy and movies that I enjoy that can't really be described as particularly well made, and I try to point out the difference between the two. For instance, the movies Where the Wild Things Are was a masterful work of visual art and perfectly captured the fantasy world of a child... but that didn't mean that I didn't hate it. Conversely, I love old kung fu movies, but most of them are technical disasters on celluloid.

There are two common criticisms of movies that I try not to use:

“That wasn't very realistic!” Movies aren't reality, and one shouldn't expect a movie to conform to the rules of our reality. Movies are escapism, we view them because we wish to escape reality. Maybe the movie broke the laws of physics or vastly oversimplified a psychological syndrome or a character didn't use the precise vocabulary of a rancher, it doesn't matter. Writers have united behind the saying of “don't let the facts get in the way of story!” and I whole-heartedly agree. Instead, I view it as acceptable to point out when a movie fails to be internally consistent. If the movie establishes the rules of their universe and then breaks them or sets up a particular character to behave a certain way and then reverses it without a plausible reason, then this would be grounds to argue that the internal consistency is off. However, nobody is perfect, and sometimes even I can't suspend my disbelief when some completely out of left field happens, but by and large I try not to accuse movies of not being realistic.

“That wasn't very original!” or “They ripped of [insert the name of book, movie, poem, song, and/or historical event here], those plagiarists!” Unless the story comes out word for word, shot for shot, verbatim the same, then I don't accept this criticism. Everything has been done in some form before. The question isn't if the story has been done before, the question is how well the story was told this time. I'm not saying plagiarism doesn't happen, but I think it's more rare than people think.

From time to time you may notice me highly recommending an independent movie that I gave a C rating but recommending against a Hollywood movie of the same rating. Well, to me, a C isn't a bad grade; it's average. Normal. Not bad, but not great. I give out lots of C's. So, why am I highly recommending some C's over others? Because I consider it to be a success when an independent movie comes together in some sort of coherence without the financial backing or resources of a Hollywood movie. I expect a Hollywood movie to be technically sound, but I've seen crappy indy horror films that have no sense of internal continuity or logic, where they never took the camera off the auto settings and used the built in mic to capture the sound. The results aren't pretty or even watchable sometimes, so I feel the need to give special praise to the ones that pull it off kinda okay. This leads to a logical question: Why don't I just lower the scale for independent movies? Give said C movie a B for being independent, or a B level indy an A? Well, the problem comes along when an honest to God A level independent movie comes along and messes up the entire scale, and they do exist.

It is not my goal to give scathing, angry, slamming reviews to movies. Frankly, I think critics that regularly do so are trying to make themselves the focus of attention instead of the movie. Yes, there are movies that genuinely infuriate me that I feel shouldn't exist and may end friendships with people that enjoy those movies (Transformers 2), but that's not typical. In general, I think movies are about going on a journey with the filmmaker. Maybe that filmmaker is going somewhere that you don't wish to go, that doesn't make the journey bad. It's makes the journey not for you. So, instead of saying that a movie is universally bad, I will try to identify which type of audience would enjoy a particular movie and which audience should stay away from it. But, sometimes the movie is simply bad, and they're no pretending it isn't.

In closing, I hope you enjoy my reviews and find some new movies to watch!