Roger Ebert speaks

Chicago Sun/TV film critic Roger Ebert was utterly unimpressed with
Transformers II. Fans of the movie were not thrilled, as he discussed on his blog. My favorite bit:

"Another common line of attack was disturbing. It came from people who
said I was out of touch with the tastes of the audience. That the movie's
detractors (lumped together as "the critics") like only obscure movies
that nobody else does--art films, documentaries, foreign films, indies,
movies made 50 years ago--even, God forbid, "classics." One poster argued
that "Transformers" was better than that boring old movie "Casablanca."
I was informed I didn't "get" Michael Bay. I was too old, "of the wrong
generation," or an elitist or a liberal ...
"A reader named Jared Diamond, a senior at Syracuse, sports editor of The
Daily Orange, put my disturbance eloquently in a post asking: "Why in this
society are the intelligent vilified? Why is education so undervalued and
those who preach it considered arrogant or pretentious?" Why, indeed? If
sports fans were like certain movie fans, they would hate sports writers,
commentators and sports talk hosts for always discussing fine points,
quoting statistics and bringing up games and players of the past. If all
you want to do is drink beer in the sunshine and watch a ball game, why
should some elitist play-by-play announcer bore you with his knowledge?
Yet sports fans are proud of their baseball knowledge, and respect
commentators who know their stuff."
One of the things that bugged me about writing my first two movie books
was the awareness that I wasn't reacting to them as a first-time viewer
(particularly when I watch several similarly-themed things in a row):
Watching some formulaic Poltergeist knock-off (I saw several) I would note
in the book that someone who's never seen a Poltergeist knock-off might
think it was good.
I no longer feel so ambivalent about that: It's true, someone who doesn't
know the clichés and the formulas might enjoy a formula film more, but
that doesn't make it a good film. The "Adam and Eve" SF story (couple
survive nuclear war or crashed spaceship and have to populate the world
and their names are yes, Adam and Eve!) works well the first time you read
one (at least it did for me when I was a teenager) but that doesn't erase
the fact that it was a cliché back around the time I was born.
And as Ebert says, the fact that I know it's a cliché doesn't some
invalidate my opinion compared to the reader who goes Adam and Eve—Oh, Wow!