Negative review service

Humans move toward balance. After you stare at a white wall for a while, everything around you seems dim. And after you stare for a while at a green wall, your vision becomes more sensitive to red.

Sounds seem louder after a quiet interlude. Food seems to taste more bland right after you’ve eaten a heavily seasoned meal.

All of this makes sense. After all, we humans are, quite literally, walking balance machines. If we weren’t, we’d fall over.

I saw Suicide Squad today with a friend who had read many of the uniformly negative reviews. I had read no reviews. She liked the movie more than I did, and we both conjectured that this was related to those reviews.

The entire time she was watching the movie, she told me afterward, she’d been thinking “This isn’t nearly as bad as the reviewers had made it out to be.” Faced with harsh words about a movie that she found enjoyable in places, she found herself coming to its defense.

My conclusion from this is that somebody should do us all the service of publishing only uniformly negative reviews of every new film that comes out. Before we go to any movie, we can read its reliably negative review. We can then be confident that we will end up enjoying the movie more than we would have otherwise.

Perhaps this service could be rendered algorithmically. On-line reviews could be culled from other sites, as is done for Rotten Tomatoes. Except only the negative reviews would be kept. On this site, you could be sure that the tomatoes would always be rotten.

This service could eventually be extended to hotels, restaurants, theater, music albums, pretty much anything. Wouldn’t that be great?