Evaluating Art. Part one - Movies

Scott Adams has recently written an entry about "Judging Art" in his blog. Note how my clever substitution of the word "Judging" makes it look like I designed the title by my very self.

His main point is that instead of applying the standard, subjective criteria of (essentially) "do I like this", the quality of art should be judged by how well the artist achieves his or her objectives, whatever they might be. Thus, when art achieves its goal, it must be considered great. The primary example he mentions is the comic strip "Garfield" by Jim Davis, who set out to create a massively popular comic strip. Seeing as how he has realized this goal, "Garfield" is great art (if you consider comic strips as art, that is) regardless of its content or how many people actually find it amusing.

Although I do not necessarily agree that this is a good way of measuring anything but the artist's fragile grasp of reality, it certainly opens up for different interpretations of books, movies, music, paintings and whatnot than the ones you've already applied. It also requires the goals of the artist to be clearly stated as the project is released, so as to avoid situations wherein for example Jack Black would be able to say "Yeah; I was tired of being funny, so I made Nacho Libre just to get out of the media and lose momentum for a while" after the fact. Ditto Eddie Murphy post 1988.

Still, the method does not provide you with any criteria by which to estimate your potential interest for the product prior to e.g. watching/renting/buying a movie. Although if I had known ahead of time that George Lucas set out to emulate the massive success of Teletubbies by incorporating a similar character in his prequels, it would certainly have affected the odds of me seeing Episode 1 - The Merchandising Misanthrope....

Anyway; in the simple view that the quality of a movie is affected by the components (i.e. the script/story, the choice of actors, the director, etc.), it should be possible to get a decent estimation of whether or not the movie sucks by evaluating parameters independently, such as:

• Storyline/script: Here, you often don't have much to go on, even if it's based on a book you've read several times, or a historical event. Even movies based on excellent novels can suck (e.g. "The Man in the Iron Mask"), and if you're assuming historical accuracy from movies based on actual events, I've got some prime office space in WTC2 you can rent real cheap. What you can safely assume, however, is that any movie based on a computer game probably won't have much in the way of what one traditionally refers to as a "plot".
• Actors/Actresses: Parameter wherein the quality is proportional to [presence of (Gary Oldman + DeNiro + Ed Norton + Nicholas Cage + Allison Janney + Meryl Streep + Glenn Close +..) plus absence of (Tom Cruise + Leonardo DiCaprio + Keanu Reeves + Antonio Banderas + Samuel L. Jackson + Angelina Jolie + Mary-Louise Parker +...)]
• Director: ...what I like to call the "Absence of Michael Moore and whomever made The Blair Witch project"-factor
• Title/taglines: Phrases/words to avoid: "Snakes on a ...", "Frat", "ex-marine", "ex-black ops", "...this time, ...", "Revenge Of The........", "James Bond"
• Budget: Sometimes, small, independent films can be absolutely great, i.e. "Clerks". However, if a movie comes with the label "as seen at the Sundance film festival" or something to that effect, odds are it's more akin to "The Blair Witch project". And that's not a good thing..
• More?