This series of articles is designed to help you, the fan, try and divorce yourself from your attachment to source material and judge a film on its own merits and not in comparison to another work. These tips come from my own experience. I hope they are helpful.

Many of these topics do overlap one another but attack problems from different angles. This tip really comes into play if you’ve already managed to ignore number four. So here’s how:
You’re sitting in the dark of the matinee and you’ve got your 80 oz. soda and obese-family-size Twizzlers and you’re watching the same lame slides come across the screen repeatedly. The trailers for blockbusters-yet-to-be keep you only mildly amused. All this idle time has got you anticipating the film more than you had been before and you start thinking about how this director will handle the material? Or how such-and-such will do in this part and how the casting of character X will pan out. Boom. All the things you were supposed to ignore are back and suddenly the film starts and it’s distracting you.

This is where you have to grab the bull by the horns and just lose yourself in the story. Remember what it is that drew you to this material in the first place and look for it. If you find great, if not the film failed to an extent. Again this is not an attempt to excuse the film but just setting yourself up to try and judge the film before you and not measuring against another kind of work entirely.