Daily Inspiration Quote by Joel Siegel

Expectation is the critic's original sin: the moment you walk into a movie already drafting your verdict, you're not watching, you're confirming. Joel Siegel's line has the disarming plainness of someone admitting a bias he spent his career trying to neutralize. "I do my best" is key. He isn't claiming purity, just effort - a working ethic. And the little moral turn at the end, "because it's not fair", reframes taste as an obligation. Not to the filmmaker's ego, but to the experience itself, and to the audience who treats a review as a proxy for their own time and money.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the consumer mindset that dominates moviegoing: trailers as contracts, franchises as guarantees, fandom as pre-litigation. Expectations don't just shape disappointment; they pre-shape perception. If you expect a comedy, you'll miss a melancholy movie's jokes. If you expect prestige, you'll treat pleasure as suspicious. Siegel is describing a kind of attention that's increasingly rare: letting a film declare its own rules before judging whether it succeeds.

As a critic working in the era when TV punditry and hype cycles were accelerating (and when "thumbs up/thumbs down" shorthand could flatten everything), Siegel's stance reads like resistance. It's an argument for criticism as receptive practice, not performance - a reminder that fairness isn't softness. It's rigor: meeting the work where it is, not where marketing or mythology told you it should be.