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Comment by raspasov | Hacker News Reader

Rotten tomatoes usually matches my personal tastes pretty well. Their Critics Consensus summaries are pretty blunt and entertaining sometimes. Here's the one for Fantastic Four (2015). "Dull" is my favorite part.

"Dull and downbeat, this Fantastic Four proves a woefully misguided attempt to translate a classic comic series without the humor, joy, or colorful thrills that made it great."

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Most of the critic (and user) reviews are what I think of as "easy mode" ones. They don't really teach you anything about the film, just say whether they liked it or not, using the most colorful language they can possibly muster. The FF quote seems like a typical example.

Alternatively there are some that really dig deep into the meaning and execution of the film and analyze it in ways I would never think of, not having a PhD in literature or having been to film school or anything. An example I like a bit is Film Crit Hulk[1], which range from simply explaining why the film's execution didn't match its themes (Jurassic World) to borderline philosophical treatises on the meaning of film (Birdman). (Imo, obviously.)

For getting a quick rating to see what soared/bombed, stuff like RT and IMDB serves its purpose, but I wish published reviews would do more of the deep dives into film analysis, rather than just letting some random journalist vent their opinion for pageviews.

[1] http://birthmoviesdeath.com/author/film.crit.hulk

The site you linked is unreadable because they write everything in all-caps. Unfortunate considering that the titles sound interesting and that there's lively discussion in the comments.

I forgot to mention the part where all Film Crit Hulk reviews are written in the first person as the Incredible Hulk - hence the all-caps. Certainly a valid criticism. Other authors on the site use proper capitalization.

I never found it that big a deal, mildly distracting at best, but I can understand where it turns off others. Seems the design decision for gains in immersion(?) caused a larger tradeoff in readability.

Some of his posts do recommend convertcase.net at the top, though that requires copy-pasting to a separate tab. They would really be better off enabling it themselves with a script + html button, imo.

Ahh, thanks for the explanation. Probably takes getting used to. The converting website you linked was a big help. Now that I'm actually reading the content there is some great discussion of the topics.

Worked for me:

    article {
        text-transform: lowercase
    }

Ah what we need is film reviews from Terry Pratchett's death.

Thanks for the recommendation. These (FCH) reviews are awesome. Do you know any other such critics?

Unfortunately, no. I came by them mostly by accident (recommendation on another forum). I too wish there were more like them, though. They're a very different style of review to the ones Rotten Tomatoes seems to aggregate, or that you would see in the typical "Arts" section of a paper or magazine.

The Plinkett reviews, on Red Letter Media?

http://redlettermedia.com/plinkett/star-wars/ http://redlettermedia.com/plinkett/star-trek/ http://redlettermedia.com/plinkett/other-movies/

The only way Rotten Tomatoes is useful is if you look only at the negative ratings. All kinds of horrible schlock that has mass appeal gets "certified fresh." But isolating negative reviews: If idiots dislike it then it's probably good; If the negative reviews sound cogent then it's probably bad.

I usually go for a metric along the lines of Chesterton's Fence: do the negative critiques seem like they're dismissing the film out-of-hand, or do they seem to show an understanding what it was going for and still think it failed to do it well? Roger Ebert was usually pretty good about this, which gives his truly scathing reviews that much more bite [1].

[1]: http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/battlefield-earth-2000

my favorite bit: "The director, Roger Christian, has learned from better films that directors sometimes tilt their cameras, but he has not learned why."

I generally feel the same, but was woefully misled by a detailed, thorough, but overall negative review of "Spring[1]", which I found to be a delightful genre-bending tale that really surprised me.

I'm not suggesting it was the best movie of the year, by any stretch, but where the reviewer kept insisting that the alleged plot holes were completely unexplainable, I found that perhaps she just didn't "Get It", because not only were the holes absent from my viewing, but where she found holes, I found explanations that actually made sense (y'know, within the context of a film anyway).

[1] - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3395184/

The problem with Rotten Tomatoes scores is that people want to treat them as a measure of how good a film is...it's a natural tendency considering it's a score on a continuum. But what Rotten Tomatoes scores actually represent are a measure of what percentage of people a film will please enough to give a positive review. Just like the The World's Funniest Joke [1] (which most people find "meh, kinda funny"), a movie can rate very highly on Rotten Tomatoes without rating very highly on anyone's list of movies.

But most of the films we'll enjoy are more polarizing. A smaller group of people will really like the film and a sizable group will dislike it. As such, Rotten Tomatoes is a really terrible way to choose a good movie and a really great way to avoid bad ones.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_funniest_joke

Movies on Rotten Tomatoes only need to have 60% positive reviews to be "certified fresh." It's a low bar. If you want to find good movies start at the ones over 80%.

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