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Comment by abruzzi | Hacker News Reader

I never trust any online reviews, especially aggregate reviews, because I have never found any to hew remotely closely to my taste (the best example is on RT, the worst movie I've seen in the last two decades is rated 95% fresh).

The only approach I've found that works is to pick a professional reviewer that is marginally close to my taste, read a lot of their reviews, so I know where I tend to agree and where I disagree with the reviewer, then build a mental translation, so when I would see Roger Ebert trash a David Lynch movie, I could discount it because I know Ebert's antipathy to Lynch in not something I share.

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I love RT, but I think people misinterpret the percentage. It doesn't mean that the film was 95% 'good', it means there was a 95% chance you'd like the film and a 5% chance you'd dislike it based on a sampling of professional reviews.

Something to bear in mind is that a slight above mediocre film can have a 100% rating if it has wide appeal.

Here is a great article talking about the differences between RT & Metacritic: http://www.thecroakingfrog.com/blog/rotten-tomatoes-vs-metac...

I personally find that there are less misfires on a good Metacritic score.

I think you are the one that is misinterpreting the percentage. 95% means that 95% of the reviews were "positive." Of course it says nothing on whether you will like it or not, because it has no idea what you would like.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(statistics)

>The only approach I've found that works is to pick a professional reviewer that is marginally close to my taste

I miss David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz.

I'm curious, what was the 95% fresh movie that you thought was the worst movie in 2 decades?

I'm going to guess Snowpiercer.

I'm not the OP, so this is just a guess, but my money's on "The Room". If not, I'm guessing it's because the OP hasn't yet seen it. ;-)

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/room_2015/

Edit: Ooops. The wrong "The Room" altogether. Nod to abruzzi for the correction. The actual Room is only 35% fresh, which I must say is either way too high, or way too low, depending on one's take of the film.

The correct link is here: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_room_1998/

Sadly that's the wrong Room:

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_room_1998/

Thank you for the correction. Gigantic oops moment there.

Snowpiercer. I'm sure some people love it, but I could not think of a single redeeming thing after I got done. I honestly preferred "The Room", (though that ones 'quality' was unintentional.)

Snowpiercer was indeed sad, but I always assumed my negativity towards it was a result of having already read Hugh Howey's (rather good) Silo Saga, which it seemed to rip off at every turn, only having shifted the X and Y axes.

I came away from it thinking that if I hadn't read the Silo Saga, I might possibly have actually enjoyed Snowpiercer, though definitely nowhere near 95%'s worth.

I found the first half of Wool to be very good and the rest of it readable, although just barely so. Howey is a terrible writer with interesting plot ideas. Howey has a compulsion to explicitly tell you in minute details through every other passage exactly what is on everyone's mind. The concept of using symbolism and actions to portray people seems lost to him. His sentence structure is terrible. He's saved by Wool's very interesting idea and the first chapter of Wool was admittedly very good. I read the entire series and I really think at a high level his ideas a very interesting, but he just doesn't really have the skill required to write well. I am not sure an editor would help, maybe a co-author.

I think you have it backwards. The ideas of Wool are so common in prior science fiction that authors would take them for granted, play with them. The plot is pretty much that of The Penultimate Truth. Howey succeeded because, for whatever reason, people liked his writing or he details of his version more than previous iterations of the idea.

Very possible. Not suggesting that Wool was entirely unique, but more specifically, that Snowpiercer seemed to have taken the entire idea of Wool and just shifted the axis from vertical to horizontal.

There were a LOT of copied ideas. Perhaps none of them were original to Wool, but Wool was not (to my knowledge) as much a clone of any individual work as it was the compilation of a lot of tropes.

Snowpiercer is adapted from a French graphic novel written in 1982, so the copying may be the other way round (I've not seen/read any of them so can't comment persoanlly).

I think engineering and or technically minded movie goers find Snowpiercer a lot harder to enjoy than maybe a critic who can discount such issues and focus on plot themes and movie making. There is so much that doesn't add up when you try to imagine how the people on the train solved all the problems they would have faced. It can make films harder to enjoy when you can't pretend that technology is just magic.

There are a lot of very interesting themes in the story though, the action is well done, the production quality is high, and the movie pays homage in tone and style to other great movies. When a movie's technobabble is terrible, it helps to pretend it's fantasy. If you don't and you let bad science get you down you could miss out on the other parts.

I was more bothered by the silly melodrama you got at a number of points, personally ("I know that <spoilers> taste best!"). It did have some really great scenes, though. The schoolcar scene was top notch. And it was quite impressive visually.

Agreed. The physical impossibility of the train is what got to me(where did all these soldiers come from? did they march through the nightclub and kindergarden wonderland cars?).

That said, it is very well produced and if you can set aside the technology aspect of it I would say it's among the better sci-fi movies in recent memory.

Essentially all fiction requires some degree of "suspension of disbelief." We all have different tolerances both in general and in specific genres where we might have more knowledge than the average person. Or we just have trouble buying a particular premise. Certainly there are films I love even though I know they depend on a setting or assumptions that are pure BS. And there are other films or TV shows that I otherwise really like but just can't really get past some particular aspect.

Actually, I kind of liked that idea, that they did march through the nightclub, etc. I mean, the rest of the movie was rather trite (though not the worst I've encountered), trying to imagine life on the train was one of the best parts for me.

Wow, you could not think of a single redeeming thing about Snowpiercer? And you preferred "The Room"? Now, I think you're trolling! ;-)

Of course "the Room" was worse, by a long mile, but it was enjoyable. I have long been a connoisseur of "bad movies". Look for movies like "Hillbillies in a Haunted House" or "Rock and Roll Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Ape" or one of my all time favorites "Poor White Trash II" (originally titled "Scum of the Earth"). "The Room" had many (unintentionally) funny scenes. "Snowpiercer" was not bad enough to be entertaining, so instead I found it turgid, overwrought, melodramatic, and extremely implausible.

The point is though that this is a question of taste. Maybe my tastes simply aren't aligned with what a lot of other people like. But it is for that reason that I simply don't trust RT. For many things I used to use Ebert, since I could usually predict from his review wether I'd like it.

(I havent looked closely but I do wonder if selection bias impacts review sites. If a limited appeal movie comes out, and the mainstream reviewers ignore it, and all the reviewers that RT aggregates are from the world that the move does appeal to, does it end up scoring much better than if all the mainstream usual suspects had reviewed it.)

7.0 on IMDB and 69% on CSFD (the Czech IMDB equivalent). They both have a big number of viewers rating and a 100 point scale, I find them pretty accurate, which always baffles me given how subjective the questions "Do you like the movie" is. Although blockbusters might be overrated (like the Martian), I can always see why that is the case and the error isn't similar to "95% vs god awful".

Oh thank you thank you thank you.

Turgid nonsense. I couldn't watch past the first half hour. If I'd paid to see that at the movies I'd have been properly angry.

Yes! I sat through the whole thing, waiting for it to get better. Then the credits rolled, and I was baffled by the people who raved about the film.

I agree; a zero of a film. Those that like it, were impressed by some actor/actress' performance (or they had the hots for them anyway). Not by the actual movie, which was a heavy-handed fable that thudded across the screen.

Though maybe I was blinded by the nonsense, to a wonderland of interesting screencraft. But I don't think so.

Snowpiercer was a brilliant movie. Not the plot, that didn't really matter. And of course there's a lot of rather implausible things going on. But the cinematography, the choreography, the directing, were all fantastic. The axe battle scene in specific was a great homage to Korean films (there's some film in specific it draws from, but I'm forgetting on the name), which makes sense as the directory, Joon-ho Bong, is Korean. The acting was pretty good too, I especially loved Tilda Swinton.

There's also arguments to be made about the philosophical message of Snowpiercer, but I don't think that's particularly relevant to why the movie is great (though obviously others disagree).

"Gravity" wasn't the worst in two decades, but it is a pile of crap, and it does have 97% on RT and 7.9 on IMDB.

"a pile of crap" is a bit harsh, it's fantastically produced and the acting is okay.

Everyone has different opinions but what was crap about it. Directed by the visionary behind Children of Men, which won best picture and rather than just making a bunch of easy films he spent 4 years making this one.

The cinematography required new innovations in ways to film space scenes. New rigs and such they invented that stuff on the production budget. The acting was top notch. It was stunning.

The cheesy stuff? The unrealistic parts of it? Maybe you could criticise those aspects of it, but they were intentional sacrifices made so the rest of the film could be fresh, new, attainable. The story arc was like a mini rollercoaster, never slowed down. I cheered for our protagonist.

Movies like that don't come out very often.

It's a borderline masterpiece my dear friend. A masterpiece I tell you. One of the prettiest looking things I've ever seen in Imax. It made me have feelings inside. I rated it as one of the best movies to come out in decades.

I think part of a film like that is the spectacle of it. It's probably harder to enjoy on a cellphone, is that what happened?

Finding people that rate in the same way as you is an interesting concept at https://www.mov3y.com

If only it worked. After rating 50 movies, the "recommended" section still is empty. Also, lots of GUI issues, dead links etc.

Oh yea, that's not how it was when I was using it for a few weeks. Seems they must have a recent issue.

Ah no, seems to work now :)

Recommendations are shown now for me, too. Not really movies that I liked, but at least it's working. The "Something wrong?" link at the bottom right is still a 404 though. :(

Have you explored the similarity between users? Recommendations are based on similar people. I usually use the user comparison view to check if I can trust the other user.

The user comparison view also shows you what the other user has seen and you haven't. Great once you trust the user to discover new movies.

Brilliant, thanks for that. Seems great, shame that the recommended tab is empty.

It seems to be working now.

Try http://www.criticker.com Same concept, I'd say it has a simpler and clearer interface.

Agreed.

I'm a serious movie fan. I've seen more movies than the 99.999th percentile of the worldwide public. Officially filtered for a number of film festivals, including at least one you've heard of.

And I still give heavy weight to certain reviewers for general release films. It's all about finding people you more or less agree with.

This very reasonable. Movies, music, art, can't be reduced to a single numerical score. In this sense no rating 'should' be trusted, but instead we need to make choices based on entirety of context. Seems trivial, yet we always want an easy answer.

This is basically my answer as well. I'm the first to admit that my tastes are not very well in line with conventional wisdom (I also cant stand Pixar films..) The closer your tastes are to that sort of normative, middle of the road taste the more useful aggregated reviews will likely be.

Using a single reviewer (or several) only works when someone's tastes are predictable. Using aggregate reviews, can remove the kind of predictability that I can use to predict wether I'd like the movie.

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