Taking a look at the Rotten Tomatoes “Top 100 Films of All Time” list [1], I’m not exactly sure why it’s a model to be replicated. It’s extremely obvious that “top” means “popular and/or most advertised.”
RT is more like a list of the movies which a lot of critics rated but fewest critics disliked. So you get popular and uncontroversial. These are good choices for movies to show on airplanes.
It is actually an interesting rating, as long as you understand what is being rated.
I agree with you, but I don't know if that's the right way to describe them. Looking in the top 10 I can see, to name a few, Moonlight, BlacKkKlansman and Get Out, all items that SHOULD be discussed. I think these also include movies that have a social message that critics agree need to be discussed.
You could choose a cutoff, sort by date, and have a pretty neat timeline of what's considered "safe".
In RTs case, "Top" means films no one dislikes it and everybody thought it was at the very least OK. The "problem" with genuinely great films is that they can often be divisive and challenging and generate a lot of strong opinions in both directions, and thus they'll never rate as well on RT.
As Cobert (I think) said, "Facts have a known liberal bias".
Were films a lot more divisive before 2010?
Honestly? Yeah, I think so. I'm not saying RT's rankings necessarily reflects this, but I think modern movies in general are a lot less daring than what hollywood used to produce. Probably after 2008 or so, but near enough to 2010, it seems they stopped taking risks on movies and really started to search out the lowest common denominator to have the greatest shot at mass market appeal, even when that meant gutting the plot, degrading the sophistication of dialogue. SFX budgets have gone through the roof, movies are filled with explosions and vivid colors, but little that stimulates the mind. Even the exceptions that most would hold up as poignant movies are generally quite mundane, almost always appealing to the most popular public sentiments.
Consider Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) at number 7 on that list, and Mad Max (1979). 2015 has no shortage of explosions and vivid colors to keep anybody glued to their seat and eating popcorn; the movie watcher doesn't have to put forth any amount of effort to enjoy it, they could walk in half way through the movie, look at their smartphone 90% of the movie, and still enjoy the small slivers of the movie they did see because the movie was made to be as widely accessible as possible, even to philistines who don't pay attention to movies they pay to watch.
Mad Max (1979) on the other hand doesn't make it onto this Top 100 list. RT gives it 90% from critics and 70% from audiences, which hints at why. 1979 is not as easy for the casual modern tech-induced attention deficit disorder afflicted movie consumer to enjoy. It's very far from non-stop action; it asks the viewer to pay attention even when things aren't exploding on screen. It's excellent, but the industry won't make another Mad Max like that again in the foreseeable future. They don't take risks like that anymore; not when littering the movie with 500% more explosions is so cheap and is so effective at shoring up the profit potential of a movie.
I'd say it's a good model for news.
I can't even name a single news source that I'd call reputable and that I trust. That's why I like reading multiple sources on the subject plus comments on Reddit/HN.
Television news is going to probably be not quite as good, just because they can't cover as much as a newspaper in only 30-60 minutes. Again, just the news, not the opinion stuff.
If you just take all of it in uncritically, and especially if you don't pay attention to what is labeled news vs opinion, you're going to end up believing a lot of things which probably aren't true.
https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-th...
> They can get something wrong once in a while, sure, but it's mostly good.
> I'd say it's a good model for news.
It's not, but then the whole concept isn't good for news. Particularly, a model with the effects you describe would favor news that, irrespective of the ground facts, avoids reaching conclusions that are going to be unwelcome to any significant group.
For example, it's one thing to report what AG Barr's letter on the Mueller investigation says, and maybe also what it doesn't say. It's also "news" to report what various players say about the report.
It's another thing for reporters to speculate what it means in terms of future investigations, or whether the report is "trustworthy," or to reach similar conclusions.
Fox News, for instance is widely regarded to be biased to the right. And their opinion or editorial content absolutely is, often to the point of absurdity. But their actual news content is very well done so far as I can see. Do their viewers distinguish the two? I doubt it. Do their detractors distinguish the two? I doubt that also.
There is a significant amount of respect for Shep Smith and Chris Wallace in predominantly liberal news discussions (like r/politics subreddit) for being willing to criticize Trump and Republicans.
That might sound like a rhetorical question, but it's not. I don't know the answer.
Yes, I think so. Random article about Shep Smith I found with a quick Google:
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/05/shep-sm...
Chris Wallace:
https://www.businessinsider.com/chris-wallace-barack-obama-d...
So I think they have had the reputation for being willing to sometimes buck the Republican Party line for a while now.
There is also a rating which is usually hidden by default (click the more info link on a film's page). If you check that then you see, for example, that the number 1 Black Panther's rating is 8.26, while number 2 Lady Bird has a rating of 8.74, so it's a better rated movie.
There should be a top list based on ratings too. Maybe there is somewhere.
It's not, it even shows that score on the list. #1 is scored 97% while #2 is 99%.
What would be better is a top list based on audience score, not critic score.
IMDB does have some films that stick out in the top of their list though. Star Wars being so high, LOTR being so high, Inception, Seven, Green Mile, Gladiator.
No matter though you’re right that consensus is hard to get. And most of the films that I listed as out of place are part of fanboy beloved franchises or headed by fanboy beloved directors.
"How to Train Your Dragon" (2010), 99% with 206 reviews does not make the list, but many older movies, with lower scores and lower number of reviews do. E.g., "The Wizard of Oz" (1939), 98% with 111 reviews, and "It Happened One Night" (1934), 98% with 56 reviews, and "Casablanca" (1942), 97% with 79 reviews, and "Alien" (1979), 97% with 115 reviews.
It looks like the older a film is, the fewer reviews it needs backing its score to make the list.
It's also possible that the age of the review is taken into account, so that a modern review looking back on a film counts more than an older review, because that would probably be more relevant to someone today deciding what older movies to watch.
For example, take "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" (1966). It wasn't very well received by critics in 1966. Now, though, it's at 97% on RT, and is regular included in lists of top films (it used to be on the RT top 100, but looks like it has been pushed off).
So the consequence of that is clear. If you are tasked with creating a Top-100 movie list, you better tune whatever algorithm you use to include those movies. You'll butcher your beautiful algorithm to ensure those handful of classic movies always rank high. You might go so far as to put those movies in a special list and inject them arbitrarily into your Top-100 list, circumventing the normal ranking algorithm, because having those particular movies in the Top-100 is a design requirement. It's more important that those movies be in the list than it is for your ranking algorithm be fair and unbiased.
Black Panther, to use the example some are protesting here, is a perfect storm of recent (max accessible reviews), critically acclaimed, and wildly successful commercially.
I think it's more telling that recent Star Wars movies like The Last Jedi are on the list, but A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back (which are more important imho) are not.
This is one reason I like the standard set by the Cocaine and Rhinestones country music podcast. He won't talk about 21st century music because we don't have enough distance to tell what's truly great from what's merely popular at this point. A couple of decades of reflection really separates the great from the trendy.