The Decomposition of Rotten Tomatoes
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vulture.com
* If tomatometer & audience score are within 5% of each other, you can trust the ratings to give you a decent indiciation of movie quality.
* If tomatometer is more than 15%+ higher than audience score, it means it's an artsy fartsy movie that critics like and movies don't.
* If audience score is 15%+ higher than tomatometer, it's a fun movie even if it's not oscar worthy. (https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/old_school is a perfect example)
It also hard (impossible) to do bait and switch like sellers do on amazon.
I believe IMBD can help you identify the "most popular" movie. But it's up to you to decide if that's a good indicator for quality.
To give you an example, look at the top 10 songs in Spotify worldwide and tell me if those songs are the "best" songs the art form can provide.
After going deep on an art form, being music, painting, sculpting or film making, you start to develop a taste and an appetite for more complex expressions.
What would you prefer, votes of 10 people that have watched over 1000 films or votes of 1000 people that have watched 10 films?
The TV show "King the Land" is a Korean drama that aired on cable in Korea this summer and was released at the same time on Netflix worldwide. It was very popular in Korea [1] and many Asian countries. But if you look at IMDB [2] it has a 4.2 rating, with 116 thousand votes of 1/10. Similar Korean shows typically have ratings in the 7-9 range. The reason for the low rating is a controversy over a minor character in the show. I don't know how this mass voting was organized, but it seems to have worked in affecting the IMDB score (and similarly on RT).
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The Last Jedi
Tomatometer 91% Audience 41%: Artsy Fartsy
[Really?]
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The Greatest Showman
Tomatometer 56% Audience 86%: Fun, not oscar worthy
[Won Oscar for Best Original Song]
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EDIT: Truthfully, it was the release of these two films (both Dec 2017) that caused the Tomatormeter and I to part ways. Simply indefensible, IMO.
Oscar worthy - best picture, best actor, etc. Best original song isn't a top tier category. That year also had weak competition.
The Greatest Showman was nominated in a single category, and it lost to Coco. I don't know where you got that it won. Coco got nominated in two categories, one of which was important, and won both. Coco also within 3% difference on rotten tomatoes.
I still use the ratings (because they're built into Plex) but mostly as a novelty, and sometimes as a puzzlement. Increasingly, you see scores like 5% tomato, 95% audience (or vice versa!) that I'm sure mean _something_ but rarely anything to me.
Exceptionally good movies (which Paddington 2 is btw) will trend heavily toward 100% and any drop from 100% are from outlier reviewers. Citizen Kane has 1/131 negative reviews and Paddington 2 has 2/253 negative reviews.
If you want a rating of quality you can always just click on the score and see that paddington 2 has an 8.7 aggregate compared to Citizen Kane's 9.9.
* what percent of viewers will not regret watching the movie. That makes this a combination metric of quality and variance. A low variance 7/10 will beat a high variance 8/10 in RT score
But it sucks from the point of view of watching something enjoyable, and especially so if you were looking for a straight follow-up of TFA.
If you care less about it, then you'll surely want to try new things, and if it doesn't work out, no big deal.
[0] Think space-walrus cliffs, or red-salt Hoth, or lightspeed kamikazee, or the Snoke throne room battle
1. Luke went from the most optimistic and positive Jedi in the world, who found the good in Darth Vader, to a dude who tried to kill his own nephew without any explanation on how he got to that point aside from "I had a bad dream". Pathetic even if you ignore he also had dreams about becoming Darth Vader himself, and overcame those.
2. They completely destroyed any sense of time or speed with their "this turtle is so slow but too fast" race as the main plot point
3. Leia went into outer space unconscious but magically flew back in without dying???
4. They kept the elderly Leia around, instead of having her do a hero's sendoff at the end. Instead, they killed the only good character that was set up perfectly to be the new cutthroat cunning but likable leader of the rebellion.
5. They ruined every other fight in star wars with the hyperspace joust. Why was any other fight a big deal when they could have just rammed a few ships with jump drives into the star destroyers, or hell, the death star.
6. Rey is somehow the strongest force user now despite no training. Every other Jedi that got to be that strong had a lifetime of training and tribulations, but now Rey can just beat kylo ren, a lifelong trained Jedi Skywalker with the power of the dark side, just because she's a Mary Sue.
And this is just what I can remember on my phone while sitting at this bar. If you think this movie wasn't a deep betrayal to the universe, you didn't pay any attention to it.
I didn't think she was fully unconscious. Also, "magically"? She used the Force. It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together. In this case, given she was in a vacuum, just a slight pull on the ship is all she needed to fly back to it.
> Rey is somehow the strongest force user now despite no training
Well, that is the premise, though. Luke himself grew immensely powerful with much less training than Anakin. Some people are just born with stronger Force. Something something midichlorians
For what it's worth, I agree with him. When I saw the movie and even just the promotional materials I thought it was visually striking and had very strong color themes. But wow, it was a train wreck in terms of plot, characters, faithfulness to the series, etc. I could go on for hours.
But to be fair, I also think The Force Awakens was terrible and painted the story into a dumb direction. Instead of “what if the Nazis came back to power in Argentina”, they should have moved the story into a direction more like “the alliance against a common enemy is fractured”, like what actually happened after World War 2, or “there are now many factions of ambitious warlords rising among the widely deployed and still incredibly powerful imperial military”, or some of both. The Mandalorian did the setting much better in that sense.
Look on the bright side, it could have been 2 Death Stars and a whole bunch of bad space boobs jokes.
Luke was always fragile. He barely trained with Yoda, then he basically failed up to celebrity status. His weakness has always been his impatience, and his preference for the quick and easy out.
He became an icon, he got old and disillusioned, he realized his naive view of the world and the Force didn't apply to reality, as he saw the Jedi being just as corrupt as the Sith, and just as the Jedi did he fell back into a rigid orthodoxy that led him to repeat the cycle of generational darkness that he never took the proper effort to address because he was never properly trained. And in the end, he regained a truer and more grounded faith in the force than he had before. What Yoda literally said would happen, happened.
That isn't pathetic, it's an actual character arc. Unfortunately, people like yourself only wanted Luke Skywalker to remain a cardboard cutout.
>3. Leia went into outer space unconscious but magically flew back in without dying???
Leia is the sister of one of the most powerful Jedi in history. She has the Force, too.
It's weird how many people completely missed that.
5. They ruined every other fight in star wars with the hyperspace joust. Why was any other fight a big deal when they could have just rammed a few ships with jump drives into the star destroyers, or hell, the death star.
I've never understood this argument. Why don't we simply kamikaze aircraft and submarines into our enemies now? Why bother with guns and missiles?
I mean, it's a risky (potentially deadly) maneuver that a rebellion lacking in personnel and equipment can scarcely afford to lose through normalizing. It's not something you do all the time even when it is effective. Japan only resorted to kamikaze missions out of desperation.
And I'm curious what exactly you think the effect of ramming into one ship with another ship transitioning into hyperspace should be, and why it shouldn't be an effective weapon at all?
No, this is just finding shit to nitpick about.
>6. Rey is somehow the strongest force user now despite no training. Every other Jedi that got to be that strong had a lifetime of training and tribulations, but now Rey can just beat kylo ren, a lifelong trained Jedi Skywalker with the power of the dark side, just because she's a Mary Sue.
It was established that the Force is a constant, distributed amongst all Jedi. The fewer Jedi there are, the more powerful each becomes because they have access to a greater portion of the whole. Rey was as powerful as she was because, as one of the few Force users left, she had potential access to nearly all of it.
>If you think this movie wasn't a deep betrayal to the universe, you didn't pay any attention to it.
I don't know, it seems like you're the one who didn't pay attention. Did you even see any of the new trilogy or just jump on the hate train when it was popular? Because I've seen all of your criticisms, verbatim, repeated ad nauseum, by people who just seem to be repeating memes.
What?? When was that established?
Even then, assuming I'm full of shit... she's a Palpatine. Secret legendary bloodline. I hate it but it still works in universe.
I'm not sure what changed with the fewer Force users thing in the new series shrug.
It has to be nothing, or else none of the other movies make sense at all. Kinetic energy attacks (accelerate a mass to a great velocity) are the most obvious attack there is, from the dawn of time with throwing rocks to bows and arrows to muskets to cannons on up. And in a universe where you can accelerate a mass immediately to light speed, nothing else will really compare.
So yes, at some level it makes obvious sense that a kamikaze of one starship to another "should" work. But in the Star Wars universe we had had to suspend that disbelief (in some ways justified because light speed jumping isn't real, so maybe it just doesn't work that way) because otherwise X-wings could take out Star Destroyers and the Death Star is unnecessary because you can just strap the hyperspace drives to large hunk of rock.
The Empire was just that arrogant and self-confident that they never noticed such an obvious flaw until it was too late? Still bullshit.
Sabotage? Better, and it got us Rogue One, which was a great movie. But even then it stretches credibility.
The walkers in Empire Strikes Back are ridiculous, no one would actually build those, with their obvious (and easily exploited) weakness. And in a universe with blasters, no one would ever be using lightsabers. Hell, if you can force choke someone, which even Luke did with that Gammorean guard, why not just force pinch an artery in your enemy's brain or heart? Why bother with all the spinny flips and shit? Just force heart attack from a concealed location, done.
Realistically, you wouldn't even have dogfights in space at all, much less with plane-shaped ships that bank through turns, you would have fully automated, spherical droids attacking from hundreds of thousands of kilometers away or just, as you mentioned, toss a big FU asteroid through hyperspace into the orbit of a planet. And yes, the elephant in the room is that any FTL drive is by definition a weapon of mass destruction.
None of it makes much sense. It never has, because it has always been more important that things look cool than make sense. But the point is, ramming a ship with another ship while going into hyperspace makes no less sense than anything else. The transition to hyperspace isn't instantaneous, you can see the ships zooming in and out of hyperspace and see the starfield warp. So logically there must be a point at which it works. Maybe the margin of error for that is so razor thin that it's not worth trying most of the time. Maybe the particular shape of the ships involved made it an optimal strategy that one time. I don't know, but one can come up with excuses a lot less goofy and contrived that the "maze of black holes" that justifies the parsec line about the Millennium Falcon to justify it.
People are just being particularly nitpicky about this one element while they're willing to forgive the decades of patent ridiculousness that came before.
I mean if I start taking apart every single aspect, logical issues are there. Why use useless troopers who can't hit barn when robots are so much better? Space bombers that drop bombs in WWII style doesn't make any sense at all. Empire of first 3 movies is bunch of incompetent idiots who couldn't run a local 7/11, not a galactic empire. Literally pick any aspect, it doesn't make much sense in real world.
I had blast watching new trilogy in cinema, simply because I expected same level of brainless fun as original movies, and it delivered. And that's enough, making SW into some infallible religion is as stupid as other religions.
...with the addendum that it's still possible to dislike the silliness of the prequels and the new trilogy, while embracing the silliness of the OT. Rose-tinted glasses? You betcha! The OT meant the world to me when I was young.
I like Rey though. I think the accusations of her being a Mary Sue are mysogynistic -- isn't Luke's journey in the OT essentially the same? -- as is some of the backlash against the new trilogy. Which I also find boring, but not because the main characters are women or whatever.
What undid the new trilogy, in my opinion, was a couple of things:
- As a reaction against the worst excesses of the prequels, they instead stayed too close to the OT, especially during the serviceable but uninspired The Force Awakens, basically a remake of A New Hope.
- Then, it's clear JJ Abrams and Rian Johnson didn't see eye to eye (or their creative teams didn't, same thing), and so the rest of the new trilogy is essentially a flamewar between the two, with each saying "what happened before didn't matter, THIS is what matters now!" and undoing what the other did. Which was... embarrassing. Again, the OT was also full of retcons -- e.g. it's obvious Leia wasn't Luke's sister in Episode IV -- but at least it wasn't a glorified flamewar of writers actively undoing what others before had done.
Not even close. Luke had flaws, we saw real loss with Luke that motivated him, Luke spent a lot of time training, and even then couldn't compete with his enemies, he even lost his hand for trying!
I don't even know where you're bringing misogyny into this, seems like a crazy amount of virtue signalling to bring that up out of nowhere. I hate Gary Stu's just as much, that's what ruined Dune for me.
In Star Wars, there are "force sensitive" Jedis and not sensitive. I believe Rey was force sensitive just like the Skywalkers. Rey comes from a bloodline of Palpatine too. Thus, this explains how other Jedis' are "quick" to learn, etc.
>4. They kept the elderly Leia around, instead of having her do a hero's sendoff at the end.
I don't want to get into a long drown out fight about Star Wars on HN so I'll ignore most of your points, but this complaint has always really bothered me because it shows such a huge lack of human empathy. A real person died, a person that was one of the 4 or 5 most important people to the success of Star Wars. And it has become the standard opinion of her "fans" that her last performance should have been largely thrown away to slightly improve the overall narrative arc of the movies. It really puts into perspective what fans care about. It is all about the product on the screen. Anyone involved in making the product is meaningless. Their only significance is in their role of servicing the product.
I'm glad they didn't re-edit the movie after Carrie Fisher's death even if it created new challenges for the next movie.
It's not dehumanising a person to critique the art she last appeared in.
Rian's intention was to demonstrate some semblance of humanity remained within Kylo. But the optics are that he is truly weak and in the end isn't even bothered much by the (for all he knows at the moment) imminent death of his mother. Had Kylo fired the shot he at least would have surpassed Vader in evilness, whether or not Leia saved herself.
I agree with the "fans" that she should have died in that scene, but since Rian was too scared to snuff Leia before Luke the scene shouldn't have been written in the first place.
(explaining why Leia _Skywalker_ could do it, but not any ordinary Joe)
...he ended up with a movie that was visually very striking without any plot fundamentals, that felt like a deep betrayal to the universe.
Behold the terrible power of a misplaced comma, and the warped reality it inflicts upon the careless reader.
Don't forget about the pointless plot of the animal racing with John Boyega's character that went no where.
Also, don't forget the whole dressing down of Poe Dameron by Leia and Vice-Admiral Holdo as lol guy dumb. But the action gets ignored because she decides lol ship danger ram into bad guy.
I found that I hated the movie more and more as I explained the plot to a friend. I went from this is a solid dud to I really hated this when I went and described the action in the film.
7. why bomb the base they're escaping from and not the ship they're flying to? 8. they only launch about 5 tie fighters against poe at the beginning and the ship only has about 6 self defence lasers. Rogue One showed us just how many Tie fighters could be launched to defend an important base. 9. the rebel bombers. nuf said.
there's so much wrong with that film.
Isn't Luke the same story? He went from zero to Darth Vader rival in a couple of years maybe? Yoda thought that kid Anakin was already too old for training, but Luke was a young adult.
Rey's rise was sillier still, but both heroes are the story of an "even more special individual" superseding the efforts of prior generations by virtue of their intrinsic personal connection with the force - pure genetic destiny.
Dude lost his entire hand for his arrogance
> without any plot fundamentals that felt like a deep betrayal to the universe.
There should be a comma between “fundamentals” and “that”
"Say, man, what's up?"
"Someone just made me think about the myriad ways in which The Last Jedi not just sucked, but sucked the rest of the life from the 40-year history of Star Wars"
"oooof! Here, I'll shout you a bottle of Jack's, but I know it's not enough by far".
For most of the audience, if they know Luke at all, it is as the whiny kid with the bad haircut from the old movies. So its fun to see him as old and grumpy. They do not care if he is some kind of space-Jesus in the expanded universe or whatever.
A "deep betrayal to the universe" of Slave Leia, Jar-Jar Binks, C3PO?
While I agree with your criticisms of The Last Jedi, I don't think you can under any circumstances consider this movie "artsy fartsy".
The Last Jedi is the anti-artsy fartsy movie, otherwise the term loses all meaning. It doesn't mean "bad", and an artsy-fartsy movie can be good. Focusing on just the technical or glossy aspects doesn't make a movie artsy, it just makes it bad.
So IMO we should cut the person some slack :). I don’t agree that it’s that way because ultimately that’s a movie by Disney not a movie by Rian Johnson, but it’s weird to say that technical aspects are somehow not related to art
It's of course a continuum -- few movies exist squarely in either the "artsy" or "entertaining" ends of the spectrum -- but it's a safe bet Star Wars is closer to the entertaining/spectacle end.
The problem with calling a Star Wars movie "arty fartsy" is that it twists the meaning of this term to mean "a movie I don't like", which I'd rather people did not do.
Critics love these movies, because first they see lots of movies, and something doing different, even if the different doesn't really have anything behind it, is refreshing. Also, since there isn't really any plan, you can read everything behind it, which allows you to write whatever you want very easily.
Especially for the SW universe which is getting stale, and the sequel trilogy was stale from the beginning. Euroartrash allows the illusion of a new path. An illusion, since if the movie went the way some critics imagined it, a certain character had to make the other choice at the end. But you wouldn't subvert the viewer if they had.
Viewers don't like them anywhere as much - turns out trying to confuse the viewer for the sake of it doesn't make for a good experience - and it's a bad fit for a movie universe. They really picked the wrong directors for that trilogy.
Hard disagree. First, I'm familiar with many kinds of European cinema, and second, by no means is anything Star Wars artsy-fartsy, or "Euroartrash" or whatever silly made up category.
It can be bad cinema, but that's unrelated. Star Wars is, and will always be, about entertainment first; not a single Star Wars movie or TV show escapes this fact. Not a lot artsy about it.
Subverting (some) expectations has nothing to do with being artsy. And it's not like the new trilogy was particularly gutsy either; it just wasn't very good.
We agree on one essential thing though: my main criticism of Star Wars is that it's mostly played out, with very little left to say (with some honorable exceptions). Time to give this corpse of a movie universe a rest, instead of keep milking the cash cow.
In fairness, I knew the moment JJ Abrams got the role that the sequel trilogy was doomed. It's a lot more his fault than Johnson's, and a lot of the criticisms TLJ got were a consequence of the previous movie. If SW was to modernize, it needed to find new grounds, and JJ could never do it.
I was never a big fan, but I still regret to inform everyone that Disney is going to Zombify the franchise and milk the Zombie cow forever. This video is the future of Star Wars:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zY9z7IP-1Q
(Yes, it's about the Simpsons, but all Zombie TV looks the same at the limit)
So far as betrayal goes, from the perspective of someone with that background, TLJ and Rogue One are the only two Disney Star Wars films I’d save from a fire, and I’d give it a hard think before I bothered with Rogue One. Nothing about TLJ struck me as “a deep betrayal”, and on the contrary, it felt like a return to the franchise’s roots in a lot of ways, but with enough of a twist that it wasn’t just a mediocre lazily-plotted remake (cough).
I don't have some nostalgia emotions of going to cinemas in 80s, waiting in endless lines for tickets, watching it 30x in a row... its a nice scifi soap opera but not much more by today's standards. But its true I don't care about things like canon and entire SW universe, and neither do folks around me.
It’d have been better if they leaned harder into ripping off other heist movies (ripping things off and slapping a Star Wars coat of paint on them is when Star Wars is at its best—weirdly few people who get to make Star Wars media understand that, but the people behind The Mandalorian clearly did)
We didn’t build quite enough rapport with our characters to make their deaths hit as hard as they should have. I think it was a combo writing and directing issue. Ripping off better heist films a bit more might have helped with this, too.
Sequencing and editing of some action sequences felt a bit flat. I think it’s easy for these everything’s-CG films to run into that, but its being a common problem doesn’t make it not a problem.
A couple scenes were just awful. Vader in a couple of his scenes, LOL. Could have been one of those pre- and early-YouTube Star Wars fan parodies. WTF. And I don’t even mean the one where he rages at the end.
It is one of just two that gave me any amount of some mysterious quality I think of as Star Wars Feels, and it did the best at that, even, but was dragged down too much in other areas. Coulda been excellent, ended up OK.
Not everyone cares and that's fine, but for the people that do care about how the pieces all fit together, TLJ was a travesty.
I didn’t find I needed to with TLJ, and complaints of that sort about it don’t resonate with me at all.
The Luke thing was the only one of those that really bugged me though.
However, the moment I walked out of the cinema and the spectacle faded and I thought about the implications of certain other things in the film, the less happy I was.
For example, a ship going lightspeed was used as a weapon in TLJ. The implications of this are pretty huge. Shooting lasers around in a universe where you can apparently have kinetic lightspeed weapons is dumb. If treated as canon, TLJ makes every other space battle in Star Wars nonsense.
Similarly, I would say in Star Wars up until TLJ, it was somewhat clear (to me at least) that space in Star Wars is not a vacuum, but more of an "ether". People get out of their spaceships on small asteroids without any sort of vac-suit and breathe fine. Sound propagates during space battles. Spaceships (their engines, their ability to open/close, etc) seem to operate in approximately the same way on a planet as they do in space. So when they used Leia's first onscreen usage of the Force (which is actually a whole 'nother thing) to totally break that system and treat outer space in Star Wars as if it's what we experience in our universe, it kinda sucked. And all for the sake of a "she's dead, actually she's not" gotcha thing.
In summary, Rian Johnson explicitly said one of his goals when making the film was to "subvert expectations". But I think there is a huge difference between "subverting expectations" and "indiscriminately shitting on existing canon", and he was definitely just doing more of the latter. Yes, it is very easy to "surprise" people when you make characters do things that they have no reason to do from previous character development and when you ignore the laws of physics (or lack thereof) that had previously been established.
In summary: Rogue One is the only Disney Star Wars film I would save from a fire. Though I also greatly enjoyed "Andor".
TLJ: cultural elites liked the whole burning the sacred texts thing, normies hated it. (NB: I only vaguely remember this movie and don't have strong opinions about it, don't crucify me.)
The Greatest Showman: I assume "not oscar worthy" meant specifically not "Best Picture" worthy. It's a specific type of movie that wins that award.
In any case, just like you append " reddit" to most searches, I recommend appending " letterboxd" to any movie searches. You do kind of have to read the reviews instead of just going by the rating though.
Wouldn't the "cultural elites" in this context be the hardcore Star Wars fans who hated everything about the new trilogy, and Luke's disillusionment arc in particular, and the "normies" be the mainstream fans who really didn't care?
They tend to hate Star Wars because it's wildly successful and popular, but it doesn't have any of the cultural crap that they want.
Cultural Elites are the ones who decide what wins Oscars, for example.
The nice thing about letterboxd is that many different subgroups are represented, so you can find the reviews you vibe with and get a better idea of whether the movie will appeal to subgroup you're a part of.
There's probably a pretty decent youtube essay on like the balkanization of culture and also the construction of identity through consumption, and how social media has turbo-charged all this here.
TLJ got great critic reviews and poor audience reviews because it was propaganda designed to please movie executives and their friends who don't care about Star Wars but do care about social engineering (the badly named "cultural elites"). It wasn't intended to please the people who paid to go watch it.
In reality, sequels tend to be less successful than the original, but can expect a certain audience. Since only very successful movies get sequels, sequels are still safer investments than original movies.
The third movie was still one of the most successful movies of all time.
So highest-grossing doesn't mean absolutely anything about how good a movie is, or whether people actually liked it. There is a huge contingent of people that follow religiously a franchise and will pay to watch the new one even if they've been told it is not very good. You don't skip the latest Star Wars movie if you call yourself a Star Wars fan, and it is marketing's job to create the Star Wars fan in the first place.
As a cynic, I'd argue the opposite to what you said: you have to spend more on marketing if the material is not very good in the first place. The result is a terrible movie that becomes a meme and still makes bank.
Otherwise, yes, I generally agree that sales are not necessarily an indication of quality.
Marketing can boost ticket sales, but there are plenty of examples of movies which flopped despite heavy marketing, just because the audiences didn't like the movie that much.
The ratings on RT and IMDB does not represent the average audience member.
The thing is, the last trilogy was tremendously enjoyable by general audience, and this is what generates sales after initial weekend. Few butthurt starwars nerds writing endlessly on internet (just like here with consistently flawed arguments) or review bombing out of pure hate don't change anything, luckily.
I had great fun, considered it as brainless popcorn fun just as original trilogy and prequels, exactly just like everybody else I know. Sometimes, that's enough.
Attendance is expectations, and rating is reality, after the necessary act of paying to watch the film. A film that someone is excited to see can still stink.
It did make 30% less than TFA.
I was astounded by just how bad it was -> rating.
I did see the next one (the last of the Skywalker series), mostly out of morbid curiosity. That one was just...random. After that I stopped. The halo of the franchise only carries so far.
TGS: It didn't win an oscar for best song, it was nominated. Regardless of that, best song is not usually considered a top category in the Oscar's from a film critic POV. That would be best movie, director, script, actor/actress.
80% fresh means that 80% of reviews are "positive" it's not 8/10 how some people like to think.
I would much rather watch a movie that has a 50% on RT and a 70 on Metacritic than a movie that has 100% on RT and a 70 on Metacritic. I might not like that 50% movie, but those ratings show some people really love it. The 100% movie's ratings show that everyone kinda likes it, but few people feel strongly about it meaning it is probably not a very interesting watch.
It doesn't imply that at all
* Overly artsy
* Overly political. Reviewers feel the need to give it a positive review because they agree with the message, while the audience will split because they're not as homogenous politically.
* Outraged fans. Reviewers aren't typically fans of a given franchise and so won't notice if it ruins something that would irritate a fan. The Last Jedi is in this category.
* Bribery.
Doesn't happen as much anymore since they require proof of ticket purchase to review, but it still will on occasion. And it happened enough previously that they specifically had to put the proof of purchase condition in place.
Critics 56%
Audience 84%
That movie wasn't fun. It was the first part in the series where hoped the bad guy wins.
In the previous films the nonsense physics was at least entertaining.
The show that always sticks in my mind as an example is HBO’s Watchmen, which has 96% with critics and 56% with the audience.
And example would be Dave Chapelles specials.
I can't actually think of any films that attracted the same foaming at the mouth as you see by conservatives.
Could that be because you are stuck in an echo chamber and experiencing confirmation bias? "The outrage is legitimate when we do it"
Perhaps his set isn't to the comedic tastes of everyone, but there's an easy solution to that: don't watch it if you don't like it.
The Watchmen TV show is a horrible example as it's literally fan-fiction with little to no real connection to the graphic novel. So that fact alone pissed a lot of people off.
It completely ignored the only actual "squeal" (Doomsday Clock) to create the story they wanted to tell while borrow the popularity of the name to get attention.
Even ignoring all that did you actually even watch it? 96% is complete bullshit. 96% means some of the best TV ever made. I don't think it's a 56% but the 56% is way closer to reality then the 96%.
You seem not to understand the Rotten Tomatoes score though. 96% just means that 96% of critics gave it a positive review. That says nothing about how positive the review was.
Idk how many of them would describe it as one of the best shows ever, though that’d be an interesting score as well.
You might disagree, but that’s just an example of what makes the show so good. It’s shocking and subtle and up for interpretation. It makes you think, regardless of whether you agree.
With these types of shows, the TV writing will almost certainly be orders of magnitude worse since the originals were written by great authors with great imaginations. So, the more the TV writers try to innovate, the more glaring it's likely to be to fans of the originals. Plus, the innovation typically involves TV writers just ham-fistedly hacking in the drama de jour. I just can't treat the TV versions as independent from the source material when I try to watch them.
The show had realistic bad guys who did things that the audience is meant to have a strongly negative reaction towards.
I’d take that over cookie cutter cartoon villains any day.
And the idea that TV writers aren’t capable of good writing is total BS by the way. Check out shows like The Wire, Sopranos, Chernobyl, Succession, or Severance.
Eg Captain Marvel or She Hulk being generally disliked compared to Iron Man, Hulk or Captain America, The Last Jedi being disliked in the Star Wars community or in gaming, The Last of Us Part 2 being much more controversial than the original.
Put aside the politics for a bit and actually pay attention to the arguments and it becomes clear that people aren't specifically complaining that Captain Marvel is a woman, but that she isn't interesting or likable. Similarly TLOU2 wasn't controversial primarily because of the trans character, but because it essentially wrecked what people liked so much about the original for seemingly no meaningful reason. When faced with that, it's unsurprising that the conclusion tends to be that the series was sacrificed at the altar of politics.
This is such a common tactic in gaming when a game is controversial, just lean on the claim that gamers are typically bigots and get away with anything because most people don't want to be called bigots. It's why Steam Reviews are preferable to reviews from journalists on whether or not a game is worth playing.
If you don’t change anything, then what’s the point of watching/reading/playing the same thing over and over? Doesn’t any series just get incredibly boring without variation?
Great literature, TV, and films say things. Sometimes you might not agree. But at least it makes you think. Ideally, each entry in a series should say different or evolving things. Just look at how The Wire explores different aspects of Baltimore’s crime epidemic in each season as an example.
And I’m not saying Captain Marvel is great or even good by the way. I thought it was just another boring superhero move, and a D or F tier at that. Same goes for a lot of your other examples.
But I do think even beloved series have to have room for adaptation and experimentation. Because otherwise, they stagnate and can get to a point where they’re no longer worth watching.
Just look at Mission Impossible for example. Each film is well made and has fun action. But do we really ever need another one? Doesn’t essentially the same thing happen every time? Isn’t Ethan Hunt always going to save the day and risk everything for his friends and the mission?
Nobody said that. You're building a straw man and putting words into people's mouths (or comments, rather).
Of course there's always going to be changes when adapting for different media. People dislike when important things change.
> If you don’t change anything, then what’s the point of watching/reading/playing the same thing over and over? Doesn’t any series just get incredibly boring without variation?
I've re-read lots of books, and there's many reasons I do it. Sometimes it's as stupid as missing the characters. Sometimes I'm co-reading with a friend who just recently started the series and I recommended it; so it's like a little book club. Sometimes it's nostalgia, etc.
Similarly regarding TV shows. Sometimes I just wanna share the moment with another person, see their reaction etc.
Games are a whole different situation though. Not sure why you even put that in there. Do you play games often? I feel like you either don't, or just play a genre of games I don't. It kinda baffles me why you'd even ask what the point of replaying games is...
> Great literature, TV, and films say things. Sometimes you might not agree. But at least it makes you think. Ideally, each entry in a series should say different or evolving things.
I both agree and disagree... I like the way something like BSG or Arcane (TV show, great btw) or even Buffy "says things" where they're not, ... literally spelled out in a patronising way?
> But I do think even beloved series have to have room for adaptation and experimentation. Because otherwise, they stagnate and can get to a point where they’re no longer worth watching
I kinda agree with this, though. There's some great successful examples of this (JoJo's Bizarre Adventures or Supernatural come to mind)
> Many times the "rightwing media" driven review bombing is about beloved series being damaged/unfaithful.
> The Watchmen TV show is a horrible example as it's literally fan-fiction with little to no real connection to the graphic novel. So that fact alone pissed a lot of people off.
Both are implying that new entries in a series should stick closely to previous entries. I don’t think being “unfaithful” or changing certain details is wrong if it’s necessary to tell a different story or provide a new experience.
And for games, are you really going to defend how developers make essentially the same Call of Duty and Halo over and over again and sell it for $60?
I never said that games have no replay value, and now you are the one attacking a straw man. I’m criticizing when new entries in a series bring nothing new to the table.
I can see how my wording there could lead to misunderstanding, but still, I thought it was clear based on context what I meant.
Telling a different story that's consistent with the established lore is fine. Dedicated fans get annoyed when established lore breaks; especially when it's something important.
And about writing original stories: I'm all for it! That's not what's happening though, is it? They use the original work as a platform to tell their lame/modified stories or spread some political message (bait&switch the audience basically).
A more honest thing to do would be to put into credits something like "Original stories (loosely) based on {series title}". Then at least people would go in with the correct expectations, and maybe even be pleasantly surprised by the semi-original story.
> are you really going to defend how developers make essentially the same Call of Duty and Halo over and over again and sell it for $60?
Isn't this happening with TV shows and films recently, though? They're all the same cookie cutter TV shows with nearly identical ensemble of characters and the plots look like someone just filled out the same rigid story template.
> I never said that games have no replay value, and now you are the one attacking a straw man. I’m criticizing when new entries in a series bring nothing new to the table. > > I can see how my wording there could lead to misunderstanding, but still, I thought it was clear based on context what I meant.
Right. Sorry then; it wasn't clear to me what you meant. We agree, then, I think. But the point you tried to make is even muddier now. I know you're not saying JK Rowling wrote seven Philosopher Stones, but I'm not sure what you mean. I sure everyone understands it's normal for stories to evolve over the course of a series?
I just pointed out Watchmen as a rare example where the producers took a big risk by making it about racism and violent extremism. Even though it was a superhero show, it felt fresh due to the new take and ideas.
It rankled a lot of feathers in the process, likely reinforcing Hollywood’s desire to continue making cookie cutter shows instead.
And about Harry Potter - it did a great job of evolving throughout the series to stay fresh. The kids grew up, learned new types of magic, and had constantly changing relationships for one thing.
Also, the series constantly introduced new and interesting characters or killed off extremely popular characters as well.
There was even an installment that heavily made use of time travel, which I thought was depicted in a really cool and satisfying way.
The Rings of Power is a recent example where almost every strong and noble character is either black or a woman or both. It serves no purpose in the story.
Watchmen was a rare example where they actually took on racial issues rather than just pay lip service to them.
Black Panther, for example, was a perfectly fine film... but who isn't bored of Marvel stuff now, and is it really worth 96%? Higher than The Dark Knight? And even that was probably somewhat overrated due to Health Ledger's passing...
One of the worse end fights of a marvel film, too, which is saying something, and really matters since that’s like 30 damn minutes of the film.
Lots of good elements and performances. Middling MCU film overall.
There were daily articles on news sites like Breitbart about how it was the best movie of the year and how biased critics were trying to destroy it. About how readers should watch it to help support a conservative alternative to Hollywood.
We ritually act online as if trying to create workarounds for obviously corruptible services will make things better, but it simply doesn't. It only serves to keep rewarding companies that have sold us out, including the process of normalizing the sale and security compromise of our user data. Supporting bad apps and companies after breaches of trust only works to reward them and undermine reliability overall for ethical services and companies. Workarounds also enable companies to breach trust more and more over time as well... Class action lawsuits are also no consolation, as they only cost a fraction of the illicit gains a company makes on being willfully corrupt, and they mostly reward law firms, not victims.
I hope we change this workaround narrative, and start holding bad business accountable for it's schemes instead of embracing it as normalized behavior. LET THEM FAIL. :/
I opt for the audience in this case.
Lost Highway (1997) - 68% Tomatometer - 87% Audience Score
Fight Club (1999) - 79% Tomatometer - 96% Audience Score
American Psycho (2000) - 68% Tomatometer - 85% Audience Score
Requiem for a Dream (2000) - 78% Tomatometer - 93% Audience Score
Dancer in the Dark (2000) - 69% Tomatometer - 91% Audience Score
Oldboy (2003) - 82% Tomatometer - 94% Audience Score
The Prestige (2006) - 77% Tomatometer - 92% Audience Score
Joker (2019) - 69% Tomatometer - 88% Audience Score
A lot of the old movies you picked are famous and popular in movie pop culture. Audience scoring this in RT probably went out of their way to watch these films, they are not as organic as recent scores as you have a larger number audience scores created by movie lovers.
If you find examples post 2015 when RT became a mainstream scoring system that would be great.
Only movie that's current in your list is "The Joker" which among critics is considered to be a copycat of other critically acclaimed films (taxi driver, the comedian). This is a film that tried hard to look artsy fartsy but was not.
I think the critics are wrong about Joker. The fact that it's an homage to Taxi Driver and King of Comedy is completely intentional, to the point of casting Robert De Niro as the talk show host. I don't consider that a detraction from the film at all. Many critics also interpreted it as some kind of political document, which is totally off the mark. One of the big problems with criticism in the 21st century is that people have lost the ability to tell the difference between portraying something and endorsing it.
As for the Joker I wasn't agreeing with the critics just describing the consensus based on reviews I've heard. To me personally it did feel like it took a bit too much inspiration from the movies it was trying to pay tribute to. When does a homage becomes a copy?
The political angle is irrelevant and I agree with you on that.
See -
Sound of Freedom (2023) - 60% Tomoatometer - 99% Audience Score
15% tomatometer, 85% audience score.
Sure it's a dumb stoner comedy, but it's an _amazing_ one. Being "dumb" is half the fun, but of course that translates into "more gross than comedic" and "lazy and unrewarding"
* Tomatometer ≫ Audience, there is artificial bias on the critics side, perhaps due to political reasons, or perhaps due social conforming by film critics within a clique, or reviews are being paid for by the film industry.
* Tomatometer ≪ Audience, probably more fun, or less serious film, or may have politically confronting themes that critics don't like to praise.
* Tomatometer ≈ Audience, rating is probably a good indicator of film quality.
Probably more in line with the idea that film critics have an inherent type of political inclination being a small, creative niche.
I like your test, but I recently watched "Platonic" series and loved it. But Tomat says 93%, Plebs only concede 74% -- I declare it is not Art house.
Or woke. Critics love woke, at least officially. Audiences not so much. I suspect critics also do not actually like those movies in private.
We are born with pretty good 1:1 bullshit detectors, and exceptionally credible people easily earn my trust. Aggregated review platforms like rotten tomatoes and Amazon are just garbage.
That's something you don't get with aggregators.
The more reviews that go into a rating, the more effort has to be made by bad actors to influence the score. And the higher the possibility that someone with integrity will reveal the scheme.
He measures TDS which I admit is one way to judge a water filter but people may have other considerations they have to consider such as are they looking to filter fluoride, bacteria, etc? Some of the poorly performing filters that fared badly in TDS filtering filter these other items much better/or handle the material better(not filtering fluoride).
Also small nitpick, he used one of the manufacturer's free provided TDS meters instead of buying a independent meter(the TDS meter was provided by the winning product). I know because I got the same meter provided free with my Zerowater meter. It seems accurate when I compare it to an independent meter but if you know that it was provided by the manufacturer it is not a good look.
Now this is the only video I have a gripe with because I have done a lot of independent research on water filters before seeing this video so these things popped out to me...but what about his other videos? I am not and cannot be an expert on all the different items he reviews so what else is he not testing properly or leaving out?
The first thing I will say is that water filters are not Todd's core competency. He usually tests motor oils and tools, so water filters are certainly out in left field for him.
He can't test every dimension of a product, partly due to lack of time and partly because he can't cheaply/easily test every scenario. TDS is mainly what people buy water filters for. Yes, SOME people want to filter flouride and bacteria but these are uncommon. (Flouride because it's generally safe to drink in municipal tap water, and bacteria because most water has flouride or comes from a sterile well.)
Even I would like to see him do more in-depth testing of some tools, but he does a good job overall of testing whether most products stand up to the maker's claims and whether they survive typical use. (It's surprising how many do not.) I'd personally like to see teardowns and subjective assessments of build quality along with more punishing longevity tests but I know that is asking quite a lot on top of what he already does.
Plus, the YouTube Recommendation AI demands weekly uploads and a constant stream of engagement from your viewers, or else your channel gets sent straight to the dark, sweaty backlot of obscurity and your funding along with it.
No, he's not. Wirecutter is in fact extremely useful and reliable, in my experience. This one dude is not 100x better than that. Perhaps in some cases he's slightly better, sure. He is obviously not "orders of magnitude" better.
If you take the natural choice of base, e, then "orders of magnitude" would only imply Todd to be 7.39 times better, which he is in many cases — for example, by measuring the self-information of reviews — and he may even cross that threshold in the aggregate.
-Requires the reviewer to actually own / play the game
-Highlights the amount of time played so you can easily filter out people who just dismissed
-Lets you know who got the game for free or reviewed the game in early access
-The magnitude of votes is shown which lets you know if it is a niche title or mainstream blockbuster
-Gives you a timeline of votes so you can see changes over time and see if there are any review bomb cycles happening
It's not perfect but I find it wild that people think there is any value in these movie review aggregator sites when you can't even verify if the person watched the movie at all and these guys can just spam votes. Worse yet there isn't any incentive for the site to change this since more traffic means more eyeballs for ads.
Well, maybe one more caveat: user expectations as they relate to the genre or company. One thing I noticed while browsing the hidden gems list* -- which have games with extremely high ratings -- is that there's a LOT of hidden object games on there. I think there's one cat series that appears like three or four times. And some more conventional genres like RTSes or action RPG's are hardly present at all.
I think this is due to expectations: people don't expect a lot out of a hidden object game, they're generally very simple, and a small indie title can easily meet those low expectations. Whereas a genre that has included many big budget titles, people have higher expectations, even larger, highly experienced dev teams have a hard time pleasing everyone.
But also, lists like that also implicitly often are euphemisms for “titles that are good, but cater to non-mainstream interests, and so never achieve vitality.” Hidden-object games get (probably unfairly and mostly self-perpetuatingly) classified as “girly games” — which leads to major game reviewers and journalists just completely ignoring them when they come out. So a good hidden-object game will almost always, inherently be a “hidden gem.”
Some games are so good that you may want to play them even if you're not the biggest fan of their genre. I guarantee you plenty of people played Undertale without being big JRPG fans.
There's the occasional "in joke" comment that usually only makes sense to people who're already past a certain point in the game (or reference a meme known about the game), but they're nowhere close (not even in astronomical terms) to being being the majority review type. Even then, they still have to rate the game.
And, if early, potentially game-breaking, bugs have been fixed. I've seen many games with poor initial reviews, due to performance problems, fixed in the next GPU driver release.
For a more extreme example, you have something like No Man's Sky, which is nearly a different game, which early reviews don't apply to.
The quality of reviews was really good.
With all things social media/crowdsourced, the biggest is the most useful, and the most difficult to influence, and the most funded, by all actors.
What do you suggest as an alternative in this scenario with Rotten Tomatoes? Nothing really rides on it. People are widely critical of it. I just don't really see a big problem here.
Find reviewers who agree with your tastes, and who like the things you enjoy. Follow them. Ignore the metacritic-like sites.
This is especially useful for games. Which is why it boggles my mind when people get upset at reviewers. Reviewers are not reviewing for everyone. Rather, they are reviewing for their readers. It's okay to disagree. It just means this persons tastes are different for yours.
The problem is people forgot how to use reviewers, and instead, just see them as weapons in a the game of "highest metacritic score."
It's silly.
Find the reviewers you agree with most of the time. Find several, listen to all of them, and make your judgement from that. Ignore the masses.
they are borg...
So today I have found it useful to look at bad reviews, and the worst reviews the critics have for something the more likely it is I will enjoy it...
Human curation seems to be the only way out, but it can be so unergonomic. I don't really want to watch no-name movie reviewers on YouTube for hours until I find some I agree with. I don't want to read rambling blog posts to figure out whether or not someone liked a film.
The ideal flow for me would be: rate a handful of films, then it provides a list of curators that I can choose to follow. Each curator has a list of films that they've endorsed ("you should check this out, for this reason").
83% of critics gave it a positive review on a binary scale. Not an average rating of 83%.
Whereas 38% of audience gave it higher than 3.5 stars.
They aren't exactly comparable.
I knew some LOTR superfans who were upset with the first three Peter Jackson movies only being about a thousand hours long and omitting various plots and characters.. but these people were a minority and most loved the new thing. And then when Jackson made the hobbit movies the reception was very different. The audience didn't change, his new movies just weren't up to the same standard they expected. And if the show is getting hate, I think it's fair to assume that's because the show isn't good either. Maybe it would get better reviews if it were original IP and didn't have Jackson's first three LOTR movies casting a shadow on it, but blaming the fans for this isn't right.
But, it's doubtful I know anyone well enough to ask their opinion on a fantasy series who hasn't read the Silmarillion.
It's a solid C+. Like Wheel of Time or Foundation. Not horrible. Not great either. Not the best take on the source material, but it's fine I guess.
I don't know, I feel like both the people who say it is great and the people who say it is horrible are both wrong. If you would ask me for an opinion, I would say it is a show that I watched.
I was surprised when watching the first episode, after seeing 83% from critics on RT. It did not match my expectations from prior RT scores. I remember one movie that had a 90-something rating from critics and 30-something rating from viewers, whose name I unfortunately can't remember. It was strange, like a C movie from an alternate universe with different tropes. I can imagine being a reviewer, bored to death of the endless rehashes I have to watch, enjoying it because at least it's different. Rings of Power, not so much.
They decided to slap the name on a show that only represented LOTR in name. So, I think they fairly get to receive the backlash of an obvious money grab.
I mean, just to be silly, if we translate it to typical US grade scale… that’s like on the B to B- cusp which seems reasonable for the show.
The formulation is a way to collapse precise scores into a binary classification of thumbsup or thumbsdown. So, another way to put it would be 83% of reviewers 'liked it'
Side note, I used to really like Rotten Tomatoes 10+ years ago but I noticed a drop in quality, likely Goodhart's law in action as some other commenters here have pointed out.
And shows are often reviewed after only a few episodes. Typically two to four episodes are released to reviewers before the premiere, and this is what the review is based on.
So a high rating means most reviewers reacted positively to the first few episodes.
I have seen Rotten Tomatoes apparently just glitch out scores, too. Wheel of Time season one has 94 reviews with 64 positive, which is 68% positive, yet the tomatometer says 81%. Sometimes that is because of the episode-by-episode reviews, which are overwhelmingly from recap blogs that only cover what they like, but even in this case, that doesn't make up the difference.
Years ago a friend of mine in SF started a review site, it gained traction by being fair and balanced. Once the website was a top 1000 site on the internet, my friend started to try and make money with advertising.
After a while, he grew dependent on a few select advertisers. Too dependent.
While he had built the business with integrity, at some point, he decided to start "helping" his advertisers get better reviews... to build goodwill and keep the checks coming.
This is fine, except it undermines the purpose of a review site. This is the time when his traffic plained out and started to decline.
I'm sure the same is happening here.
People that 'hate' art movies are usually wrong. People that 'love' popcorn movies are too. Art movies are nuanced and delicate, so hating it with a 1 star review is too broad of a brush to paint your opinion with. If you don't like art and connecting with humanity, don't watch art movies (peasant). Similarly, popcorn movies are trash (<3) and love is too strong a word. Have fun, be entertained, but if you love The Avengers with all 5 stars you are paper thin.
I speak strongly with a smile and fully accept that film is a subjective medium, open to interpretation, and you can go ahead and hate The Royal Tenenbaums if you want, and love The Avengers if you want, but I will take your review with a large grain of salt and you deserve to not to be taken too seriously.
One would have to work hard to prove they were NOT biased in the first place, or at least since 2011 when they sold out to the movie industry.
FYI, the other big name in movie reviews, IMDb, has been owned by Amazon since 1998 (color me surprised, I didn't know it had been this long until I checked on Wikipedia), and they also had their own streaming service, IMDb TV, now called Amazon Freevee.
It is 2000s UX but sometimes that is quite functional. Especially the compare feature which seems like its generating the charts on demand but is quite nice to use.
When IMDB was sold, it was seen as if wikipedia was sold to a private company. Amazon promised to leave IMDB mostly alone, and to provide data feeds / db backups for free. They are still available although new features of IMDb have not been migrated to the original datasets.
It's a pity keywords aren't in those datasets. Still, it's nice that this still exists. https://developer.imdb.com/non-commercial-datasets/
the User Reviews seem to be more accurate but RT does manipulate them as well citing "view botting" for any trends that do not match their desired outcome from a film
They would generate that score by looking at other things you have rated, finding ~100 other users who have voted similarly to you, and then showing the scores that those other users thought of each movie you are thinking of watching.
This is much harder to bot, since you will only see the botted scores if you yourself vote like a bot.
I don't share many values with movie critics. Here's an spicy example that will mark me as a philistine forever.
I think Princess Mononoke was an awful film with a navel gazing director who gets treated far too kindly because of a childish desire for "whimsy". Everytime I see a Ghibli pusher here, I laugh.
No movie critic will engage with such a perspective (because it is "wrong", the movie is "powerful", the art is "beautiful" and the characters are "strong" — every one of which is literally a matter of interpretation). Depending on critics is depending on people who have to satisfy their local equivalent of the Reddit front page. Why would you trust them except to know the current rightthink?
It's not the same as a scientist describing climate change or an engineer explaining the loads on a bridge.
Freddy Got Fingered, the movie I personally found funniest, is currently at 11% on Rotten Tomatoes. It's full of creative and quotable scenes, and never resorts to tired cliches (despite its genre there is no toilet humor). Penalizing a gross-out comedy for being "gross" is a clear failure of criticism. Even Roger Ebert, who usually judged movies by the standards of the genre, made this mistake.
Batman v Superman, the superhero movie I personally found most engaging, is at 29%. It's one of the few movies in the genre that feels like it has any ambition to be serious art. It takes the characters seriously, without the constant jokes the Marvel movies use to reassure the audience that they're not really comic book nerds. Critics considered this a reason to rate it poorly.
While I don't personally like the "gross-out" style of movie, the the discussion of the movie exposed a lot of nuance behind the movie that I didn't know. The difference between the conversation and the original "professional reviews" really was telling; I much prefer the former to the later.
*: I am aware of the contradiction; in my defense, I mostly care about their comments about movie structure.
It's easily one of my favourite films for these reasons.
The bottom line is basically every single site that aggregates reviews or has user reviews is functionally useless now, as there are entire multi-billion dollar industries employing tens of thousands of people in China, India, Russia and the Philippines devoted to flooding the sites with fake reviews and the sites themselves know this all to well and do nothing to stop is as they make more money this way.
For non-contemporary movies I trust the Sight&Sound poll [1]. Yes, it's mostly artsy-fartsy movies. I love them.
Sure, that can also be gamed, but very much less so: if you are voting you can pick only your top 10 movies ever, and then the next poll is in ten years. It's very difficult to push marketing on it.
I can of course see two points of failure still:
1. Since it's Sight&Sound who picks the voters, they could choose only voters that fits their "ideology". I don't see what this ideology could be. Also, most directors are very well-known, and they wouldn't vote for Marvel Movie #19 since the votes are public [2].
2. A lot of voters could make a deal among themselves to all pick a certain movie. This is in part mitigated by the large numbers of voters, but of course it can happen.
Paul Schrader gave a lot of shit online because the #1 movie in the 2022 edition was "Jeanne Dielman". He sees that as "Distorted Woke Reappraisal" [3].
I think he's full of shit, and the S&S Poll is the most credible snapshot of (art?) movies made every 10 years.
[1] https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/greatest-films-all-ti...
[2] https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/greatest-films-all-ti...
[3] https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/paul-schrader-sig...
Deadpool scored 85% on rotton tomatoes and that makes sense, it was a bit different than the normal "Marvel" films and was well acted but it is totally not something I would enjoy.
Napolean Dynamite scored 32% and strictly speaking, it was a very oddball film. I really enjoyed it and there are more than enough quotes in it to still make me laugh over 10 years later.
The idea that crowd-sourcing reviews leads to some kind of useful truth is marginal at best but downright wrong.
The problem is curation. I don't want to poll just about anyone. I only want to poll a selected list.
Selected how?
We can go by "seriousness", respect and proven knowledge, like the S&S Poll or the ASC for best cinematography [1].
Or, as you said, trust someone (or a group of people) because I like what they like.
[1] https://theasc.com/news/asc-unveils-list-of-100-milestone-fi...
Just for example:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/lousy-listing-on-sight-a... https://www.worldofreel.com/blog/2022/12/b9nt3og3xtalyb227h3... https://www.worldofreel.com/blog/jb7gl4mobhpnsn03tc6tek9fzko...
The S&S poll results were very controversial and I don't really want to come across as saying the list was good or bad, or that any film should or should not have been ranked as it was (I'm at a point in my life where I think the whole idea of making lists is flawed and elitist regardless of how the polling is done), but Schrader wasn't the only one complaining about the process. In fact some people were predicting controversy before the list was even revealed because of how the process was unfolding. Having the person who is responsible for the voting pool go into it with the objective of "setting the canon on fire" — rather than obtaining a more voting pool more representative of the cinema community worldwide per se — I think is fairly opening themselves up for criticism.
More broadly, I think even if you accept the S&S poll as fine (which maybe it is), the controversy kind of points to ways in which the process could be gamed. I think that's true regardless of whether you think the poll was better this year or in the past: if it was better this year, it says a lot about how it was implicitly gamed in the past, and if it was problematic this year, I think it says something about how it was gamed that way.
Maybe Goodhart's law is inevitable.
I think you're right.
I like the list, but I also don't think that the canon was set on fire.
Yes, there are a couple more women-directed movies near the top. The list is virtually identical to the one from 2012.
Originally, RT was more or less a 'good faith' measurement of the general sentiment\quality of a film, but it is so easily manipulated it was inevitable that it would become meaningless.
While they definitely measure on different metrics, the goal of a critic is supposed to be to measure films worth watching (even if only for a subset of the total audience). When 95% of critics tell you to see a movie that only 10% of people enjoy, something's broken.
I believe I addressed this. I specifically mentioned that they have different metrics so you wouldn't expect it to fully lineup. It's the drastic disconnect that is the problem. If critics love a movie but literally no one else does, what are they seeing? Or, more directly, what is the point of me putting any validity into their words?
It depends on what you mean by "worth watching".
You can't apply necessity to art. I don't have to eat some shitty art-film to survive.
* - Hate is probably an overloaded word anyways. I don't know many kids who genuinely "hate" broccoli, they just think eating broccoli means they won't get ice cream because they don't have rational thought processes and can't think/imagine beyond the next fifteen minutes. Adults can, and so the distaste is less extreme, because they can have ice cream on their cheat day. But obesity rates would show that nothing really changes, in how much they "like" things.
Of course it's impossible for one person's evidence to refute what happens "in general", but either this isn't true for me, or I don't understand what you mean. I love broccoli. I don't hate ice cream, but I certainly wouldn't eat it every day, which I'd be happy to do for broccoli. I don't think I'm responding in any significant way to external factors, only to eating one regularly making me feel better than eating the other regularly. I don't imagine my experience to be universal, but nor do I imagine it to be very rare.
However, I addressed your point:
> obesity rates would show that nothing really changes, in how much they "like" things.
If everyone loved healthy food and hated treats, obesity rates wouldn't be so high, and Frito-Lay wouldn't be one of the most profitable food companies in the world. Obviously, no general claim is universal.
40 million people not paid to review movies seem to hate this movie; but the 100 people who love it are both A) paid to watch it and B) seem to entirely fit the vast minority of viewers who like it.
Well... expectations shift between a movie ticket and a bucket of popcorn for 10€ or the same for 30€.
Cinema has gone really damn expensive, and loaded with ads to boot - but movie critics don't get that crap experience, they get exclusive previews. It's literally a different world.
My GF adds other points: while the audience as a general loves "typical plot" movies, critics who have to see 20 movies based on the same formula a year will be sick of it.
Imagine applying that metric to any other job.
"Fuck, this is the 20th React component I've had to build...I'll just do it shitty instead."
Clearly though their is more to a movie or book than just the plot.
Nowadays my first guess would be a black actor in a role previously played by whites.
Such a big difference looks like review bombing
There are far more where the verified audience score is way higher and they tend to either be religious films or films with very low numbers of audience reviews (aka selection bias)
1) The TV Guide summary, which consists of one or two sentences describing what happens during the film, perhaps a categorization, then some references to the actors wherein based on a scale which multiplies how much time that person is in the film against how famous that person is. The runtime part is easy. Then you have your star rating, which is almost agonizing. This product is used to determine whether or not you will just sort of put something on while you fold laundry.
2) The "do I want to exert effort and/or money seeing this film?" review. This is the most dangerous part. You have no idea who is reading this. How will you know that they will or will not like this movie? Your best bet here is to cover the most objective portions of the film in detail. Your subjective impressions must highlight their subjectivity and point out your own biases. This allows for the "Ebert doesn't really do most horror films well" factor, as well as some of his other quirks. For all that I might disagree, he wore his heart on his sleeve and I could predict which films he might give short shrift.
3) The third product is a monologue, hopefully something which can start a conversation somewhere, about the more abstract businesses of film-making. How has this actor developed over time? Is this a worthy entry in this director's career? Are there rip-offs, allusions, homages, nudges and winks? You can talk about anything which struck you during the film, so long as you leave room to begin a kind of dialogue with someone, somewhere.
The best you can hope for is that a reader understands what you have said in your review to the point where they can decide not to see a film you like, or vice versa, because you have sufficiently explained your reaction. I would not call myself a tastemaker, but I am good at, with friends, identifying what they will and will not like, whether or not I care for the film. A great deal of that just comes from examination of my own biases (my turn-ons, my turn-offs, my habits and my aversions).
It is a shame, but not especially shocking, at how we have just another clumsy fumble at our wallets and minds.
Also anyone with a little cynicism who watches movies is probably not shocked by this.
There has been a lot of positive review inflation over time and there are other tricks like having a score for 'critics' and a separate score for 'top critics'.
Then there is question of if the review they post was actually positive or not. There are plenty of ways to bend and play games with their system and the seem to do it. Just like yelp 'does not delete bad reviews' if you pay them, they just get relegated to a hard to find page and not counted.
I only casually use it to find books I might like. So far I've not noticed anything changed since Amazon acquired it (didn't even realise they did, in fact)
The shadow of the Butcher's Thumb looms large. I've started to see it more and more. Everyone wants to put their sticky digits on the scale to push it in the direction they like. Film reviews, product testing, the news ... and there's so many ways they can do it: the "window" of the data, deciding what is an outlier, and so on. I get to feeling paranoid when I look into it.
A decentralised rating system would work really nicely on something like nostr. You still have the issue of spam to solve, but that's a larger, orthogonal issue.
Critics would be loathe to be discovered taking money if it dropped their ability to influence aggregate ranking (and those who send the money would be loathe to send it if sending it made it worthless).
Critics aren't a proxy or predictor of some objectively verifiable outcome. If you want something useful for you, you could vuild a model with your ratings of movies you've seen, then then takes critics ratings of those movies to build a model of the relationship between individual critics ratings (in isolation or combination) and predicted ratings for you, but other than that you'd just be rating how well one proxy for “will I like it” matches a different proxy.
This is why the pre-internet system of reading your local newspaper and seeing what their film reviewer thought worked okay. From long experience you'd know that the reviewer e.g. loved anything with anti-war themes, had really high standards for romance subplots, and couldn't stand fantasy. Thus you could fit their review into your own standards and perhaps wind up interpreting an intensely negative review as a recommendation that you'd love that film.
Critical Drinker ones usually align quite well with both my opinion and the audience score.
The guardian came with the following real headline in 2019:
>Forget Joker: here's the film you should see about an extremist loner While Todd Phillips’ vacuous DC origins tale fails to go beneath its grimy surface, low-budget drama Cuck offers a braver alternative
Schrader's last half dozen films were rated across the spectrum by critics on RT, middling by audiences, and barely broke even in aggregate. The idea that this is done combination of RT and dumber audiences' fault is a possibility but equally possible is that he just doesn't know how to make movies for modern audiences.
Was Amazing Spiderman incredible? no it was far from it, was Venom 1 good? it was good except the last fight, literally.
Yet its rating was 30%. (audience 80%)
Morbius as much as I hated the actor personally, I liked the movie, it felt like spiderman 1 in a way, the cinematic shots were better than anything Marvel has done in years.
Yet they all get horribly rated, Black Adam was I felt, good, more interesting and better CGI than literally every Marvel movie since maybe endgame, yet it was critically butchered.
NOBODY can tell me that Disney doesn't weaponize critics.
(For people who do not get it, review bombing Sony produced Marvel movies made them do worse at box office which in turn made Sony or forced Sony to give the rights back to Marvel).
Lol, fuck you too, buddy.
I wonder if we can find out which films these were. Interesting that the punishment was applied to the films, not to the critics.
The article makes it sound like this is how much the firm is paying members of the official critics pool for reviews, not ordinary users. If $50 is the upper bound for how much they can get paid then journalism must be an even more terrible career than I already thought.
I don't know how niche outlets are even making it, even with large fractions of pure SEO "pay the bills" articles.
In either case, my best advice for reviews in general is: take it with a big grain of salt. Ie don’t compare 7.5 with 7.8. Barbie vs Oppenheimer ratings is not gonna tell you anything useful, even if there’s no gaming going on. Never obsess over subjective measurements.
Instead, use a 5.2 rating as an indicator that it’s very likely to be bad. But if it’s say a documentary about something you have nerded out on, then it may have you glued to the screen.
I struggle to see how the gp here can still be so bothered by the “feminist” film that did just a couple hundred thousand in the box office five years ago personally. That is a tiny drop in the bucket.
I just can’t fathom why you felt compelled to reference it and the fact that it was “feminist”
I only know about YouTube's policies, but I do wonder if the story at other social networks for paid-sponsorship disclosure is similar, since they all have an advertising component.
Well color me shocked, absolutely shocked.
In the instances that it is far apart, the differences are usually easy to articulate. Critics appreciate and notice technical aspects of films more than average viewers, and are quicker to recognize cliches and tropes.
This can lead to movies having much higher audience scores than critic scores, which flies in the face of the notion that critics are getting paid.
Obviously, paying to get a positive review or to bury a negative review is cheating and should be treated as such.
OTOH, paying to get reviewed honestly is completely OK -- it's how many indie films get noticed. While large studios don't (openly) offer cash, they do entice reviewers with food, drinks, meeting cast & crew, swag, etc. Some reviewers seem to feel pressured, others seem to not give a care. AFAICT, they all keep getting re-invited.
Some stuff though just doesn't make any sense to me (going back to the point about subjectivity).
I love the movie The Ninth Gate, and that scores 44% on RT with the critics, and 57% with the audience.
I know a lot of people who love it as well. So I thought that the reviews were perhaps influenced by Polanski's history, but then when you look at The Pianist, which came after by quite some years, it scored 95%. So what gives?
Movies are no different from video games and other stuff. You quickly find out who is paid to win when the whole media under review is quite opposite of the review itself.
If PR firms can pay the nytimes to sell war, surely they are capable of buying a few positive reviews for movies.
Yelp is the last straw for me. If yelp reviews are found to be bought and sold, I'll lose all faith in social media and the reviews ecosystem. If we can't trust yelp, then who can we trust?
I had to laugh at this - "Every review carries the same weight whether it runs in a major newspaper or a Substack with a dozen subscribers." Yeah, and that's a good thing. Why should subscriber base give your review more weight? I can read that individual's review if I want to know what they think, I don't need to get a higher weight for the total review from everyone.
Then this was just as laughable - "Misogynist trolls had hijacked the platform, coordinating to tank women-led movies like Captain Marvel before they opened." No, it was an objectively BAD movie with an actress that acts like a stiff unenthused robot delivering her lines.
In conclusion, this author thinks RT needs be fixed because it's not reflecting his bias that the movie industry needs to be more "inclusive" and no movie that includes that "inclusivity" ought to ever receive a poor rating because obviously all of those ratings are racist, misogynist, -ist this, -ist that etc.
Here's my prescription: Just watch the movies and make your own mind up. If you have to go to a site like RT, ignore the critic reviews completely because almost all live in a bubble and can't relate with common movie goers.
If these companies don’t get their act together soon, I’m sure the Govt of various countries will compel them to do so.
Worse is that Web Search Engines promote it as authoritative gospel.
Like, what is left for them to aggregate?
Commenting here feels like submitting a pull request.
All of these review sites, every single one of them, are influence peddlers. All review articles are paid PR. Every single one.
Pick one or two critics you know & respect, read them, and decide for yourself if you might like that film.
Personally I disregard both RT and published reviews (I've never found a reviewer who aligns with me) and go off word-of-mouth from my circle of friends and family. But I think that doesn't work for everybody either.
Read the whole message before jumping on it. The last paragraph, which most people would take to be the conclusion, was:
Pick one or two critics you know & respect, read them, and decide for yourself if you might like that film.
RT & MC, although flawed, are superior metrics for watchability of a movie to box office totals. The existence of another, less useful metric (which isn't free from biases or opportunities for manipulation) has no probative value on whether one should use RT.
And, then, you mock others and break the site guidelines in the cousin thread.
Definitely agree with what you're saying, though I guess I'm saying you don't need to limit yourself to a particular subset of reviewers.
And it's increasingly less useful given the way streaming services have changed movie releases.
I do this, but their opinion isn't a perfect indicator of what my opinion will be, and it's useful to know if their belief this time around is aligned with general consensus or an outlier.
On a side note, a lot of people missed the chance to watch a show called Review, which is too damn good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Review_(TV_series) go watch it.
What you do with information is than your decision.
Best case you know and trust your critics because you align to a certain degree with their experience and movie taste.
For example "now you see me" is a shit movie. Magic in a movie doesn't work and the main hidden character basically breaks the whole movie but apparently the audience loved it.
The Last Jedi is apparently the cultural enrichment film of the decade.
A better way to view the critic score is, "X% of film critics think this film is worth watching."
And the audience score is: "Y% of moviegoers who leave movie reviews on Rotten Tomatoes think this film is worth watching."
This is why Toy Story can get 99% (it's a crowd pleaser), and why daring, impactful films can sometimes get lower scores (they can be polarizing).
> *“The studios didn’t invent Rotten Tomatoes, and most of them don’t like it,” says the filmmaker Paul Schrader. “But the system is broken. Audiences are dumber. Normal people don’t go through reviews like they used to. Rotten Tomatoes is something the studios can game. So they do.”
...calling the audiences dumb. There are plenty of smart movies that manage to find smart audiences, but for some reason those smart audiences just don't exist when considering his movie. He can't admit to himself that he doesn't make very good movies, so he prefers to think that everybody else is stupid. Blaming audiences is a coping mechanism for bad artists.
This is a single datapoint, but my hypothesis is that political correctness does indeed account for a measurable (beyond noise) portion of a RT score. Marketing spend probably matters more, and genuinely excellent non-PC films (say, Oppenheimer) can succeed without PC, but PC does contribute.
[0]https://fandomwire.com/theyve-been-barely-advertising-it-unt...
They focus first on their political objectives, their political views, and what political issues they wish to advocate for above all else
This has been an increasing trope in modern film and shows.
"The narrative" is now even a meme... The other coded phrase for a "politically correct" film is "re-imagined for a modern audience"
EDIT: Ugh, looks like replier reached for personal attacks, so this thread has sadly derailed into flamewar :( Hitting the eject button.
>There was no campaign speech to elect Biden in the latest Captain America
This is just a stupid statement
>I don't recall anything overtly political in most modern movies.
Snow White, Indian Jones 5, Just about Every Marvel Movie Past infinity War, 2 of the 3 Star Wars Films in the new Trilogy, The Little Mermaid... Shall I go on?
It is more pronounced in TV Shows however, She Hulk, Season 2 and 3 of Witcher, Rings of Power, etc etc etc
>So what exact "narratives" is everyone complaining about?
For starters [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPE7-PRL0M8
This that just just the tip of the ice berg...
That's a list of movies, not an identification of political content in movies.
Recent history has shown us that any narrative can be termed “political” if it helps one side drive a narrative.
Just look at the faux outrage over induction ovens and banning beers. Completely fabricated nonsense used to drive a narrative. This is the true trope.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/osca...
This is an analogy or what I mean by "political correctness" (or related concepts like "wokeness" and "social justice warrior"). Great art communicates truth about the human condition in a beautiful way. This is, of course, open to interpretation, yet somehow many people agree that, for example, The Godfather is a great film. Why? I believe the film shows us some truth about the human condition (particularly our ability to descend into evil) through a gripping story with excellent characters, visuals, dialogue, plotting, etc.
When we substitute an arbitrary checklist of criteria a film must meet that have nothing to do with communicating truth about the human condition in a beautiful way, we are engaging in "political correctness," and we have ceased to value art but instead propaganda. For instance, if we were to use the new Academy standards for Oscar-nominated movies, the Godfather would fail – the cast is almost all white, has no LGBT and IIRC includes the n-word. Amadeus, another excellent film (one of the most praised in Oscar history) would certainly fail, since the cast is all white and almost entirely male, as we would expect from a film set in 18th century Vienna. This does not mean great art cannot have diverse casts, LGBT characters or a lack of "problematic" content. For a recent example, the excellent show Andor ticks almost all of the DEI checkboxes – LGBT character(s), diverse cast –, but it also has smart writing, interesting characters, sensible plots, beautiful visuals and a compelling story. As long as the former are subordinated to the latter, a work remains art and not "politically correct" propaganda. At the same time, Oppenheimer ticks almost none of the DEI checkboxes and yet is arguably one of the best films of this century.
> So instead of using a meaningless euphemism, OP should articulate what exact themes, stories, or characters they think lead to a good critic score?
I think this comment betrays exactly what I'm critiquing. Great art can't be shoved in a box like this. Mediocre art has identifiable flaws - maybe it's visually bland or maybe the dialogue is poor or the characters act in inexplicable ways. These all detract from the beauty and truth of the work.
I'm not sure what FOSS has to do with any of this, so I'll leave that be. For The Godfather, obviously what counts as Great Art is subjective. I think the idea of greatness can change as the public's norms/values change over time. A lot of people look back at classic movies from the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and say "Yea that was a great movie for its time, but measured using today's moral yardstick--yow! Some of that stuff is actually not so good."
If The Godfather was made today, who could say whether the cast and crew would be more diverse? It probably would be, at least the crew. Would that make it any better or worse a film? There's no way to know. Maybe the creative leadership positions, financiers, and distribution companies would be more diverse. Would that make it a better or worse movie? Would The Godfather somehow not have been able to show truth about the human condition if its executive producer was black?
Times have changed. "Ticking DEI checkboxes" as you put it, should not be difficult--or even something a studio has to consciously think about. If you're a business or studio and are up all night sweating bullets about "Oh lord how am I going to tick DEI checkboxes," you're doing something fundamentally very, very, very wrong in your business. Your point about Andor supports this: A studio can easily do this (respect the norms of today) and still make a great movie!
Which is kind of inevitable because how else would you choose who becomes a critic other than choosing someone whose idea of quality is at least somewhat close to those of the artists, producers and other critics.
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/orville/s01 (critics: 31%, audience: 93%)
vs
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/star_trek_discovery/s01 (critics: 82%, audience: 49%)
(S02 of The Orville got very few but great reviews from the critics, it hadn't really changed much IMO.)
The art world is a _thing_, with tastes that can vary quite a bit from mid-brow average consumers. Its sensitive in its own way to "PC" and lobbying, but is distinct to a degree (albeit entangled, naturally).
Lost me here.
It is critic-career suicide to give negative ratings to any girl-power movie, no matter how bad or artistically bankrupt. At the same time, any movie that gets republicans excited (even if it isn't political) will struggle to be certified-fresh on the platform.
> anti-woke”/anti-pc comments
If that's the sentiment, then that's the sentiment. I know it sounds like we've had an influx of new angry redditors. But, a lot of old school HN folks have fundamental disagreements with the woke/pc tent.
I agree that HN should try to avoid culture wars. But not when it is the crux of the very thread we're on.
Oh come on, this is exactly what I’m talking about. No critic worth their salt is afraid to criticize a movie if it’s bad or mediocre.
I remember just recently the “woke” Marvel Eternals getting plenty of sniffy reviews because it was a boring endevour. Ditto for the Ghost Busters remake, Disney live actions etc.
The only thing is that the critics write actual reviews, they don’t just say “I hate the new Little Mermaid because they made Ariel black” like all the anti-woke mouthbreathers on the internet.
Or to put it more clearly: the way you feel about ycombinator comments here is very similar to how some people feel about e.g. LOTR or any other piece of media they otherwise treasure. I should think you might empathize with their position more if your politics weren't so opposed.
Also, people that rate movies online may not be representative of the entire movie-watcher population, so that may be, in some cases, also not a very accurate measurement, unless you yourself are a typical movie rater.
In the gaming world, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare got the most disliked trailer ever on YouTube, and still sold more than 13m copies. Somewhat similarly, logic-devoid, low-quality children movies can get as many dislikes as parents want, children will still watch them.
The point is that commercial success in a variety of industries is a result of a variety of factors, product quality is frequently not the most relevant.
That is: a restaurant owner can correctly say that another restaurant has excellent food and service without that being an endorsement of the restaurant's ability to survive as a business.
I would disagree with the loose correlation point. Although it's just one component of a restaurant's broader strategy for success, quality is undoubtedly crucial. While in Times Square, I would doubt you would blindly choose any restaurant without considering food and service quality.
Also, I would say that while a restaurant owner can correctly evaluate another, it's not necessary implied that specifically an award winner has proven that the unbiased opinions of others put them in this position.
Vulture ran an article on September 2023 that raised criticisms including the fact that since the acquisition by Fandango in 2016, the rules have changed in ways that happen to favor the biggest movies. The article cited publicity company Bunker 15 as an example of how scores can be boosted by recruiting obscure, often self-published reviewers to write positively, or selectively hiding negative reviews, using the example of 2018's Ophelia.
Try searching for barbie movie for an example. Click more reviews and filter by 1 star. The third says:
"Barbie," director and co-writer Greta Gerwig’s summer splash, is a dazzling achievement, both technically and in tone. It’s a visual feast that succeeds as both a gleeful escape and a battle cry. So crammed with impeccable attention to detail is "Barbie” that you couldn’t possibly catch it all in a single sitting; you’d have to devote an entire viewing just to the accessories, for example.
It even says ADVERTISEMENT in capital letters but below the fold where you have to expand the whole review to see it. Despite that this review directly contradicts its star rating, 774 "people" have marked it as helpful.
Scroll down a bit further and there is another, "If this was an item on the McDonald’s menu, it would be everyone’s favourite - the Oreo McFlurry. Hands down, I don’t think I could name a better film. The acting was superb!" which supposedly nearly a thousand people found helpful. This one doesn't say anywhere that it's an ad.
When I first noticed this, almost all the top 1 star reviews were ads. Real users have been correcting it and the top two reviews are now real. The second review says "Update: if you notice google is showing mostly 5 star reviews when there is almost an equal number of 1 stars to 5 stars hence why the average is 3 stars." and the 5th post says "I noticed a few giving spectaculars about the movie but rating it as one star, maybe to drown out the real reviews?" so irate users have been noticing the manipulation too.
It's really very embarrassing for Google. It's gone now but originally when you searched for this movie there was a special pink sparkle effect. So they're paying engineers to write special code just for this movie whilst ignoring obvious fake reviews, claiming they were meta-reviewed by thousands of people and they still haven't cleaned this up even weeks later.
For a mainstream example, take Fast X. It's an objectively stupid movie with a great audience score - because it's exactly what it says on the tin! Nobody is confused about what they're watching. Nobody thinks they're going to get terrific drama or romance or suspense. They're going to get the 9th sequel to a comedy action movie about dudes driving cars.
Blue Beetle: 78% critics, 92% audience
Gran Turismo: 63%, 98%
Elemental: 74%, 93%
Meg 2: 29% 73%
Haunted Mansion 38%, 84%
Indiana Jones: 69%, 88%
Little Mermaid 67%, 94%
Those audience scores are not "more accurate" in any way. People who are forced to see these movies like them less than people who chose to see it.
There also really isn't anything currently that fits into "the political correctness / marketing budget of the movie" claim of OP. It seems like they are just buying into cultural war nonsense. The closest I can find is Barbie and its critic score is 5% higher than the audience score, so not much of a gap.
You rate movies. The consensus ratings you see are based on people who have rated movies similarly to you overall.
My favourite way of judging movie quality is checking what kind of movie goers hate it and why.
-Pretentious watchers hating on summer blockbuster movies
-Political things and review bombs
About your specific example Steam comes to mind, they have a great review timeline feature that allows to filter out review bombs.
One feature that would be nice would be a filter to filter out reviewers based on certain criteria
-only one review
-only has reviews on certain films
-account life is less than specific threshold
That DB query is probably too expensive to run on a free site though. An app that scrapes the RT reviews and filters out based on this criteria has been on my list of things to build.
High Audience Score: HA High Critics Score: HC
HA + HC: Great movie to watch
HA + no HC: An entertainment movie but don’t expect a masterpiece
No HA + HC: Avoid unless you have obscure tastes or if you are pretentious
No HA + No HC: Probably garbage
At a high level what I really want is two ratings: Global rating and does this deliver what it promised. A greasy spoon is objectively not a good restaurant but it scratches an itch and you have certain relatively low expectations of it so in the context of greasy spoons generally I might rate the restaurant 5 stars even if globally I'd give it two stars.
As you say with Fast X: objectively it is not a good movie but it absolutely delivers what it promised. People who like that movie series will be pleased with it so in that context it deserves a positive rating.
As a follow-on I want to tell the system about the things I like + the things I hate. Then I want the system to give more weight to ratings from others who both like and hate the same things. I honestly don't care if critics or audiences liked the movie... I want to know if people who in some way think like me enjoyed it.
I had a product idea I have yet to make where you replace ratings with rankings. Instead of giving something a 1-5 review, you just answer a few quick questions whether something is better or worse than a listed alternative. You aggregate enough rankings and you can give everything a percentile score. The number is actually meaningful - a 70% means people on average think that it's 70% better than all ranked alternatives.
And you can't lie or influence a ranking as easily. "You think Rings of Power is a good show? Okay, but are you are actually going to rank it above The Sopranos?"
Hasn't failed me yet and if you do it as an org it helps with arguments down the line
If an entry causes a logical fallacy, that is an opportunity to represent the data in a different order and see if the user changes their ranking. This will actually help to keep the data fresh. And you can retain "fuzzy" rankings in certain areas without threat to the accuracy of the overall database.
If you want to have a multivariable structure, users could rank more than facet at once. So for a car, you could compare if a Honda Civic is better or worse than a Toyota Corolla on handling, comfort, features, etc. Combine this with non-subjective data (price, 0-60, etc) and users can choose if they want an aggregate ranking or weighted based on their criteria.
Are you aware of metacritic? They take all kinds of ratings, scales, stars, grades, etc, from all kinds of critics and reviewers and turn them into nice 1-100 percent ratings to average.
A 7/10 from Gamespot is useless data because they give 7/10 to everything.
The _Actors Who Love History But Not Accuracy_ list. Mel Gibson holding #1, but look out: Costner is on the rise!
Why not ? It depends what you are looking for at that moment.
If, in the future, your tastes change, a few things get ranked "above" what formerly held your top slot. The top slot was never "200 absolute points," it was just "the highest single ranking"
Although, I do see the coarseness of a new #1 bumping everything down … and forcing a reconsideration of whole blocks of rankings … arriving at "groups" … and basically a star system.
- [0] my mood changes more often than my taste do
If I've spent all day on calls, then proceed to watch, for example, anything Aaron Sorkin, I'm likely to treat it less charitably (because I'm tired of flapping gums) than if I watched it after a week in the desert (and human contact is wonderful).
My mood would color ratings as well …
How would one flatten the effect of mood on a either-or ranking system? Is it possible?
I suppose the system should ask for every movie watched how they'd rank given a particular mood ? So it's "is A better than B when you want something with deep thinking to watch, is A better than B when you want something easy to follow ?" but it has its own can of worms: sometimes I want to watch something with deep thinking even though I am in the mood to unwind...
All in all, I think it's a waste of time to catalogue our own tastes and try to build a personal recommendation system. I hope/think/want to believe thank knowing ourselves gives better reward.
Imagine if you had the dataset to say "remove every reviewer who ranked God of War above Spiritfarer" you would probably be left with an amazing set of recommendations.
Is Schindler's List a better Comedy than Gone With the Wind?
Is Schindler's List a better Romance than Gone With the Wind?
Is Schindler's List a better Documentary than Gone With the Wind?
If you have enough people willing to mindlessly to swipe on random comparisons during the day so they can see their own report, and you could properly sort and tag all categories, you could have a truly bonkers data set. Like whether dollar for dollar consumers prefer the Barbie movie to owning a Porsche Cayenne.
Companies depend on good reviews to make sales, so dishonest companies and reviewers see mutual benefit in purchasing dishonest reviews. It's a frustrating but old problem.
PR firms paying for reviews on RT on the other hand don't have that luxury...
I read the OP anyway. It's worth reading. The short of it is that movie studios and their unscrupulous apparatchiks are paying less prominent movie critics to keep negative reviews out of view of Rotten Tomatoes, for example, by publishing those negative reviews in a separate, more obscure blog.
Personally, I now trust only the reviews of a handful of movie critics whose reviews have proven to be reliable over the years.
Even then I still make my own decision on it. I have been surprised by a few movies I thought were just fine/horrible but my favorite reviewers disliked/liked it.
Review sites can still be helpful. Even though many reviews might be paid for, you can usually spot them if you read carefully. And then you can focus on the genuine reviews.
(especially nationalistic ones please)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: unfortunately your account has been breaking the site guidelines so badly and so frequently that I think we have to ban it. We simply can't have users posting things like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37381905.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Among all the possible reactions to news of corruption (of any sort) I've come to the opinion that humorous-resignation normalizes corruption and is, therefore, just as corrupt.
In fact, if I were a bad guy, I'd hire people to leave comments of "The system is broken", "This is normal", "Everyone does it", "There's no way to stop it", and rebuff anyone that proposes solutions. "[Your solution] won't be enough because..."
In the end, they need a scolding that will perhaps shame them into remembering they have a backbone. But I suggest that imprecision with the scold will reduce the efficacy of this bitter medicine, and the poster will focus on the minor inaccuracy of your analysis compare it with their own pure intent, dismissing the scold as bad faith. If instead you note that it is cowardice, and add a spoonful of pity to the scold, and remove the minor inaccuracy, it may have a greater effect.
I generally agree with you but not on that point. I don't blame people for checking out. Fighting the wrongness of the world is just extremely tiresome. At some point, people change themselves instead. They stop trying to fruitlessly change things and move on with their lives, often with the goal to make a ton of money so they can isolate themselves from the rotten society.
Sometimes the only healthy way to react to something is to laugh at the absurdity of it as if you were a sociopathic Joker. It's a coping mechanism for dealing with an imperfect unfixable reality.
That's my personal revelation.
But to your point, perhaps "just as corrupt" should have been "are, surprisingly, complicit in that corruption".
* "Effort" in this case being "going to the effort of posting". Be checked out? Sure. Being checked out is not my argument. Instead, being engaged-but-jaded and thus broadcasting "corruption is normal" (and thus penalizing corruption is "weird") is /itself/ corrupting.
Now you might respond that there’s so much corruption in the world and you, as an individual, can’t do much to stop it all. That’s probably true! However, the power and the great benefit of living in a free, democratic society (I’m assuming you live in a western or otherwise free country, otherwise you may have bigger concerns than review payola on Rotten Tomatoes) is that individuals are free to act and to hold people accountable when they abuse their power. Maybe this issue isn’t that important to you and that’s fine, but maybe some other issue actually is really important to you.
What I’m getting at with this long-winded post is simple: try directing your efforts toward one thing you care about and see if you can make a difference, even in one small way. It can go a long way to help you feel more effective and engaged in society!
also this: "(I’m assuming you live in a western or otherwise free country, otherwise you may have bigger concerns than review payola on Rotten Tomatoes)" ... is simply hilarious, implying that 'western or otherwise free' countries don't have anything more important than messed up film reviews for me to want to change.