Although RT tends to produce false positives for me, it is a reasonably reliable filter. If Hollywood is suffering, I'd look to the quality of its product.
For example, marvel civil war is a false positive (for me). When I watch it, I can't get past the clipped, contrived dialogue, close-ups on faces, ham-fisted plots, inconceivably stupid action, schizophrenic scene changes, plastic cgi, and awkward obviously demographically targeted identity fantasies.
But the movie Valerian and the city of a thousand planets, which was panned on RT, was in almost every way actually objectively worse than its well rated marvel counterpart. It was so bad it made me fill physically ill.
Through accumulated experience, I've found that RT, for me, is a reasonable predictor of "a very bad time." And even if its high ratings don't consistently predict a good time, they do predict relative enjoyability well.
I've had so many awful movie going experiences over the last twenty years of adulthood that I've more or less stopped going. I have a very hard time blaming a rating system. I'd look instead to very shallow, implausible scripting (punchy one-liners, hollow melodrama), lackluster cinematography (zoomed in facials, schizophrenic shot switching), repetitive and/or assinine plots (corporations are eeevil), weird editing and incoherent writing (random, poorly interjected side stories or comedy, bizarre scene shifts, prolonged melodrama), boring, implausible, drawn out action (ugh), predictable demographically targeted identity fantasies, and I don't know, the list goes on.
I know beyond certainty that I'm not the target audience, but I can't help but think people are increasingly demanding movies that repay rather than punish sustained attention, and I can't help but think that these qualities passively improve the commercial value of the Hollywood product.
I helped produce a short film called Confidential Informant. We poured our hearts and wallets into the film. I am very proud of the result. We (sort of, I'm currently in college so I have been reduced to editing scripts, crafting one pagers, and sitting on conference calls) are about to set out on a few more endeavors and quality, originality, and financial success for our investors and contractors is paramount. We hire quality over quantity. We want to make good movies that make enough money to make more.
I write all this to highlight two points: it is not just mindless recreations and rebrands out there (I have to believe that we are not the only indy guys who want to make good pictures) and there is good content out there, but like all good things you must work to find it.
When I get tipsy and hopeful, I dream of seeking funding from the likes of HN folks (y'all definitely talk like you could afford to invest in low budget pictures) instead of the withered, myopic folks who do the bulk of investing now. Film is risky, and people want guaranteed ROI. The climate is such that people want guaranteed winners and few will take risks on unknown quantities, directors, scripts and production companies alike.
Sorry for the ramble, but every time I hear someone complain about the state of film these days, my first response is, "what are you willing to do to change that?"
If anyone is interested in getting involved with a small and hungry production company hit me up. We don't need you to win but we'd love to have you.
Please update your HN profile with some kind of contact or website information. Currently it has nothing. It'd be easier for people to check here than search online and try to find out more.
I used to like action movies but they had a somewhat realistic everyman element to them and the characters were if not entirely relateable at least sympathetic. But Hollywood's love affair with impossible physics; shooting someone doesn't send them flying, you can't outrun explosions, not everything explodes into a giant gasoline ball of flame, etc, has ramped up to the point where it takes me out of suspension of disbelief. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and everyone's flying around on wires? Sure, it's genre-specific and makes sense in context. Every movie ever made in the last 10 years? Not so much.
>I've had so many awful movie going experiences over the last twenty years of adulthood that I've more or less stopped going. I have a very hard time blaming a rating system. I'd look instead to very shallow, implausible scripting (punchy one-liners, hollow melodrama), lackluster cinematography (zoomed in facials, schizophrenic shot switching), repetitive and/or assinine plots (corporations are eeevil), weird editing and incoherent writing (random, poorly interjected side stories or comedy, bizarre scene shifts, prolonged melodrama), boring, implausible, drawn out action (ugh), predictable demographically targeted identity fantasies, and I don't know, the list goes on.
Those are present in modern movies, and I agree to your characterization of the Marvel franchise etc, but you seem to be randomly going to various movies and suffering from that?
I find it's more consistent to have a few favorite directors, with which work you have a longer term relationship, and understand better. E.g. I'd go to any David Fincher movie, and 95% of the time I wont be disappointed even if they vary widely in subject and scope (B.Button was kind of a flop).
And of course lots more obscure directors (someone like Hal Hartley or Kar-Wai Wong for me) with consistent quality.
Perhaps you are wrong and if you got your film recommendation elsewhere, you would find films you loved, then afterward be surprised that they have just 46% ratings on RT. Also you call it a reliable filter but spend half of your comment complaining about films that pass it.
Perhaps it's a reliable filter of movies that are "so bad it makes you feel physically ill" - but would anyone have recommended those films for you?
I recommend you get your film recommendations elsewhere, ignoring RT unless it's sub 10%. That's approximately what I do.
It's like how HN and /r/programming users brag by hating on things that are popular and loving the esoteric such that they peacock to the other neckbeards about how refined their tastes are. Ugh, DAE hate Javascript?
I prefer IMDB user ratings and Metacritic's user ratings, basically the opinions of the unwashed masses who can at least tell you if a movie is actually enjoyable.
Critics may be bad signals when conditioned on the things that you individually prefer. this is hardly an objective measure.
Your preference for user ratings could also be biased towards the kind of things that you enjoy about movies, which may align more with non-critics, while at the same time my preference for (aggregrated) critic ratings could be biased towards the things i enjoy about movies, which might align more with critics; those two sets of things might not exactly be the same. (i.e. there could be tribes that rate enjoyableness differently)
Lastly, there is this [1], which is tangential to your claim but worth considering what a good distribution of ratings should look like. Now even though the analysis isn't perfect, it's still interesting that _if_ the assumptions of the analysis were true, metacritic has the most well-behaved distribution.
In general the trick with critics is to find those that you agree with on certain genres. No critic is really going to agree with you on everything. So find some that align with you on say action movies and some on dramas and interpolate a score. Eventually you learn their preferences and you can get a very good read on if you'll like a movie with just one or 2 critic reviews. You'll learn that some are into filming or score or other things more than you and you can ignore that.
I'd add that, if you don't know the individual critic's taste, they might as well be another take on public opinion. There can be something to be gained, but for the everyday person, you are best off with "what did the general public think" and what did this person (whose tastes I know) think?
A good example (I think, at least when ignoring drama) is Total Biscuit. He makes it clear when playing a genre of game he doesn't care for or if a game is in a setting he loves. He lays it out and tries to be fair and objective (even if that pursuit is a fool's errand).
P.S. I'd also like to say that the pursuit of an unachievable goal (objectivity, perfection, etc...) is a noble pursuit even if unobtainable, as it will cause a drive to be better and improve. Rather than an excuse to be lazy since, "perfect/objective/... is impossible.
Also, an interesting thing about metacritic (at least from what I can remember) is that they are silent about how they weight differing review sites/critics in how they calculate their overall rating.
Whereas (as far as I know) RT has a simple average for critic reviews and general internet user reviews.
It sounds like you've been going to the wrong movies, at least for your tastes. You seem to be exclusively seeing blockbusters. Maybe you'd prefer smaller, less action-focused films.
Eh, I love a good action movie, but it's hard to get into movies that you can't believe. I watched a very low rated one from the 80s the other day (https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/blood_of_heroes/), and while it had very little plot, and the production value was incredibly low compared to recent movies, and just generally wasn't a very good movie, I enjoyed it more than the vast majority of very expensive recent blockbusters, because it felt real. They had real actors and real stunts. They moved like real people. And in that world, a 50 foot fall could kill them, rather than just cause them to touch a knee, so there was something at stake.
In a movie full of invincible people, who cares what happens? They'll be fine regardless.
I wish hollywood would get to making movies about real people.
I have. Definitely better than the superhero flicks that plague theaters, but he's still got that invulnerable mechanical efficiency that gets a bit old after he's plowed through the 50th person in a 10 minute shootout. I'm talking more like Die Hard, Alien, Air Force One, or even First Blood, where the main character is a mostly regular person with some combat training, is in a situation where they're believably screwed, and has to rely on their wits to survive the odds stacked against them, not just their incredible reflexes.
One thing John Wick gets right though, is that they took their time with the choreography and training rather than using shaky cam and jump cuts to cover the fact that the actors have no idea what they’re doing. Keanu Reeves spent a lot of time learning how to handle firearms and it shows.
My only complaint is that I would prefer they figure out some way to simulate firearm recoil. As a hobby / target shooter it always takes away from the action when I see guns rock steady every shot. If guns were like that everyone would be John Wick.
Yeah, to be honest the rare action movie that really made me invested into the action lately was The Raid (2011), which was shot in a way that made the action sequences look significantly more realistic and you didn't get the feeling that anyone has plot armor in it.
I similarly enjoyed that movie. It skimps a lot on the plot to provide the best action I've ever seen. The meat of the movie all takes place in one building and if you don't count the small pauses, is basically one giant action scene.
The thing I find crazy is that in 2017 $20M movies with B-list names are getting picked up as "independent". Ridley Scott's name shows up on IFC movies now; It Follows had an excellent ROI compared to most "blockbuster"; Get Out was a sold-out hit with audiences and critics... but it's all just a blip compared to the latest Transformers or DC or Marvel franchise shit-show.
A few millenia from now archaelogists and historians will be pontificating about Hollywood the way we do about the Pyramids.
It's like someone said "lets make all those comics teenage nerds used to love into movies for adults -- while not only keeping everything as simplistic but making it even more simplistic and shallow".
I was reading all the Marvel stuff when I was a kid/young teenager (5-6 comic magazines every week) but I never understood the point behind modern superhero movies. Those comics were shallow and childlish as well, but, depending on the writer, sometimes touched things beyond that, and at the very least, they explorer some subjects that mattered to their audience: young teenagers.
Today's superheroes movies are watched by 20 to 40 year olds as well, and they don't put any effort to matter at all.
Even Nolan's Batman is at a young teenage level understanding of the world, it just has better cinematography and more than the average comic-movie gore (because it's allowed to show that to kids nowadays) but no real life grit (because that's considered too confusing and adult) and no sexuality either (ditto). The plots and the "moral dilemmas" in the movies are laughable ( https://xkcd.com/1004/ ).
Maybe Logan points to a future where such movies can be actually good, but it's not exactly there yet either.
good point! And you're right, I do have those preferences. I guess I wasn't lamenting my own situation (I personally feel blessed to have as much art available to me as I do). I was trying to make a pretty awkward point, which was that even though I understand my conscious preferences aren't shared by most audience members, I think a failure to "satisfice" on some features of artistic quality might be reducing the value of the product for everyone, and hence the profitability of blockbuster movie studios. It's a hypothesis, anyway.
edit: re-reading I see that I used "movie-going" to mean "going to the Regal Cinema 17 with extended family and seeing a Hollywood movie," which makes it sound like I'm throwing going to movies period under the bus.
Rotten Tomatoes is owned by a Time Warner and Comcast, they're ratings now end up wildly biased. That's why there are so many decent movies that end up being '93%' etc.
"since January 2010 has been owned by Flixster, which was, in turn, acquired in 2011 by Warner Bros. In February 2016, Rotten Tomatoes and its parent site Flixster were sold to Comcast's Fandango. Warner Bros. retained a minority stake in the merged entities"
Rotten Tomatoes now uses 'Top Critics' to compile their overall score instead of 'All Critics'. This distinction didn't originally exist.
As the Wikipedians say, [citation needed]. Yes, Rotten Tomatoes is owned by Fandango, but they appear to be using essentially the same methodology that they always have: look at a bunch of reviews of a given movie, decide that review is "fresh" or "rotten" (which is done objectively based on the reviewers' own star/numerical ratings as much as possible, from what I can see), and tell you how many reviews they've aggregated were "fresh." What bias are you asserting? Are you saying they give Warner Brothers and Universal movies better ratings than competitors? Can you cite plausible examples? Through what devious mechanism are they subverting their aggregation system?
For example, marvel civil war is a false positive (for me). When I watch it, I can't get past the clipped, contrived dialogue, close-ups on faces, ham-fisted plots, inconceivably stupid action, schizophrenic scene changes, plastic cgi, and awkward obviously demographically targeted identity fantasies.
But the movie Valerian and the city of a thousand planets, which was panned on RT, was in almost every way actually objectively worse than its well rated marvel counterpart. It was so bad it made me fill physically ill.
Through accumulated experience, I've found that RT, for me, is a reasonable predictor of "a very bad time." And even if its high ratings don't consistently predict a good time, they do predict relative enjoyability well.
I've had so many awful movie going experiences over the last twenty years of adulthood that I've more or less stopped going. I have a very hard time blaming a rating system. I'd look instead to very shallow, implausible scripting (punchy one-liners, hollow melodrama), lackluster cinematography (zoomed in facials, schizophrenic shot switching), repetitive and/or assinine plots (corporations are eeevil), weird editing and incoherent writing (random, poorly interjected side stories or comedy, bizarre scene shifts, prolonged melodrama), boring, implausible, drawn out action (ugh), predictable demographically targeted identity fantasies, and I don't know, the list goes on.
I know beyond certainty that I'm not the target audience, but I can't help but think people are increasingly demanding movies that repay rather than punish sustained attention, and I can't help but think that these qualities passively improve the commercial value of the Hollywood product.
Edit: grammar, removed repetition.