I remember being fairly drunk and going to see Interstellar at an indy arthouse movie theater that sold you overpriced craft beers. I remember relatively little of the finer points of Interstellar other than the fact that I couldn't stop laughing at how monumentally dumb it was. I have no idea why they even had it so that McConaughey's character had a son that he just basically didn't give a shit about because he wasn't as smart as his dad and sister. He's like "Oh, I miss my daughter Murph so much. Also the other one is probably still alive assuming he never drank any pesticide. What's his name again? Stumpy? Whatever." Also I loved how Matt Damon played a soulless robot better than Bill Irwin, who voiced the actual soulless machines in the movie. God, what a fucking terrible movie.
Same on Interstellar. For a movie that spawned a paper on mathematical realities of black holes and how to render them, and the rather realistic aesthetic, so so many things are brain-dead cliche or just technical enough to be extra wrong. Star Trek is better science, and they do dumb shit all the time.
Honestly Rotten Tomatoes is basically useless when discussing film. I’ve been using Letterboxd for reviews and I get much more insight on if I’ll like the movie.
Because consider that people who post on RT are either snobs, frequent movie goers, or are emotional about the movie in some way. And a critics aggregate is an awful way to do anything which is why metacritic is useless most of the time.
What people should do is take some of their favorite movies or games or whatever and look up reviews. Find ones that you agree with. And then use those sites or people as sounding boards for new movies. If that doesn’t work, move on to the next critic till you find one whose perspective aligns with yours.
Letterbox is where you go to find some truly wild takes. It's filled with people who have no genuine sense of media literacy, combined with a profoundly unjustified sense of confidence in the universality of their own opinions.
The Expendables 4 is out? You made my day, really need to watch it!
I enjoyed all of the three in the series, light humor, action, all my old heroes.... couldn't ask for more.
Give me some time to watch it before calling the cops to pick me up :D
Some people definitely need to relax a little about the whole afair. BUT calling something "good" is entirely pointless unless you know the other person knows exactly what your tastes are. It's generally better to qualitfy it with a meaningful description: "artsy" or "dumb fun" or "so bad it's good"
I've only seen rotten tomatoes enough to have looked harder at this macro to see it is in fact that. I judge my movies by how many people are seeding them. I have the digital space and real life time to watch whatever. I've seen the worst shit and the most incredible masterpieces. People should be more thankful for everything, good and bad. You won't have it forever.
honestly, i stopped caring for aggregate scores & started reading individual user reviews, particularly the ones in the 6-9/10 range seem to be the most honest. then I'll watch the movie anyway & form my own opinion. every piece of media is essentially someone's masterpiece, including video games too, even the bad ones are worth playing just to see someone else's perspective.
if we're talking the worst of the worst, like the last airbender m*vie, i personally dont regret watching it cuz it really put the good movies into perspective.
if we’re talking the worst of the worst, like the last airbender m*vie, i personally dont regret watching it cuz it really put the good movies into perspective.
This is one reason I love MST3K. It's like a film school where you learn all the wrong things to do, so when you see them done right you appreciate it more.
This is my perspective on a lot of art and music. If something is universally hated, I want to know why it is and if I can find any redeeming qualities. A lot of my favorite things have that characteristic of doing something very specific extremely well but being generally unlikeable.
For most things (not just movies) my tactic is to look at some average reviews, the most negative reviews and the most positive reviews, while checking if the reasons they love/hate it are things I care about.
Looking for reviews after you watched a movie seems kind of pointless to me.
Can you think of a good example? Maybe a couple Netflix movies like "Don't look up"? I have cetain genres that are automatic watch for me. Suspense thriller usually falls in that category.
I only ever use those sites if i really disliked a movie but can't figure out why.
As a way to select a movie they're really pointless, I think a system that matches tastes of people and recommends movies based on that would be more promising.
I was surprised the Little Mermaid live action remake was so well received. Those live action remakes only even exist as a way to milk the older cows without paying royalties due to obscure Hollywood laws. I like Halle Barry's acting too, but a 94% audience rating? The fuck?!
Still hoping for a decentralized FOSS alternative to Letterboxd/IMDB/TMDB/etc. Like what BookWyrms is compared to Goodreads. I really like logging what I consume (read, watch, listen) but I don't like relying on and donating my data and reviews to for-profit companies.
Film critics are the people that went to film school but couldn't get a job making movies. They tend to judge a movie on it's technical merits.
Audiences mostly just want a good story. If the cinematography isn't great, if the shot composition is boring, the editing is janky, the audience may not care as much about those things, but a film critic will obsess over those kinds of problems.
A film critic can be so wowed by technical proficiency they don't notice it's in service of a poorly written story.
Also a film critic watches movies as their job. They're more likely to notice when a movie isn't all that original. They tend to want something that's unique to make their job of watching movies to be less boring. Someone in the audience doesn't care about that so much, mostly it's just important that the movie is entertaining. If the movie is sort of like a movie they didn't see, why would they care?
So I think a high critic score low audience score means the movie looks really good, but probably has a poorly written story. The critics went to film school, not writing school. For the converse, it's probably going to be fun and entertaining but isn't going to change my life.
Critics didn’t necessarily go to film school, but they see everything under the sun, so when a movie doesn’t do anything particularly new or is highly derivative without adding its own twist, it bores them. The person who goes to 3-5 movies a year doesn’t care, to them something derivative of 10 movies they haven’t seen is still new and fresh. This is in addition to the technical competency component you mentioned.
I watch a ton of movies so my tastes are more likely to align with those of a professional critic.
The movie was marketed towards empowering women, but it was actually incredibly poorly written to the point that it makes women look bad.
Like the plot is: that she's incredibly powerful and special and perfect from birth and she defects from her organization and lands on earth in 1995 and fights all the aliens and wins, the end. But also there are a ton of plot holes: if Marvel gave Nick Fury the idea for Avengers Initiative in 1995 then why did it take him 17 years to begin the project? Also, Stark's dad was stated to be a founding member of SHIELD which is where Nick Fury claimed to be very close with him, even though Stark's dad died in 1991 but Nick Fury is shown to be a low level desk jockey in 1995? Plus the entire subplot with SHIELD and Nick Fury realizing the Aliens are a threat to earth and they need superhuman defenders is stupid because Nick Fury mentions he saw Thor fight in New Mexico the year prior, and SHIELD has had an alien corpse on ice since WWII, and he has also knowingly interacted with the Skrulls (main antagonists and also some of the protagonists of the Captain Marvel film) on multiple occasions before. Then on top of all of that, SHIELD started out post-WWII as a Hydra operation wherein the remaining members fled to the USA after the Nazis lost the war, but for some reason SHIELD barely exists at all in 1995 and most of their roles such as research on the Tesserract is being done by a joint NASA and USAF operation?!
It feels like they just threw all that shit in at the last moment like "Yeah it was all Captain Marvel. She started everything. It was all her. And SHIELD were always the good guys, none of them were nazis."
But the real drama was how they marketed the film, again. They modified shots in the trailers, spread false stories and rumours, all of it was lies.
Lots of talk of manipulation from basically both sides of the argument when it came to the whole sexism/woke bullshit that we suffered through when it came to that movie.