Is anyone else getting a little uncomfortable having their confirmation bias put in the spotlight like this?
- 8 days
I swear rotten tomatoes and IMDb fucked up movies and tv more than anyone talks about. You can’t REALLY make an review of a work of art, even if it is corporate produced tripe, with a percentage scale or */10 system, and before anyone comes at me I know it’s been done for decades but it was never a be all and end all thing, critics wrote articles about things and you might disagree with their sensibilities and go see it specifically because a particular critic didn’t like it, the opposite is also true.
At some point though we crossed a line where no one actually reads the criticism and internalizes it, instead they just look at the number and make it either a personal attack or validation. Thats a really bad way to experience art of any kind.
This isn’t a complete thought I feel, but I hate the reality of film and television criticism today, not because critics are worthless, because that’s just silly. If you like something Peter Travers said was dog shit go find a critic that speaks to your taste it’s not difficult and doesn’t mean your favorite movie actually sucks.
- 8 days
Yeah these ratings are worse than useless. Oh The Abyss 14% better than Amelie?? Fuck off, Poindexter.
They’re completely disconnected from my own opinions and when I see then before watching a movie they just distract me by wondering what tf other were watching.
You can’t map.reduce this shit, it’s totally subjective
- 7 days
it’s totally subjective
Yet we agree that there is such a thing as one movie being better than another, broadly speaking. It’s not something to boil down to a percentage, but you might as well show more detail when you have the data.
Personally, I use ratings to estimate whether a movie that I’m interested in is worth my time. Especially Rotten Tomatoes is super useful for this because the critics score is basically a distilled thumbs up or down.
- 6 days
it’s totally subjective
Yet we agree that there is such a thing as one movie being better than another
I mean I wouldn’t say that, it’s kind of the opposite of what I was saying actually. But if reviews form a kind of aggregate metric you find useful then that’s good for you.
Elsewhere I even talked about how frequently I disagreed with Siskel and Ebert’s thumbs ups/downs, but the text of their reviews at least showed me I would love a movie they thought was bad.



