7 ms·

I never trust any online reviews, especially aggregate reviews, because I have never found any to hew remotely closely to my taste (the best example is on RT, t

by abruzzi 11y ago

I never trust any online reviews, especially aggregate reviews, because I have never found any to hew remotely closely to my taste (the best example is on RT, the worst movie I've seen in the last two decades is rated 95% fresh). The only approach I've found that works is to pick a professional reviewer that is marginally close to my taste, read a lot of their reviews, so I know where I tend to agree and where I disagree with the reviewer, then build a mental translation, so when I would see Roger Ebert trash a David Lynch movie, I could discount it because I know Ebert's antipathy to Lynch in not something I share.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
eridius 11y ago
I'm curious, what was the 95% fresh movie that you thought was the worst movie in 2 decades?
- copperx 11y ago
  I'm going to guess Snowpiercer.
- bmelton 11y ago
  I'm not the OP, so this is just a guess, but my money's on "The Room". If not, I'm guessing it's because the OP hasn't yet seen it. ;-) http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/room_2015/ http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/room_2015/ Edit: Ooops. The wrong "The Room" altogether. Nod to abruzzi for the correction. The actual Room is only 35% fresh, which I must say is either way too high, or way too low, depending on one's take of the film. The correct link is here: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_room_1998/ http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_room_1998/
  - abruzzi 11y ago
    Sadly that's the wrong Room: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_room_1998/ http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_room_1998/
    - bmelton 11y ago
      Thank you for the correction. Gigantic oops moment there.
- abruzzi 11y ago
  Snowpiercer. I'm sure some people love it, but I could not think of a single redeeming thing after I got done. I honestly preferred "The Room", (though that ones 'quality' was unintentional.)
  - bmelton 11y ago
    Snowpiercer was indeed sad, but I always assumed my negativity towards it was a result of having already read Hugh Howey's (rather good) Silo Saga, which it seemed to rip off at every turn, only having shifted the X and Y axes. I came away from it thinking that if I hadn't read the Silo Saga, I might possibly have actually enjoyed Snowpiercer, though definitely nowhere near 95%'s worth.
    - lemevi 11y ago
      I found the first half of Wool to be very good and the rest of it readable, although just barely so. Howey is a terrible writer with interesting plot ideas. Howey has a compulsion to explicitly tell you in minute details through every other passage exactly what is on everyone's mind. The concept of using symbolism and actions to portray people seems lost to him. His sentence structure is terrible. He's saved by Wool's very interesting idea and the first chapter of Wool was admittedly very good. I read the entire series and I really think at a high level his ideas a very interesting, but he just doesn't really have the skill required to write well. I am not sure an editor would help, maybe a co-author.
      - lmm 11y ago
        I think you have it backwards. The ideas of Wool are so common in prior science fiction that authors would take them for granted, play with them. The plot is pretty much that of The Penultimate Truth. Howey succeeded because, for whatever reason, people liked his writing or he details of his version more than previous iterations of the idea.
        bmelton 11y ago
        Very possible. Not suggesting that Wool was entirely unique, but more specifically, that Snowpiercer seemed to have taken the entire idea of Wool and just shifted the axis from vertical to horizontal. There were a LOT of copied ideas. Perhaps none of them were original to Wool, but Wool was not (to my knowledge) as much a clone of any individual work as it was the compilation of a lot of tropes.
- 4ad 11y ago
  "Gravity" wasn't the worst in two decades, but it is a pile of crap, and it does have 97% on RT and 7.9 on IMDB.
  - knowaveragejoe 11y ago
    "a pile of crap" is a bit harsh, it's fantastically produced and the acting is okay.
  - Kequc 11y ago
    Everyone has different opinions but what was crap about it. Directed by the visionary behind Children of Men, which won best picture and rather than just making a bunch of easy films he spent 4 years making this one. The cinematography required new innovations in ways to film space scenes. New rigs and such they invented that stuff on the production budget. The acting was top notch. It was stunning. The cheesy stuff? The unrealistic parts of it? Maybe you could criticise those aspects of it, but they were intentional sacrifices made so the rest of the film could be fresh, new, attainable. The story arc was like a mini rollercoaster, never slowed down. I cheered for our protagonist. Movies like that don't come out very often. It's a borderline masterpiece my dear friend. A masterpiece I tell you. One of the prettiest looking things I've ever seen in Imax. It made me have feelings inside. I rated it as one of the best movies to come out in decades. I think part of a film like that is the spectacle of it. It's probably harder to enjoy on a cellphone, is that what happened?
Demiurge 11y ago
This very reasonable. Movies, music, art, can't be reduced to a single numerical score. In this sense no rating 'should' be trusted, but instead we need to make choices based on entirety of context. Seems trivial, yet we always want an easy answer.
- abruzzi 11y ago
  This is basically my answer as well. I'm the first to admit that my tastes are not very well in line with conventional wisdom (I also cant stand Pixar films..) The closer your tastes are to that sort of normative, middle of the road taste the more useful aggregated reviews will likely be. Using a single reviewer (or several) only works when someone's tastes are predictable. Using aggregate reviews, can remove the kind of predictability that I can use to predict wether I'd like the movie.
2muchcoffeeman 11y ago
>The only approach I've found that works is to pick a professional reviewer that is marginally close to my taste I miss David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz.
kpmah 11y ago
I love RT, but I think people misinterpret the percentage. It doesn't mean that the film was 95% 'good', it means there was a 95% chance you'd like the film and a 5% chance you'd dislike it based on a sampling of professional reviews. Something to bear in mind is that a slight above mediocre film can have a 100% rating if it has wide appeal.
- nrao123 11y ago
  Here is a great article talking about the differences between RT & Metacritic: http://www.thecroakingfrog.com/blog/rotten-tomatoes-vs-metacritic-the-definitive-guide http://www.thecroakingfrog.com/blog/rotten-tomatoes-vs-metac... I personally find that there are less misfires on a good Metacritic score.
- chrismcb 11y ago
  I think you are the one that is misinterpreting the percentage. 95% means that 95% of the reviews were "positive." Of course it says nothing on whether you will like it or not, because it has no idea what you would like.
  - kpmah 11y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(statistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(statistics)
aceofpack 11y ago
Finding people that rate in the same way as you is an interesting concept at https://www.mov3y.com https://www.mov3y.com
- andreasley 11y ago
  If only it worked. After rating 50 movies, the "recommended" section still is empty. Also, lots of GUI issues, dead links etc.
  - aceofpack 11y ago
    Oh yea, that's not how it was when I was using it for a few weeks. Seems they must have a recent issue.
    - aceofpack 11y ago
      Ah no, seems to work now :)
      - andreasley 11y ago
        Recommendations are shown now for me, too. Not really movies that I liked, but at least it's working. The "Something wrong?" link at the bottom right is still a 404 though. :(
        leonfs 11y ago
        Have you explored the similarity between users? Recommendations are based on similar people. I usually use the user comparison view to check if I can trust the other user. The user comparison view also shows you what the other user has seen and you haven't. Great once you trust the user to discover new movies.
- aembleton 11y ago
  Brilliant, thanks for that. Seems great, shame that the recommended tab is empty.
waterlesscloud 11y ago
Agreed. I'm a serious movie fan. I've seen more movies than the 99.999th percentile of the worldwide public. Officially filtered for a number of film festivals, including at least one you've heard of. And I still give heavy weight to certain reviewers for general release films. It's all about finding people you more or less agree with.

by abruzzi 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

eridius 11y ago

I'm curious, what was the 95% fresh movie that you thought was the worst movie in 2 decades?

copperx 11y ago
I'm going to guess Snowpiercer.
bmelton 11y ago
I'm not the OP, so this is just a guess, but my money's on "The Room". If not, I'm guessing it's because the OP hasn't yet seen it. ;-) http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/room_2015/ http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/room_2015/ Edit: Ooops. The wrong "The Room" altogether. Nod to abruzzi for the correction. The actual Room is only 35% fresh, which I must say is either way too high, or way too low, depending on one's take of the film. The correct link is here: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_room_1998/ http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_room_1998/
- abruzzi 11y ago
  Sadly that's the wrong Room: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_room_1998/ http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_room_1998/
  - bmelton 11y ago
    Thank you for the correction. Gigantic oops moment there.
abruzzi 11y ago
Snowpiercer. I'm sure some people love it, but I could not think of a single redeeming thing after I got done. I honestly preferred "The Room", (though that ones 'quality' was unintentional.)
- bmelton 11y ago
  Snowpiercer was indeed sad, but I always assumed my negativity towards it was a result of having already read Hugh Howey's (rather good) Silo Saga, which it seemed to rip off at every turn, only having shifted the X and Y axes. I came away from it thinking that if I hadn't read the Silo Saga, I might possibly have actually enjoyed Snowpiercer, though definitely nowhere near 95%'s worth.
  - lemevi 11y ago
    I found the first half of Wool to be very good and the rest of it readable, although just barely so. Howey is a terrible writer with interesting plot ideas. Howey has a compulsion to explicitly tell you in minute details through every other passage exactly what is on everyone's mind. The concept of using symbolism and actions to portray people seems lost to him. His sentence structure is terrible. He's saved by Wool's very interesting idea and the first chapter of Wool was admittedly very good. I read the entire series and I really think at a high level his ideas a very interesting, but he just doesn't really have the skill required to write well. I am not sure an editor would help, maybe a co-author.
    - lmm 11y ago
      I think you have it backwards. The ideas of Wool are so common in prior science fiction that authors would take them for granted, play with them. The plot is pretty much that of The Penultimate Truth. Howey succeeded because, for whatever reason, people liked his writing or he details of his version more than previous iterations of the idea.
      - bmelton 11y ago
        Very possible. Not suggesting that Wool was entirely unique, but more specifically, that Snowpiercer seemed to have taken the entire idea of Wool and just shifted the axis from vertical to horizontal. There were a LOT of copied ideas. Perhaps none of them were original to Wool, but Wool was not (to my knowledge) as much a clone of any individual work as it was the compilation of a lot of tropes.
4ad 11y ago
"Gravity" wasn't the worst in two decades, but it is a pile of crap, and it does have 97% on RT and 7.9 on IMDB.
- knowaveragejoe 11y ago
  "a pile of crap" is a bit harsh, it's fantastically produced and the acting is okay.
- Kequc 11y ago
  Everyone has different opinions but what was crap about it. Directed by the visionary behind Children of Men, which won best picture and rather than just making a bunch of easy films he spent 4 years making this one. The cinematography required new innovations in ways to film space scenes. New rigs and such they invented that stuff on the production budget. The acting was top notch. It was stunning. The cheesy stuff? The unrealistic parts of it? Maybe you could criticise those aspects of it, but they were intentional sacrifices made so the rest of the film could be fresh, new, attainable. The story arc was like a mini rollercoaster, never slowed down. I cheered for our protagonist. Movies like that don't come out very often. It's a borderline masterpiece my dear friend. A masterpiece I tell you. One of the prettiest looking things I've ever seen in Imax. It made me have feelings inside. I rated it as one of the best movies to come out in decades. I think part of a film like that is the spectacle of it. It's probably harder to enjoy on a cellphone, is that what happened?

Demiurge 11y ago

This very reasonable. Movies, music, art, can't be reduced to a single numerical score. In this sense no rating 'should' be trusted, but instead we need to make choices based on entirety of context. Seems trivial, yet we always want an easy answer.

abruzzi 11y ago
This is basically my answer as well. I'm the first to admit that my tastes are not very well in line with conventional wisdom (I also cant stand Pixar films..) The closer your tastes are to that sort of normative, middle of the road taste the more useful aggregated reviews will likely be. Using a single reviewer (or several) only works when someone's tastes are predictable. Using aggregate reviews, can remove the kind of predictability that I can use to predict wether I'd like the movie.

2muchcoffeeman 11y ago

>The only approach I've found that works is to pick a professional reviewer that is marginally close to my taste I miss David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz.

kpmah 11y ago

I love RT, but I think people misinterpret the percentage. It doesn't mean that the film was 95% 'good', it means there was a 95% chance you'd like the film and a 5% chance you'd dislike it based on a sampling of professional reviews. Something to bear in mind is that a slight above mediocre film can have a 100% rating if it has wide appeal.

nrao123 11y ago
Here is a great article talking about the differences between RT & Metacritic: http://www.thecroakingfrog.com/blog/rotten-tomatoes-vs-metacritic-the-definitive-guide http://www.thecroakingfrog.com/blog/rotten-tomatoes-vs-metac... I personally find that there are less misfires on a good Metacritic score.
chrismcb 11y ago
I think you are the one that is misinterpreting the percentage. 95% means that 95% of the reviews were "positive." Of course it says nothing on whether you will like it or not, because it has no idea what you would like.
- kpmah 11y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(statistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(statistics)

aceofpack 11y ago

Finding people that rate in the same way as you is an interesting concept at https://www.mov3y.com https://www.mov3y.com

andreasley 11y ago
If only it worked. After rating 50 movies, the "recommended" section still is empty. Also, lots of GUI issues, dead links etc.
- aceofpack 11y ago
  Oh yea, that's not how it was when I was using it for a few weeks. Seems they must have a recent issue.
  - aceofpack 11y ago
    Ah no, seems to work now :)
    - andreasley 11y ago
      Recommendations are shown now for me, too. Not really movies that I liked, but at least it's working. The "Something wrong?" link at the bottom right is still a 404 though. :(
      - leonfs 11y ago
        Have you explored the similarity between users? Recommendations are based on similar people. I usually use the user comparison view to check if I can trust the other user. The user comparison view also shows you what the other user has seen and you haven't. Great once you trust the user to discover new movies.
aembleton 11y ago
Brilliant, thanks for that. Seems great, shame that the recommended tab is empty.

waterlesscloud 11y ago

Agreed. I'm a serious movie fan. I've seen more movies than the 99.999th percentile of the worldwide public. Officially filtered for a number of film festivals, including at least one you've heard of. And I still give heavy weight to certain reviewers for general release films. It's all about finding people you more or less agree with.