3 ms·
Up a level: any notion of a "score" for a movie is inherently BS. The box office totals are there, if you want a score. Pick one or two critics you know & resp
by AlbertCory 3y ago
Up a level: any notion of a "score" for a movie is inherently BS. The box office totals are there, if you want a score.
Pick one or two critics you know & respect, read them, and decide for yourself if you might like that film.
- mcpackieh 3y agoYou're right of course, but reading a review takes time and learning which reviewers have tastes aligned with your own takes even more time. The entire premise of Rotten Tomatoes is to give people a simple number they can read in a second. 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.
- singleshot_ 3y agoUnder this methodology, the best film in history was Avatar.
- AlbertCory 3y agoI didn't even name any critics, so how would you derive that?
- mlyle 3y agoHe's responding to "The box office totals are there, if you want a score."
- AlbertCory 3y agoMisunderstanding it, though. I didn't say you should go by them.
- mlyle 3y agoIf you say it's a possible figure of merit, don't be expected when people point out problems in that figure of merit or say why it's even less suited for purpose than RT and MC.
- AlbertCory 3y agoJust goes to show there's nothing you can possibly say that someone won't either misunderstand, or be offended by, or both. 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.
- mlyle 3y agoI just don't understand what your intended point is. You're mentioning that there's an unrelated attribute about movies, but "objective"... Then you're surprised when people quibble with said attribute's utility. 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.
- woobar 3y agoI don't think parent meant that we should use box office number to decide if movie is great. Just that it is a most objective "score" attached to the movie title. For instance, one can use this score as a proxy to how popular the movie is.
- AlbertCory 3y ago[flagged]
- singleshot_ 3y ago[flagged]
- AlbertCory 3y ago[flagged]
- coremoff 3y agoI find the general aggregation of reviews with key quotes (e.g. that you see on wikipedia) to be extremely useful; you can get a sense of how the movie plays out even from reviewers that you don't know or don't respect, as there's always some objective critiera worth mentioning, and some of those things are important to me and some are not. 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.
- chrisfosterelli 3y agoBox office totals tell you how widely appealing a movie is, how well marketed it is, and how well distributed it is, which is not necessarily the ideal proxy for quality. And it's increasingly less useful given the way streaming services have changed movie releases.
- mlyle 3y ago> Pick one or two critics you know & respect, read them, and decide for yourself if you might like that film. 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.