Watched Lockout with Guy Pearce and Maggie Grace. It’s basically Die Hard on a Supermax space prison. Guy has to rescue Maggie after a prison riot that erupts on her fact finding mission. She’s the First Daughter by the way. And Dad is standing by to give the order for a ful assault once she’s rescued. The rest of the hostages will be collateral damage. There’s also a subplot about a briefcase that Guy dumped off to a mystery man. That man is on the prison but he suffers from dementia brought on by stasis.
So I check out rotten tomatoes after rating it 5 stars on Netlix streaming. 33% critics, 44% audience. What gives?
I guess my TomatoMeter is pegged to that of the reasonably astute critics, because my personal ratings tend to agree with the RT ratings. That’s often the case even when my opinion was formed long before I saw any reviews or the composite score. So films that come in at the 0-25 range tend to be ones I thought were sucky, too.
It’s in the midrange that there’s the most difference - movies I’d rate 80+ sometimes come in with an RT of 50-60. In most cases, the films are special-interest (Watchmen) or ones where I think (and the more astute positive critics seem to think) that those who gave a thumbs-down missed the point of the movie. Older example: if you read the negative reviews of Darkman, you can see that they never got that it was black, black humor. Viewed and reviewed from the perspective of being a straight thriller/drama, it does suck. You have to get the humor to appreciate it for what it is.
But in the end, you’re your own best critic. So if you gave five stars to a movie and RT hammered it, so what? The question is… if you rewatch the movie in a few years, will you still rate it so highly? Or did this first viewing hit you in a time and way that obscured what the consensus thought sucked? I’ve had that happen, too. I think part of being an astute critic is to try and watch the film both as a viewer and in a meta mode, thinking about how it’s going to age and strike viewers on repeated showings.
Without trying to list specifics, I found out long ago that if I had read reviews before watching something, I would have missed a good percentage of my favorite movies and TV shows. So I wait until I have seen them to read the critics. I’ve had decent luck with Ebert and Rotten Tomatoes and maybe 75% of the things I like will get their approval. But it still happens too often that I will give something at least 3 stars only to see that they have had to stretch to give it one!
I worry at times that my tastes are not as sophisticated as I would like them to be, but I still prefer to make up my own mind before I see how wrong I was.
No. The Tomatometer has a better claim to infallibility than the pope.
The disconnect is that I know cult movies suck as movies. I might still enjoy Jackass - The Movie (48%) – but I know it doesn’t pass muster as a movie. I don’t need my campy romps to be critically acclaimed in the exact same way I wouldn’t expect or require my Wrigley Field brat and beers to get four star raves from the Tribune’s food critic.
I really liked Dinner For Schmucks. Didn’t expect any Oscar nominations, but it was a comedy, and it made me laugh quite a lot, so that’s a success in my book. Critics did not agree.
Also, my wife drags me to a good number of Romantic Comedies, most of which I simply tolerate. We went to see one called How Do You Know with Reese Witherspoon, Paul Rudd, and Jack Nicholson as Rudd’s father. While I’m not sure I’d go so far as to say I “thoroughly enjoyed” it, I found it well above average for a romcom, and it kept me invested and engaged all the way through. It was a critical and commercial failure.
Me too! *Oscar *is made of awesome - made me a Stallone fan for life. So now when I see dreck like The Expendables (1 or 2) - terrible, but stuff gets blowed up real good - I can at least say, “But he was in Oscar.”
I need critics. My life is too short and funds too tight to spend two and a half hours and/or more than ten bucks bucks on a crappy movie. There are a few directors than I will always go see, but favorite actor, hell no. If a movie gets mixed reviews I might go see it, but if it absolutely gets savaged by the critics, if will probably go on the netflix list and I’ll probably let my wife watch it alone. I’ll find something better to do, thanks.
Critics are an imperfect way to make choices but you need to have some basis to find quality entertainment. Don’t have time, money or inclination to see every movie that shows up at my Cineplex. I probably have missed some reasonably entertaining movies but I’ve never walked out of a movie at the theatre and I’ve only turned off a half dozen movies at home in my life.
The first one to come to mind is Domino with Keira Knightley. 18% at RT. 9% (!) among top critics. I’m not a fan that much of the genre, but I found it quite a bit better than most action shoot-em-ups.
I really liked Prometheus until I got on this board and read the discussion thread. It clued me in to a lot of weird and inexplicable stuff in the movie that I had overlooked, and now I like the movie much less than I did when I came out of the theater
A couple of time. I adore Death to Smoochy - I think it’s brilliant and hilarious. The critics ripped it to shreds and seemed to almost universally miss the entire point of the movie. Some of the reviews I read literally left me boggled, wondering what movie they’d seen.
:eek: :dubious: :mad: