People want to use it because its very easy to sign up and very easy to use. Even compared to Paypal, its much easier in my experience. And the vast majority of users don't have any issues at all.
In my experience the scores are not usually that far apart (< 20 points or so let's say).
In the instances that it is far apart, the differences are usually easy to articulate. Critics appreciate and notice technical aspects of films more than average viewers, and are quicker to recognize cliches and tropes.
This can lead to movies having much higher audience scores than critic scores, which flies in the face of the notion that critics are getting paid.
I've been using the website Movie Lens for over a decade and it works kind of like this, except you're not comparing to critics, it's just other users' average score
Yeah, I mean, its a pretty basic application of the general recommender-system concept, there's probably lots of places where there is an approximation of it for movies.
Criticker (https://www.criticker.com/) works like this too and gives really good recommendations but even keeping track of all the movies you've watched and rating them is more work than most people want to do.
Putting experience and expertise about a matter of taste on a pedestal is nonsense.
I don't share many values with movie critics. Here's an spicy example that will mark me as a philistine forever.
I think Princess Mononoke was an awful film with a navel gazing director who gets treated far too kindly because of a childish desire for "whimsy". Everytime I see a Ghibli pusher here, I laugh.
No movie critic will engage with such a perspective (because it is "wrong", the movie is "powerful", the art is "beautiful" and the characters are "strong" — every one of which is literally a matter of interpretation). Depending on critics is depending on people who have to satisfy their local equivalent of the Reddit front page. Why would you trust them except to know the current rightthink?
It's not the same as a scientist describing climate change or an engineer explaining the loads on a bridge.
Freddy Got Fingered, the movie I personally found funniest, is currently at 11% on Rotten Tomatoes. It's full of creative and quotable scenes, and never resorts to tired cliches (despite its genre there is no toilet humor). Penalizing a gross-out comedy for being "gross" is a clear failure of criticism. Even Roger Ebert, who usually judged movies by the standards of the genre, made this mistake.
Batman v Superman, the superhero movie I personally found most engaging, is at 29%. It's one of the few movies in the genre that feels like it has any ambition to be serious art. It takes the characters seriously, without the constant jokes the Marvel movies use to reassure the audience that they're not really comic book nerds. Critics considered this a reason to rate it poorly.
I saw a recent reappraisal of Freddy Got Fingered by Red Letter Media* that was very interesting; apparently it was also meant as a cash grab by studio execs, and Tom Green decided to make the weirdest movie he could possibly make.
While I don't personally like the "gross-out" style of movie, the the discussion of the movie exposed a lot of nuance behind the movie that I didn't know. The difference between the conversation and the original "professional reviews" really was telling; I much prefer the former to the later.
*: I am aware of the contradiction; in my defense, I mostly care about their comments about movie structure.
Princess Mononoke just has a slow gradual buildup. It builds the world and plays with plot tension and progression in interesting ways. Then saves the climax for the end of the film, with an after scene that gives a sense of finality.
It's easily one of my favourite films for these reasons.
"Expertise" in subjectively critiquing an art (movies) isn't a thing. You don't progress at it or have a better ability to critic as you do it. You might get better at portraying your feelings to people in the review, but they're still subjective feelings based on your personal tastes.
It used to, the professional critics were mostly just those that were paid by newspapers or similar. Lately as in the last few years the gates were opened to basically anyone with a blog viewed by more than their parents. This let everything be manipulated much more easily.
It seems to me like fans of LotR decided before it even came out that they didn't like it and have brigaded platforms with negative reviews. Maybe its not even a conscious effort. Lots of people dislike Amazon. And lots of the fans disliked the whole notion of turning this content into a show. I think that has colored the reaction to the show among the public while critics can usually take a more objective view
I have no strong attachment to LotR. The Rings of Power was just bad: the characters were shallow stereotypes, the acting was poor, the plot wasn't interesting.
I was surprised when watching the first episode, after seeing 83% from critics on RT. It did not match my expectations from prior RT scores. I remember one movie that had a 90-something rating from critics and 30-something rating from viewers, whose name I unfortunately can't remember. It was strange, like a C movie from an alternate universe with different tropes. I can imagine being a reviewer, bored to death of the endless rehashes I have to watch, enjoying it because at least it's different. Rings of Power, not so much.
On the very off chance that anyone knows the name of this strange movie, here are my recollections of it: they come out when you sleep, beats of 4, talking to strangers, robotic face visors, going with the flow vs. machines.
That sounds like the sort of cope the show creators would come up with to shield their egos. It's not the creators fault, it's the audiences' fault for hating new things or something... I disregard these narratives. Blaming the audience is pure cope.
I knew some LOTR superfans who were upset with the first three Peter Jackson movies only being about a thousand hours long and omitting various plots and characters.. but these people were a minority and most loved the new thing. And then when Jackson made the hobbit movies the reception was very different. The audience didn't change, his new movies just weren't up to the same standard they expected. And if the show is getting hate, I think it's fair to assume that's because the show isn't good either. Maybe it would get better reviews if it were original IP and didn't have Jackson's first three LOTR movies casting a shadow on it, but blaming the fans for this isn't right.
I've seen a couple of critiques on it, and they all seem to be well-founded. How do you differentiate between "decided before it even came out that they didn't like it" and "have real grievances that support their view of the show"?
I looked for their critic reviews and they only list one. That one saw two episodes and said it's off to "a promising start", mostly talking about the production values which I don't think anyone will argue against. I think I might have given it a positive rating after a couple episodes too. The plot soon veers into too many nonsensical moments to ignore though, like an elf swimming across an ocean.
Rings of Power is ok. More flash than substance. And the dialog and writing is genuinely bad in places. In one episode you had two characters pull the "don't kill him, we may need him" trope on each other within a minute of each other over the same character. And nothing had really changed otherwise. They both wanted to kill the guy and both stopped the other from killing him because, I don't know, show.
It's a solid C+. Like Wheel of Time or Foundation. Not horrible. Not great either. Not the best take on the source material, but it's fine I guess.
I don't know, I feel like both the people who say it is great and the people who say it is horrible are both wrong. If you would ask me for an opinion, I would say it is a show that I watched.
Existing IP comes with existing baggage seems fair to me. If they did something original people wouldn't have those expectations, but in return also not the existing fame.
They did a really good job of shitting on their fan base before it came out. Every criticism with met with you're a bigot, or a racist, or a misogynist.
They decided to slap the name on a show that only represented LOTR in name. So, I think they fairly get to receive the backlash of an obvious money grab.
I tend to view the opposite. An individual is way easier to manipulate than an entire platform. Anybody who gets free products is immediately tainted. Project Farm says he pays for everything but all we have to trust that is his word. If you trust him, why don't you trust RT when they ban the company that paid for the reviews and say, "we take the integrity of our platform seriously"?
The more reviews that go into a rating, the more effort has to be made by bad actors to influence the score. And the higher the possibility that someone with integrity will reveal the scheme.
An aggregate of critics who may have different tastes or priorities than you is less useful for the reader than an individual person you're in tune with.
People like Rotten Tomatoes. It's a trusted source of information. If you know of widespread review manipulation then that IS news because it affects how people perceive the site and it's trustworthiness. In this particular case, RT's response is commensurate with what you'd expect of an organization that takes their reputation seriously. There's nothing here that indicates this is the normal state of affairs
I always look at critic score like quality of the film (acting, editing, etc), and audience score as entertainment value. I look for films that have 80+ in one and 70+ in both.
