Aesthetics for Birds

Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art for Everyone

Against Rotten Tomatoes

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For Matt’s updated thoughts about this topic, see his book, Why It’s OK to Love Bad Movies.

Rotten Tomatoes was in the news this summer, as reports were made that the teams behind the Baywatch reboot and most recent Pirates of the Caribbean installment blame the critical aggregator for the films’ poor performance at the box office.  Both films had tested well, and the studios believe that audiences skipping the films in light of their poor Rotten Tomatoes scores otherwise would have attended and enjoyed them.  There is some evidence that the impact of Rotten Tomeatoes on box office earnings has in fact been minimal, but it’s hard to deny that the website has seen an increase in influence in recent years.  There’s no longer any need to actively search for RT scores.  If one simply Googles the title of the movie one is hoping to see, the RT score has pride of place at the top of the search results, along with the IMDB user score.  When one logs onto the Fandango website or app to buy movie tickets, the scores are already listed along with the showtimes (Fandango owns Rotten Tomatoes).  The same is true for Flixster, also owned by Fandango, and the home streaming app VUDU.  There are smartphone apps available that let users quickly consult RT scores for a movie recommendation or even cross-reference the movies that are available on Netflix streaming with their RT scores.  Rotten Tomatoes scores are now inscribed all over the technological landscape that mediates our access to film.  It is very hard to avoid becoming aware of a movie’s RT score before seeing it.

One reasonable reaction is, “Well, good!  The blockbuster used to be a beautiful thing, but now it’s all lazy, uninspired sequels and reboots.   It’s a good thing that Rotten Tomatoes has created a mechanism that helps us avoid bad movies.  Perhaps studios will up their game if they become convinced that that they can’t get away with this crap anymore.”

I think this reaction is short-sighted, and the growing influence of the Tomatometer is mostly a bad thing. There are many reasons, but the one I want to focus on is this: the aggregator doesn’t just punish bad movies, it also punishes bold and distinct movies. How would 2001: A Space Odyssey have fared if Rotten Tomatoes existed in 1968? Not well.

Alexander Nehamas writes, discussing the negative critical reaction that Manet’s Olympia initially faced:

Of the more than 3,000 works exhibited at the Salon of 1865, only a very few came up either for praise or blame.  The Olympia provoked by far the strongest reaction among them: but, far from having caused it harm, the ferocity of its critics suggests that on some level they knew they were confronting something importantly different from the paintings to which they were accustomed.  Harm was done only to the thousands that went, and have remained, unnoticed, outside the history of art…. [L]ove clashes less with hate than with indifference and beauty is less opposed to ugliness than to the nondescript. (Only a Promise of Happiness, 42)

I’m reminded of a trip to a brick-and-mortar DVD rental store back in New Jersey.  I was considering a handful of rentals, including Gus Van Sant’s Béla Tarr homage, Gerry, which I had heard good things about.  Realizing that I had made too many selections, I handed Gerry to the cashier and said “I don’t think I’m going to rent this one today.”  She said, “Good call.  It’s literally the WORST movie I’ve ever see.”  I replied, “Nevermind, I want it.”  Nothing against her, it’s just that the vehemence of her reaction told me that there’s something interesting going on with Gerry.   No one says that a forgettable movie is the worst thing they’ve ever seen.

If one only watches movies that most RT critics like, much of what one sees will be inoffensive and benign.  Bold, ambitious works are not apt to generate consensus.  Often, a lot of people will hate them, especially when they are first unveiled.  Distinctness breeds disagreement; innovation prompts backlash.  This is not to say that early audiences always balk at groundbreaking works, but it’s pretty much a crapshoot.  This holds true for the highbrow and lowbrow alike.  Check out this list of movies that were booed when they debuted at the Cannes film festival (granted, some of them deserved it).   And here are some of the movies that have been nominated for the Razzie award for worst film or worst director of the year: Cruising, Dressed to Kill, The Shining, Mommie Dearest, Scarface, Cliffhanger, Last Action Hero, Heaven’s Gate, Rambo: First Blood Part II, Rocky IV, Cobra, Road House, Showgirls, Anaconda, Freddie Got Fingered, Alexander, White Chicks, Lady in the Water, Jupiter Ascending.   What do these movies have in common?  They have panache.  They’re memorable.  They’re not to everyone’s liking, but the world would be a much less interesting place without them.  I bet you absolutely love at least a few of them.

If one systematically favors releases with a high RT rating, one perhaps mitigates the downside of the gamble one takes when one spends time and money on a movie, but one also tends to limit the upside.  If one were making decisions this way in 1968, one would have likely skipped 2001.  Plenty of movies that get very high Tomatometer ratings will be totally forgotten a few years from now.  It’s often movies like 2001—movies that early audiences struggle to come to terms with—that prove to have the deepest and most enduring interest.

This is not to say that Rotten Tomatoes is useless.  It gives useful information.  We can count on the bulk of Tomato critics to have extremely nondescript taste, because very few publications want to employ outlier critics.  Tomato critics characteristically overvalue method acting, landscape photography, and progressive messaging.  They write things like, “I’d be more into Knight of Cups had it been a cohesive study of the human spirit, with actual character development that draws you into their struggles, desires and circumstances.” Sometimes it is good to know where the aggregate of these critics stands.  If there is a new Jason Statham movie called Professional Thief or Racecar Driver or Escaped Convict, and the aggregate says 90%, I know I’m in for a good time.  If the aggregate says 30%, I know that the movie doesn’t do a good job jumping through all the genre expectation-hoops that it’s supposed to jump through, but I also know that it’ll still be good, because every Jason Statham movie is good.  If the new Oscar-bait prestige biopic is at 24%, I know it probably sucks, because this is the sort of thing that Tomato critics characteristically overvalue, and so if even they don’t like it, it’s probably just bad.  But if the new Nicolas Cage movie is at 7%, I’m definitely in.

So should the film-goer who just wants to have a good time on their night out care about my argument?

There are surely some contexts where the most important thing is protecting the downside. Perhaps one is extremely anxious about a romantic date and just wants to make sure the movie one selects is not bad without caring about how good it is. Fine, I get that. But generally, it does not seem that most people want to think of themselves as especially risk averse when it comes to the aesthetic realm. Some people surely are very risk averse about aesthetic experiences, but we tend to think that these people suck. These are the people who insist on the Olive Garden’s soup/salad/breadsticks combo when they are visiting a new city full of exciting regional food options. Even if someone can only see a small number of films, wouldn’t most of us prefer a few extravagant disasters along with a few bold masterpieces rather than a steady diet of plain vanilla La La Land?

It’s worth taking an active effort to undercut the influence of Rotten Tomatoes. This certainly doesn’t entail limiting one’s consumption to titles that are Certified Rotten; it just entails taking care not to treat the aggregate as the default decider. If you’re short on time and need a way to separate the wheat from the chaff, find a few individual critics whose sensibility speaks to you. It’s worth the effort. Rotten Tomatoes is actually a decent place to start (if you’re up for it, also consider film social media sites like letterboxd.com). There are some very interesting critics included in the RT aggregate, often representing more specialized publications. Look for insights that resonate with you. I regularly read a number of critics from the aggregate, including Keith Uhlich and Ed Gonzalez. I very often disagree with them, but they usually have an interesting point of view that I find illuminating or at least entertaining. By reading these same critics consistently for many years, I have developed a sense of their taste and where it is likely to diverge from mine.  I get way more information from their reviews than I do from the aggregate. If one of the critics I have an affinity for is head over heels about something, I’m going to see it, regardless of what the aggregate says. I certainly believe that this approach has worked out much better for me than default deference to the critical majority would have.

9 Comments

  1. So I wasn’t sure what the upshot is: Is it something more like don’t read aggregates, or just that Rotten Tomatoes suck at that?

    Here’s a million-dollar idea I’ve had a long time and still not seen implemented. Something like Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic, except that the critic scores are weighed with respect to your own ratings so that the aggregate reflects your taste profile. That is, the aggregation should not be a generic ideal advisor, but your idealized self. To build such a weighing, polarizing movies might be especially helpful. (Dancer in the Dark was my go to example. I quite like it, many don’t.)

    The closest implementation to this idea I’ve seen is https://www.criticker.com/ which uses other users’ scores to determine your likely response.

    So here’s where I’m not sure what the upshot is. On this model, there indeed wouldn’t be default deference to the critical majority would have. But it also minimizes “extravagant disasters”. And I wasn’t sure whether you think that’s good or not.

    • This and what follows is the upshot:

      “It’s worth taking an active effort to undercut the influence of Rotten Tomatoes. This certainly doesn’t entail limiting one’s consumption to titles that are Certified Rotten; it just entails taking care not to treat the aggregate as the default decider.”

      What you’re describing sounds like the old Netflix algorithm: ratings are weighted for how often you tend to agree with the rater. That would be better but one still shouldn’t treat it as the default decider, because many of our dearest loves are quite idiosynchratic. I’m sure many people who overlap broadly with your taste hate Dancer in the Dark (I like it, btw, but I don’t love it).

      • Right, I recognize the paragraph, but I still feel like we might dislike Rotten Tomatoes for very different reasons. Roughly, I think it should not be the default decider because it is such an imperfect predictor. And I think the response is to look for better predictors (but still continue to try to minimize the chance of seeing bad-to-me movies).

        I think there are a couple of differences between what I am describing and what’s on the market. The use of critics as proxy for idealization makes it different from Criticker. It uses more fine-grained measures like Criticker and Metacritic and unlike, if I understand correctly, old Netflix and Rotten Tomatoes. And finally, it is “personalized”, unlike Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes. Yes, many of our loves are quite idiosyncratic, but the thought is that, with enough data points, maybe we’ll find people with similarly idiosyncratic loves who are in a better position to predict our future idiosyncratic loves than a generic coarse-grained unpersonalized aggregator. (The thought with polarizing movies is that they might be better indicators of idiosyncrasies.)

      • But again, I’m not sure we really disagree because I feel like what I’m describing is just a more mechanical and machine-aided version of “If you’re short on time and need a way to separate the wheat from the chaff, find a few individual critics whose sensibility speaks to you. It’s worth the effort.”

  2. I would shift the emphasis: once one has selected a few critics one has an affinity for, it’s important to attend to the content of their reviews and not simply their verdicts. Some reviews will give me a clear sense that the movie will be a waste of my time, while others might give me the sense that I might like the movie better than the critic did. I also think (though this is a different question) that there is some reason to include works we don’t like in our diet. I mean, there are lots of reasons, such as enabling ourselves to participate in the conversation about these movies, but in particular it seems that part of developing one’s taste is having occasion to make negative judgments as well as positive.

    • Thanks! So is it right to put it that your objection toward Rotten Tomatoes is less about aggregation and prediction, but its focus on verdictive (as opposed to substantive) judgments? That is, if there were some other aggregation and predictive algorithm (that is personalized) that’d focus more on substantive judgments then that’d be okay?

      • I have many objections towards Rotten Tomatoes. The one I wanted to focus on here is that aggregation will tend to punish distinctness and boldness. I suppose you could aggregate critics with a predilection for distinctness and boldness and thereby escape this problem. I think there are better and worse algorithms, but I am skeptical that I would endorse total reliance on *any* algorithm, because I don’t think generalizations about aesthetic qualities are very useful (I’m a sort of particularist about aesthetic qualities), and so I am skeptical that you could construct parameters that will reliably predict what you will like or find worthwhile. So while I think you can get helpful information from a review, I don’t think you could delineate in advance the sort of information that you’re looking for. So let’s say, for instance, that I like Wes Anderson in part because I like his whimsy and fastidious visual compositions. This doesn’t imply that I like whimsy and fastidious compositions in most other contexts. If I told the algorithm to look for substantive judgments favoring a work’s whimsy and fastidious compositions it might tell me to watch The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which I hate. I do think that such algorithms can be useful, but I don’t think you should let them run the show for you. If I’ve misunderstood your suggestion, please straighten me out.

  3. OK, I’m coming to this piece five years late, but I’ve been busy. Anyway, thanks for an amazing read—and it’s amazing particularly because I agreed with everything you wrote. A few random (and, sorry, lengthy) comments/reactions; a word on a pre-digital movie review behemoth (Leonard Maltin’s Movie & TV Review); and a shout-out to someone we both know.

    Your 2001 comment hit home. I’m 65, and as an 11-year-old SF nerd I suddenly found myself the core demographic for that movie, which remains the film I’ve seen more times in theaters than any other; I still relish the memory of my 2nd (and 3rd) viewing, sitting in the 4th row and watching it twice (oh, the days of the Continuous Showing). I also had no idea what critics were saying (although I had some idea of the confusion it created), so I simply assumed that everyone on the planet was having a wonderful time.

    On Jason Statham: a week or so ago ago I watched the one where they’re robbing armored cars (a Guy Ritchie movie, I think), just to validate my conviction—which you state—that every JS movie is a good movie. This is an empirically provable fact, provided you’ve properly calibrated your Awesome Meter.

    How to use the Meta/Tomato for low-scored movies: Read the negative reviews, which often want something I don’t, hate something I like, or simply hit that hallmark of bad criticism: discuss not the movie you saw but the one you would’ve made. Feh.

    Maltin’s Guide was a remarkable thing, a Double Big Mac-thick paperback that you bought every year, not simply because of the additions but because you wore out the old one. A friend of mine and I used it to play a game: You open to a random page and try to find two movies you’ve seen (three in the final deathmatch). You lose the round if you can’t (drinking optional). Speaking of Maltin, I grew up in New Jersey (great minds, etc.), and returned there in the late ’80s, where I found a Movies Unlimited retail store, a Big Box sales and rentals store. The clerks were all Tarantinos, providing insight and geek-rapture as needed. In case a customer wanted advice on a title the clerk hadn’t seen, they kept a Maltin behind the counter. (One clerk from England clued me in on the great treasure-trove of British SF/horror movies: Enemy from Space, Fiend Without a Face, Night/Curse of the Demon, and so on.) Back to Maltin: My friend and I came to recognize that the book’s mild-mannered core resulted in a sweet spot in their star rating system: the 2-1/2-star movie, a twilight world in which uncertainty and missteps resulted in some pretty wonderful stuff. btw the Maltin Guide provides the best “BOMB”-rated review in the history of criticism, for Cronenberg’s The Brood: “[Samantha] Eggar eats her own afterbirth while midget clones beat grandparents and lovely young schoolteachers to death with mallets. It’s a big, wide, wonderful world we live in!” Now there’s a must-see.

    Finally, I’d like to thank you for the stuff you’ve been doing with Brandon Polite. I work at Knox College (as a writing coordinator for a program that serves first-gen and low-income students; I also adjunct-teach, including some film courses) and have long enjoyed seeing Brandon’s syllabi in the hands of my students, his FB postings, and more recently his Polite Conversations; I enjoyed your article and conversation with him on disagreeing about art. So thanks for your brain-thinkins, as Ricky from Trailer Park Boys puts it. I may be an English teacher, but way back in the late ’70s the Jesuits made me take 6 semesters of theology and philosophy, and it gets to you after a while. Take care.

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