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3yr ago
Of course, if you assume that Rottentomatoes is not manipulating any data than the data comes back to show exactly what they're telling you. But I was suggesting that they were secretly weighting the score which may seem conspiracy nutty but that's the entire point of looking at it and thinking "this seems strange, I don't buy it." I'm not going to say nobody believes that the score matches what the website shows but I believe most people who think things might be being manipulated think that a portion of negative reviews are being excluded outside of their own verification system because it's socially/politically in their interest to do so for any number of reasons. There's been so many instances of things being protected from false reviews in the past few years that I find it hard to believe without any hint of doubt that the 95% reflects reality.
Protecting TV shows/videogames/movies from review-bombing for political reasons is considered just what a good/respectable company does these days. In the same way that allowing people to talk about certain risque things or have certain opinions isn't allowed, saying "I didn't like this product because I don't like its political message" is only allowed in one direction and if it's the wrong direction (right slanted) then that is deemed bad and cracked down on in some way by changing how the reviews work (netflix), limiting reviews affecting scores when a lot of reviews happen at once (steam), verifying reviews in some way (rottentomatoes), all these things only exist because of review-bombing for political/culture war reasons. It's clear that review-bombing does happen by people who haven't consumed the media but even in cases where money is confirmed to have changed hands (steam) they still have protections for review-bombing because there are reasons for reviews that are deemed invalid. It seems easy for a website like Rottentomatoes to just turn off commentless zero star reviews for something even if it's been "verified" (I put a quotes because I don't know how their verification works). It's relatively conspiratorial and I don't necessarily believe it 100% but it doesn't strike me as crazy outlandish to do.
I also would find it easy to believe that a pr company would manufacture bad user reviews for something like metacritic to take a 5.0 down to a 2.0 and flood it with reviews specifically targeting the woke angle of something to completely erase the perceived value of user reviews that are bad or middling. I said in another post that I just don't trust rottentomatoes in the same way I don't trust wikipedia for anything political. Manipulation is just too easy even discounting RT doing it themselves. There are plenty of people that would give a 5/10 a 6/10 purely for culture war reasons and vice versa. But given the critic reviews, genre-fatigue (I guess live action remakes are maybe a genre), the baked-in culture war angle from both sides(I've seen three articles on deadline about how it sets a bad example for women, erases black slavery, and appropriates drag culture) I still find it hard to believe that it sits at 95%. I didn't say impossible, just hard to believe.
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3yr ago
Speaking of apples to oranges comparisons.
Rottentomatoes critic scores before a certain era and for certain products are absolutely not useful because they have so few reviews compared to anything recent and until streaming there were very few serious about making reviews for direct-to-dvd movies. Black Stallion Returns has 5 critic reviews. The Little Mermaid II has 6 critic reviews (and one of them is a duplicate). I don't see how you can take the comparison between thousands of user reviews seriously with that discrepancy.
Not to mention the fact that reviews for older movies are almost never going to draw review-bombing, and almost always going to have people leaving a less critical review of something older because it was older, because their nostalgia, because if they thought it was middling they wouldn't care to make a review for it. Hype, marketing, cultural issues (warring or not) probably skew reviews for modern things in ways that I have a hard time believing are going to reflect accurately back when examining 40 year old movies or direct-to-dvd sequels that came out in 2000.
A better comparison would be to take a movie without controversy, to my knowledge that fits in a similar mold. Look at The Lion King(2019) 52% critic and 85% audience and Aladdin (2019) with a 48% critic and 95% audience which would seem to suggest along with Beauty and the Beast that verified audience percentages make disney movies review proof for audiences. Then again there's Dumbo (2019) 46% critic and 48% audience, Mulan (2020) 78% critic and 46% audience, Lady and the Tramp (2019) 66% critic, 50% audience and finally, Pinnochio (2022) 29% critic and 27% audience. If IMDB has admitted they had to weight the score of The Little Mermaid to combat review bombing and rottentomatoes is releasing a 95% with no comment, I find it hard to believe. Not impossible taking into account something like Aladdin, but still hard to believe.
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3yr ago
You're not the first to notice. It seems like IMDB already weighted scores because of review-bombing. On IMDB, even weighted, it's at 7.2. And metacritic's score of 2.2 seems more reflective of what review-bombing might look like, so I'd bet Rottentomatoes put in some extra protections against review-bombing, above and beyond just weighting the score like IMDB. It seems like Rottentomatoes user scores are like Wikipedia articles, if it's political I wouldn't trust it implicitly.
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3yr ago
Ignoring the low-effort rule, we're casual here. "If I had more time I would have written a shorter letter." It takes a lot of unnecessary effort to be very succinct sometimes and most people just can't do it naturally, so I'll forgive some bloviating because it's a post on a discussion board that I'm reading for free.
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3yr ago
This hit home for me. The kindle fire volume slider/buttons go like this 0->30%->45%->60%->75%->90%->100%. Apparently you have to root it to get access to changing the volume in steps that don't skip the first 30 and don't go 15 at a time.
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3yr ago
They actually renewed it and then spent 5 million dollars on pre-production of the second season and then cancelled it. I mean it's not HBOmax renewing Minx and filming the entire second season and then cancelling it but it's clearly an executive decision-making problem. I wouldn't call any show that they've ever made an organic "hit" besides The Boys.
If you look at the Nielsen weeklies of time watched and compare A League of Their Own to Reacher it's probable that the entirety of minutes watched up until for for A League of Their Own was probably equal to the first couple weeks of Reacher. And Reacher is a mild hit for Amazon and Amazon in general has a much lower bar for being a hit than Netflix.
For a comparison Reacher had around 1500 million minutes watched in its first week and A League of the Their Own had around 500 million minutes. Reacher stayed on the charts for a couple more weeks but League was gone after its initial appearance.
Another, more sad comparison is that Friends/Seinfield/The Big Bang Theory/Gilmore Girls/Supernatural routinely get around 500 million minutes weekly, they pop in and out of the top ten but they're pretty consistent and usually come back. For whatever reason the show failed spectacularly but nobody noticed because nobody probably knew it existed (a wonder how that works).
Though all of this is moot. A League of Their Own is a clout chasing prestige show made to show off diversity or be artistic and maybe nab awards. It's competition is never going to be Reacher or Jack Ryan but maybe something like the Night Sky which premiered even lower than League and was promptly cancelled. It seems pretty clear that Amazon, like every other network and streamer makes a few clout/award shows and doesn't stick with them if they're not successful.
The fact that they're getting a second season and complaining about it is just a stupid way to bite the hand that feeds. Aside from writing for the Onion, and Movie 43 Will Graham has two episodes on a sitcom for Bravo which I'd never heard of and wasn't aware that Bravo made sitcoms, and his other two shows were both Amazon shows. The guy wrote for the Amazon show Alpha House, executive produced and wrote for Mozart in the Jungle and then created and wrote for A League of Their Own. And then he shits on Amazon, I hope that shield of saying "diversity" can keep them from noticing/remembering this when they want to offer him another show to make. It's funny how it's the white guy complaining about this and the other creator who has a career outside of that show isn't instigating diversity investigations into Amazon because her show was only renewed for a second and final season.
I'm not disagreeing that it is probably not ethnic. But I don't the think the majority of people making claims that Trump was a fascist or a Nazi make any distinction between the two. It works the same way with people who call the other side communists and socialists. They're just bad words for people they disagree with.
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3yr ago
Maybe your take is correct but I still think the ending makes the AI seem stupid or at the very least incredibly myopic.
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3yr ago
At least in the very recent era of these IPs you can look at it like this: The people making Dune were trying to adapt the book of Dune. The people making the new Lord of the Rings show were trying to write their own prequel they made up and couldn't include anything from the Silmarillion.
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3yr ago
My problem with Ex Machina is the ending. It makes the AI seem stupid. It has no idea where the helicopter will go, how long it will take to get there, and could have easily kept manipulating the protagonist until it was safely away and set up in a place where it could charge or a place to betray the protagonist later and escape in a world that has far less variables. I think it just threw away logic for a "Yaas Queen Slay" ending. But to me that's what happens at the end of almost any Alex Garland movie/tv show. Not necessarily about the queen slaying but about throwing away logic for an emotional payoff that trips all over the logical parts that came before. And I really like Alex Garland but I feel like he's just an ending stumbler.
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3yr ago
We don't need to figure anything out, it's clearly not just values because this post is bothersome to me on its face because it has very little context, is continuing an argument but also ignoring the argument to deflect disagreements as ad hoc or something, I'm not even sure because you're making vague insinuations here that I also can't parse even after realizing who you are and what it is you're talking about.
We don't live inside your brain and the way this was posted doesn't make that apparent. So, yes, clearly there are problems beyond just disagreeing with your values. But does this matter? Even understanding this post I'm left wondering what you're even trying to do here. Are you posting this because you want the answer? Because I'm sure you can strike a nerve and get more agitated responses than usual depending on the topic but there's clearly something more than that and it's not even the previous posts that made it clear but it's this post. Whatever drove you to make this post and to keep it so vague as if we all know about you and your arguments is probably partly the reason why people are reacting harsher than you think they should to you.
So, maybe think about why this post exists, why it needed to be made so long after those arguments have basically died, why you didn't link to any of the quotes or preface with what it is you were arguing about. And I know it's not fair because sometimes your personal overton window bugbear will bug other people immensely more than their's would you but if you want to get people to react less aggressive or dismissive toward you the first step is to be conscientious in general and avoid examples of how people phrase things as consensus building or culture warring, even if you disagree the examples you'd get from a search might just help you understand what to avoid when framing your position or just, in general, constructing something that someone else is going to read. Like I said before, we're not in your brain and we don't have your brain. But don't treat us like we're stupid even if we are.
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3yr ago
The Good Doctor introduced a doctor last year that is heavily religious (Christian) and it's honestly her most positive trait and they introduced a love interest for her that is also deeply religious. Maybe this is an import storyline from the Korean version, I don't know. But the two characters are almost universally supposed to be portrayed as positive (the girl is also as woke as one can be and still be a Christian). Though every character in the show is, I suppose, presented in a positive light. One of the last few episodes the female christian talks about how she's waiting to have sex for marriage. This is (2021-2023).
The Good Fight, probably in the running for the wokest show to ever exist had Andre Braugher come in after Delroy Lindo left and his character was extremely Christian, kind, and entertaining but because of those things all the other characters didn't believe that he was genuine at all and thought he was a phoney who was scheming but he really wasn't, exposing their own bias and this was (2021-2022). Though he and the female character above are both black they are genuinely presented as good people and good Christians. But there's also Jamie from Outlander at least up until the latest season in 2022 who you could say it doesn't count because of the era he lives in but considering his life and circumstances it wouldn't be strange for them to make him not Christian but he remains that way (though the most recent antagonist was a more devout Christian so maybe that's a wash).
There's also the Young Pope (2016) and The New Pope (2020) and even through all the characters foibles in it, almost everyone, even the scheming ones, are still fundamentally good people. At least the people portrayed as religious.
It made me think of how much of a kind of tropey character Shepherd Book actually was at the time because I remember so many shows that would have a solidly sound and humanistic moral center of the show be a pastor or extremely religious character. The Simpsons (which ended in season 11), Oz, The X-Files, and (going back to Andre Braugher) Homicide: Life on the Street. Recently that trope has kind of gone away and I feel like the amount of characters who are good and almost solely as a shorthand for that are made religious is still pretty high but the amount of people that are evil and also religious has probably skyrocketed, I blame horror.
An interesting note to the OP is a trans character played by a trans actor in Big Sky that was part of the main cast was just silently written out. Maybe that is an adjustment for the audience or maybe it's just coincidence.
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3yr ago
It's possible but I think it's also possible that the culture-war could've played a role in the judge's decision to throw the cases out. Part of what the judge says is that there was a valid reason to cover Sandmann because the video was "of great public interest". It's like a cito-genesis blank check for the media to just call out and cover whomever they want because they have enough sway to make anything "of great public interest." A bunch of reporters share a video between each other and stir a huge outrage and then cover it in the real media based on the outrage they stirred up. Anyway, I've yet to see anything from anyone about how CNN and Wapo's coverage was substantially different and I find it hard not to be cynical.
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3yr ago
I remember this too and it being one of the things that actually was a good swaying argument to me about someone using HRT to treat their dysmorphia. I used to listen to Loveline a lot and Dr Drew would talk with people who would say transgenderism is people being sickos and he would talk about how there were studies showing mri images of a patient's brain before and after hormone therapy and how the HRT would change the brain from showing abnormal function to normal function after they started taking the hormones. I think it being a medical condition garnered a lot of sympathy for transgender people that they still want to keep while also denying that it's a medical condition that requires treatment, while they get treated, and I think they lost a lot of sympathy from people that can remember the before times.
The thing is, I'm not even sure this is mainly a bad faith thing. I've encountered several times, when talking about neologisms with people, that they simply don't remember things but the present and that knowledge just becomes always. I remember when "binge-watching" became a popular term and I was talking with someone about how it's weird how the term suddenly came into existence along with the topic as if we hadn't said the word "marathoning" before to mean the same thing. They were the same age as me and had no idea that it was called marathoning and made me doubt myself. I had an almost identical conversation about the term "lowkey" with someone who said it had meant what it does now in the 90s because that's what it always meant.
I think about 1984 and "always being at war with Eurasia" and maybe about how you don't have to actually rewrite history because nobody bothers (or maybe can or cares) to remember it anyway.
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3yr ago
I'm not sure your first example works as a pure counter-argument since they settled before the case went to court but the rest that waited got their cases thrown out. Though, it's possible CNN and WaPo were considerably more defamatory, I don't know, but based on the wording in the ruling it seems like the judge would've likely thrown the lawsuit against them out as well.
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3yr ago
Focusing on a single person for no reason to expose them as a bad faith actor is trolling. People are not ants in an antfarm. Not giving a person any time to respond at all before you make a top-level post detailing how wrong they are and pointing them out by name over and over is not the act of a person engaging in a debate. It's rude, tactless and unnecessarily aggressive. But it's clear to me that you are either unable to understand how your actions can affect other people or simply don't care. You wrap it all up in nice-seeming language but it's not. These are things you do to people you see as enemies. We're supposed to be having discussions and arguments with people that we may disagree with but they're still people. You are not treating people who disagree with you as people, you're treating them like they're enemies that need to be dissuaded or dismantled. Charity: from where I'm sitting you give it to no one.
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3yr ago
I'm not saying I agree with Nybbler. Someone behaving poorly does not excuse behaving poorly yourself. That edit's purpose is to be a petty insult, if it wasn't there'd be no reason to mention the person you're insulting. You could have easily just left the name out, but you wanted it to be insulting. I was asked to review the original post before I went into the thread and I thought it needed a warning because of the way it just called out another user seemingly for no reason. But after reading your post in response, the edit of that, and then the edit of the original post. It's just pure insult and pretending to be otherwise. I can understand banter and swipes and barbs to people with whom we disagree. But you go out of your way to humiliate and troll other users and get away with it because they made a mistake and were wrong and you are right. It's an aggressive and uncharitable trend you make a habit of and it disappoints me immensely that you can just get away with it because you do it with a smile and a bunch of links.
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3yr ago
You should get a couple days ban for being so antagonistic. That edit to the original post is a shameful act for someone that's supposed to be a mod.
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3yr ago
In the context of the show Don spent all day thinking about the guy he told he didn't think about at all. He even went out of his way to sabotage him by leaving behind Ginsberg's ad pitch so he could only do his own because he knew that his was inferior.
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3yr ago
Yeah, I just left the page because I didn't really know what to do for that. I felt like giving a neutral to a bad comment would be seen as poor meta-modding and I have no idea if they can still see deleted comments or if they can see the time that I rated the comment in relation to when it was deleted and I'd rather earn my bad meta-mod reputation honestly.
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3yr ago
So, there was a recent movie that came out on Paramount plus called Honor Society. It's about a girl in high school who is obsessed with academic success to the point where she is plotting to derail the academic careers of her competition. She manipulates several people into getting academically distracted and then her real competition is a schlubby nerd that she decides to distract/derail by getting him to fall in love with her because he only cares about schoolwork, has no friends and is ugly. So, basic plot so far (apart from the ugly). She actually falls for him instead, who could see it coming. But she basically gives away the special recommendation letter they were all struggling to get to him because he's apparently poor.
But it's all revealed to be a lie. He was manipulating her in the same way. I'm not sure how effective this would be since he's the "ugly one" from the Stranger Things cast but okay. So, he pretended to be poor and fall for her so he could get that recommendation by getting her to give it to him.
Of course, that climactic reveal is shown to not matter once she stops moping for the allotted five minutes because she blackmails the guy writing the recommendation to give it to a more deserving minority because that counselor tried to proposition her earlier. Everyone forgives her because even though she reveals what she did she did it in a nice way by distracting them with love or a hobby they liked or something. Everyone lives happily ever after. Except the schlubby nerd boy who had no real emotions except wanting to personally succeed and has to stew in his failure and friendlessness at the end. It could basically be lifted out of any high school romcom from the past thirty years except there is no lesson for the villain, there's no redemption, there's nothing.
So, no, I don't think the movie was trying to make a point but I do think it's reflective of the times. The secret villain is a friendless, rich, and ugly nerd. And there is no path for redemption. They don't have the moment where it's revealed he cared back or at all. There's not even a moment of consideration by the main character that it was possible that he could have cared at all but was hiding it. They don't show him to have a tragic backstory or even being generally a bad person overall. He was just this weird schlubby benignly evil "genius" that was capable of manipulating literally everyone around them into doing what he wanted through means that after the fact seem inexplicable.
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3yr ago
Not gonna talk about NCFOM since everyone else has it covered but I'd say Cabin in the Woods doesn't subvert tropes it contextualizes them or simply points them out. Nothing about the movie really subverted what you expected to see. I think anytime something is meta at all people just say it's subverting expectations for no reason. I didn't particularly like it but it's not criticizing tropes it's just trying to fit them all into the movie so they can all be explained by the movie itself. It's generic by design because it needs to be as trope-filled as possible while also giving those tropes a reason to exist beyond "they were stupid, serial killer is evil, monster was hungry." The entire movie reminds me of a scene in Community where Annie tells a joke but it's not 100% factual so somebody corrects her. Great. Thanks for making my horror tropes have contextual reasons to exist, now they're terrifying.
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3yr ago
It was definitely before it started airing, but it was after they had done the previews with the diverse casting, so it's possibly related, dunno.
I feel like it's a lost cause at this point. Review-bombing is probably real, fake, and irrelevant all at the same time. I say irrelevant because once a review-bombing has been deemed to happen all reviews become tainted because let's assume it's all natural both ways, people will still counter-review bomb to say something is great for culture war reasons or pretend to be the enemy and strawman their position. I'm beginning to believe the latter is very likely, if not predestined, to happen in once a review-bomb starts.
This is just a problem for aggregation and numbers. There are still usually reviews by people who have valid criticisms and praise. The review bomb basically just renders the number meaningless and anything with too much negativity or praise becomes much harder to believe as real. So, maybe people just read reviewers whose opinions they already trust to not be contaminated by playing a culture war game with review scores. I'm sure some exist.
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