Is Rotten Tomatoes Killing the Movie Industry? No, Bad Movies Are

There needs to be a term for this delusion - conflating a few people who clamor for something with "people" at large.

"IT'S up to YOU! Change your politicians! Vote with your wallet! Demand better movies/industries/X!" is a horseshit response that conveniently tries to forget that these industries and ecosystems follow a lowest-common-denominator majority, so all the "clamor" and attention-to-personal-choice in the world does nothing except accomplish some fringe action at the margins.

The only "people" listening to you at that point are those who recognize the frustration of dealing with that world, so it's healthier to engage in a substantiative dialogue about what can be done from those margins to renew widespread interest in the actual change you want than to resign with some holier-than-thou tirade to them regarding "the people" who aren't even listening.

Although RT tends to produce false positives for me, it is a reasonably reliable filter. If Hollywood is suffering, I'd look to the quality of its product.

For example, marvel civil war is a false positive (for me). When I watch it, I can't get past the clipped, contrived dialogue, close-ups on faces, ham-fisted plots, inconceivably stupid action, schizophrenic scene changes, plastic cgi, and awkward obviously demographically targeted identity fantasies.

But the movie Valerian and the city of a thousand planets, which was panned on RT, was in almost every way actually objectively worse than its well rated marvel counterpart. It was so bad it made me fill physically ill.

Through accumulated experience, I've found that RT, for me, is a reasonable predictor of "a very bad time." And even if its high ratings don't consistently predict a good time, they do predict relative enjoyability well.

I've had so many awful movie going experiences over the last twenty years of adulthood that I've more or less stopped going. I have a very hard time blaming a rating system. I'd look instead to very shallow, implausible scripting (punchy one-liners, hollow melodrama), lackluster cinematography (zoomed in facials, schizophrenic shot switching), repetitive and/or assinine plots (corporations are eeevil), weird editing and incoherent writing (random, poorly interjected side stories or comedy, bizarre scene shifts, prolonged melodrama), boring, implausible, drawn out action (ugh), predictable demographically targeted identity fantasies, and I don't know, the list goes on.

I know beyond certainty that I'm not the target audience, but I can't help but think people are increasingly demanding movies that repay rather than punish sustained attention, and I can't help but think that these qualities passively improve the commercial value of the Hollywood product.

Edit: grammar, removed repetition.

The last few years have been a kind of mini-golden-age for low- to mid-budget horror, if that's your thing, and especially if you like your horror a little off-kilter. It Follows, The Babadook, The Conjuring (kind of a low-key superhero movie blended with very not-scary horror, in many ways, but well acted, plotted, paced, and put together), Train to Busan, You're Next, The Void. The new Evil Dead. Some others I'm sure I'm forgetting right now. I've heard Girl with all the Gifts and Get Out are excellent, but haven't seen them yet.

There are serious stinkers to avoid (It, Insidious series, many others) of course, so it's a bit of a minefield, but worth the effort if you enjoy that kind of thing.

The full-sized IMAX screen helped (we have one of the very few here in Indy), but overall I found it to be quite good, particularly once I figured out the interleaving of the stories.

I'm also a sucker for movies that don't have a lot of dialog. Thanks Pixar!

I’ve just finished reading ‘Adventures in the screen trade’ by William Goldman, the guy who wrote ‘All The President’s Men’, Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid’ and ‘The Princess Diaries’.

While written in the early 80s, it’s thoroughly entertaining and very insightful as to how movies actually get made. His main point is that nobody knows anything. No one knows why one film was a hit and another wasn’t. So successful properies/stars/directors are milked for all they’re worth until suddenly they’re not.

Read the book, it’s great.