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

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

#191

Post by Veedrac »

slg wrote: post #112
Sangermaine wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A movie designed to do well on a RT score needs to please everyone. The end result is something that tries to be bland, uninteresting, and inoffensive. This is demonstrably untrue. Here is a link (along the left column) of the top RT movies for each year from 2014-2016: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/top/ Sure there are some blockbusters, but there are also many excellent, interesting, engaging, even daring films li…

How does that demonstrate what I said wasn't true? My point wasn't that all movies are bad or that good movies don't score well on RT. My point was that RT doesn't incentivize good movies. It incentives average and risk-averse movies. It is also worth noting that none of the movies you listed are targeted at wide audiences. The most successful of the list was a surprise hit in Mad Max and even that was just outside t…

The Princess Kaguya is ranked 14th of 2014 and seems like a perfect counterexample: it managed this despite being a major risk (which resulted in a major box office failure). Unfortunately Rotten Tomatoes can't save a controversial foreign film no matter how good, but it seems that if RT was scoring risk takers poorly Kaguya wouldn't be up there.

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

#192

Post by nihonde »

gozur88 wrote: post #90

Hollywood movies are getting objectively worse, and there's a good reason for it. The market is global now - the North American box office is just a vehicle for pricing deals when the international rights are sold. So they have to make movies that appeal to the global lowest common denominator. No witty or understated dialog. No cultural signifiers that might be missed by someone from another culture. All the money a…

True, and it's a shame because a movie like Train to Busan is more engaging than World War Z or Marvel Civil War, but the latter will rack up more ticket sales. Most people don't care about substance or quality in the end.

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

#193

Post by coldtea »

jknoepfler wrote: post #73

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 demogr…

>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.

Those are present in modern movies, and I agree to your characterization of the Marvel franchise etc, but you seem to be randomly going to various movies and suffering from that?

I find it's more consistent to have a few favorite directors, with which work you have a longer term relationship, and understand better. E.g. I'd go to any David Fincher movie, and 95% of the time I wont be disappointed even if they vary widely in subject and scope (B.Button was kind of a flop).

And of course lots more obscure directors (someone like Hal Hartley or ‎Kar-Wai Wong for me) with consistent quality.

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

#194

Post by coldtea »

anigbrowl wrote: post #130
ericd wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, I love a good action movie, but it's hard to get into movies that you can't believe. I watched a very low rated one from the 80s the other day ( https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/blood_of_heroes/ ), and while it had very little plot, and the production value was incredibly low compared to recent movies, and just generally wasn't a very good movie, I enjoyed it more than the vast majority of very expensive recent b…

Those are called dramas.

Only on the labels of Hollywood cookie cutters.

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

#195

Post by coldtea »

WalterBright wrote: post #145
JKCalhoun wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My filter: avoid all super hero movies.

Me too. I skip all the comic book movies.

It's like someone said "lets make all those comics teenage nerds used to love into movies for adults -- while not only keeping everything as simplistic but making it even more simplistic and shallow".

I was reading all the Marvel stuff when I was a kid/young teenager (5-6 comic magazines every week) but I never understood the point behind modern superhero movies. Those comics were shallow and childlish as well, but, depending on the writer, sometimes touched things beyond that, and at the very least, they explorer some subjects that mattered to their audience: young teenagers.

Today's superheroes movies are watched by 20 to 40 year olds as well, and they don't put any effort to matter at all.

Even Nolan's Batman is at a young teenage level understanding of the world, it just has better cinematography and more than the average comic-movie gore (because it's allowed to show that to kids nowadays) but no real life grit (because that's considered too confusing and adult) and no sexuality either (ditto). The plots and the "moral dilemmas" in the movies are laughable ( https://xkcd.com/1004/ ).

Maybe Logan points to a future where such movies can be actually good, but it's not exactly there yet either.

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

#196

Post by snarf21 »

thadjo wrote: post #104
snarf21 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also because Amazon and Netflix are buying up things that might have otherwise gone to the theaters. Why pay royalties forever when you can just own it forever and amortize the cost?

true, but i think these purchases have a much greater impact on TV that film. Amazon, Netflix, Hulu all have a long list of really successful TV shows but it's hard to think of a 120-minute movie that has risen to the ranks of Handmaiden's Tale, House of Cards, etc..

True, it is affecting both. I was speaking also to the fact that Manchester by the Sea (e.g.) was made by Amazon. A great outcome for them is simply to break even at the theater. They then have an exclusive movie for free forever. The studios can't afford for all of their movies to break even.

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

#197

Post by EdwardCoffin »

LeoNatan25 wrote: post #135
EdwardCoffin wrote: post #120

It seems to me that people are a lot harsher on movies now, less willing or able to suspend disbelief [1]. I see scathing assessments of sequels, but with examples of the imagined problems being problems that have reasonably close equivalents in their predecessors which no one had a problem with when those were released. Here's a concrete example: probably the most commonly cited 'problem' I hear about Prometheus is…

Suspension of disbelief only works when the world presented is believable and the story interesting. I find myself able to suspend belief on Nolan films, for example, because of their engrossing story and style. With your example of Prometheus, no, the flick is not bad because of that scene, but the scene is an indication of the overall laziness of the plot. All the nit-picking, as you put it, is because there is not…

> no, the flick is not bad because of that scene

The thing is, most of the criticisms of Prometheus that I have read cite that scene as a reason for its purported badness, which is why I drew comparisons to scenes in movies that are widely regarded as good, and pointed out that those scenes are not criticized.

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

#198

Post by ericd »

izacus wrote: post #182
ericd wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have. Definitely better than the superhero flicks that plague theaters, but he's still got that invulnerable mechanical efficiency that gets a bit old after he's plowed through the 50th person in a 10 minute shootout. I'm talking more like Die Hard, Alien, Air Force One, or even First Blood, where the main character is a mostly regular person with some combat training, is in a situation where they're believably scr…

Yeah, to be honest the rare action movie that really made me invested into the action lately was The Raid (2011), which was shot in a way that made the action sequences look significantly more realistic and you didn't get the feeling that anyone has plot armor in it. (It also got a huge amount of awards for it.)

Ah yeah, The Raid is an excellent example.

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

#199

Post by grzm »

izacus wrote: post #182
ericd wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have. Definitely better than the superhero flicks that plague theaters, but he's still got that invulnerable mechanical efficiency that gets a bit old after he's plowed through the 50th person in a 10 minute shootout. I'm talking more like Die Hard, Alien, Air Force One, or even First Blood, where the main character is a mostly regular person with some combat training, is in a situation where they're believably scr…

Yeah, to be honest the rare action movie that really made me invested into the action lately was The Raid (2011), which was shot in a way that made the action sequences look significantly more realistic and you didn't get the feeling that anyone has plot armor in it. (It also got a huge amount of awards for it.)

Is this the film (The Raid: Redemption) you're referring to?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1899353/

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

#200

Post by hkmurakami »

ericd wrote: post #164
hkmurakami wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time to watch Jack Reacher.

Seem to remember that being good, though I don't remember the specifics, I should rewatch.

2 hours of Tom Cruise being badass. Fun raw action movie.
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