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The Story Behind the Worst Movie on IMDb

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Re: The Story Behind the Worst Movie on IMDb

#131

Post by KeithMaguire »

NAFV_P wrote: post #82
gabemart wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A clear conversation is difficult in the absence of a clear, canonical definition of "bad". It would be very easy for me to get a few friends together and make a 90 minutes improvised movie filmed on my phone. That would be an absolutely terrible movie, but it wouldn't be a very satisfying answer to the question "What's the worst movie?" because it would be seen by very few people and it would be made with no ambitio…

> I could go further and make a movie that was 90 minutes of a black screen. That would be a worse movie but an even less satisfying answer. What about a blue screen? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106438/

It's probably worth mentioning that Blue is more than a curiosity. It really is a profoundly moving film - one of Jarman's finest. If the synopsis of it on IMDB appeals at all I'd encourage you to track it down.

Re: The Story Behind the Worst Movie on IMDb

#132

Post by danbmil99 »

A film I had the pleasure to work on, "Car 54: Where Are You?" has a rating of 2.4, and that was not due to any crowdsourced manipulation; people really hate the movie. I thought it was marginally worse than Police Academy 4, but most people apparently think it really sucks.

Re: The Story Behind the Worst Movie on IMDb

#133

Post by bakhy »

hey, let the data speak for itself! ;)

seriously, i do take IMDB ratings into account, but i consider them unreliable at best. Inception, when it came out, was the best movie of all time for a while, according to IMDB users. enough said.

Re: The Story Behind the Worst Movie on IMDb

#134

Post by __david__ »

DanBC wrote: post #63

Years ago, when you could download roms from the mame website, I gave a strong up score to the Tron romset. That tipped the romset into the spotlight - there were some leaderboards for highest recent activity and so on. Other people started downloading the romset and voting on it. Suddenly this obscure romset was catapulted into most of the lists for "most active" and "best" etc. I had rated the game honestly. I had…

> Suddenly this obscure romset…

Obscure? :-(

This was my favorite arcade game as a kid. I don't think it was very obscure. Though I have an actual Tron arcade machine not 10 feet from me, so perhaps I'm the wrong person to judge that…

Re: The Story Behind the Worst Movie on IMDb

#135

Post by __david__ »

donutz wrote: post #73
brie22 wrote: post #43

538 is using the wrong metrics. For a movie to be truly, truly, sublimely bad, that badness needs to be recognized - people in some cases will want to watch it for its incredible badness. This means that there are going to be a disproportionate number of both 1 and 10 votes. And the winner based on this is - The Room. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0368226/ratings?ref_=tt_ov_rt

Interesting. My favorite bad movie has a similar graph, but not quite so many 10's. R.O.T.O.R. - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098156/ratings?ref_=tt_ov_rt

That's pretty low. Netflix doesn't even have this movie listed. How does one go about finding an obscure movie like that?

My personal favorite bad movie has always been "Cool As Ice" [1], but even that seems to be rated higher than R.O.T.O.R.…

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101615/ratings?ref_=tt_ov_rt

Re: The Story Behind the Worst Movie on IMDb

#136

Post by lyndonh »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #56
ronaldx wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe your observation is correct, that movies are over-rated at first, but I doubt this is wholly - nor even mainly - corruption. People who are motivated to see a movie early are the same people who are likely to enjoy that movie. This makes it natural for movies to get rated very highly when they are first released. That's just natural. If you forced people to photograph their ticket stub, I believe this could…

But some 10's and 1's are lazy indignant people. Putting an obstacle in the way of registering a rating could filter out lots of noise. Leaving people who deliberately, intentionally review movies. Those ratings would be of an entire different class.

But surely they don't use the mean to find the average score ?

Even a basic trimmed statistic would find a much more accurate average. Lazy people leaving 10s and 1s would be removed or given a lower weighting.

Re: The Story Behind the Worst Movie on IMDb

#137

Post by tragic »

ulisesrmzroche wrote: post #74
leephillips wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is fascinating. I've never seen The Room , but I sure want to now. It's fascinating because of some similarities to the truly worst movie in history, The Tango Lesson [0]: each movie has one person as writer, director, and star, and (apparently) focuses self-indulgently on the abortive romantic entanglements of the author, who is utterly unaware that nobody else could possibly care. The Tango Lesson falls throug…

You ever seen Annie Hall though? That's a great movie.

The exceptions to the rule are where the writer/star/director is aware of their own ridiculousness - see also Curb Your Enthusiasm.

I haven't seen The Room, but the ne plus ultra of that kind of self-indulgence for me is Garden State. 90 minutes of Zach Braff's daddy issues and romantic wish fulfilment - I've had better afternoons. (It amazes me that it picked up an audience more or less on the basis of having The Shins on the soundtrack.)

The Star Wars prequels fall into that category, even if Lucas isn't in them. Proves very well that he should be shot on sight if ever he approaches a typewriter again. Not a fanboy of the first films by any measure, but at least Lawrence Kasdan or whoever can string a couple of lines together. Left to his own devices, Lucas is capable only of bloated, soulless tech demos.

Re: The Story Behind the Worst Movie on IMDb

#139

Post by thaumasiotes »

what_ever wrote: post #57
nkozyra wrote: post #50

I feel like there's an assumption that this data is erroneous for this reason - I think that any reason in which a person gives a negative rating toward a film is valid, be it politically motivated or otherwise. FiveThirtyEight has had a rough start so far so I may be more inclined to seek more nuance than I normally would as they've tended to be extraordinarily simplistic (Silver himself notwithstanding) to date.

But most of the people who has given the rating have not seen the movie. They are giving the lowest rating just to put their point forward. This is not a documentary to put the truth on the screen (I am not sure how much of the movie is fiction). I think the author calls data erroneous as the rating does not represent the actual quality of the movie - a thing which IMDB wants to achieve. He doesn't call it erroneous…

> But most of the people who has given the rating have not seen the movie.

In the (paraphrased) words of Andrew Gelman:

"I can't knock this guy for slamming my book without reading it. For example, I have never read the autobiography of Uri Geller, but I'm confident it's full of crap."

If you don't think Gonojagoron Moncho is lying to these people about the point they're taking offense over, how is it relevant that they haven't seen the movie?

Re: The Story Behind the Worst Movie on IMDb

#140

Post by ulisesrmzroche »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #110
ulisesrmzroche wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Penalize the avant-garde? Madness. Also, saying that they did not contribute to cinema is like huh?

To some extent, the market already penalizes avant-garde art created for its own sake. I'm just not sure how critics should respond. If the critics bubble effusively about how great Blue and 4'33 are, what exactly are we supposed to do with that criticism, as either artists or patrons? To me, works like these are symptoms of art forms that are well on their way to exhausting their own possibilities. What next? Green…

The what? John cage has a collection at NYU college for performing arts, and there's tons of other stuff too, like Sonic Youth paid homage to him, and Philip Glass, and many others...I had to write essays about essays about him , so it's not like he's a no one or whatever.

Also, You can't just say 'The Market' as if it was all one bucket. Or some 'God' thing that punishes.

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