Be Suspicious of Online Movie Ratings • Hacker News Board

Re: Be Suspicious of Online Movie Ratings

#211

Post by johnchristopher » Fri, Oct 16, 2015, 10:38 PM UTC

mangeletti wrote: post #185

johnchristopher wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so. Moreover dismissing an entire group of people (hipsterism ? really ?) by stating that watching and enjoying movies one doesn't like is akin to stoking one's ego and that such movies are pretentious seems way more... well... dismissive and absolute to me. Because, believe it or not, some people truly enjoy the movies he doesn't enjoy and it has nothing to do with ego. This is objectively anti-intelle…

My comment isn't intended to be anti-anything. I spend 10-15 hours per week studying philosophy, history, economics, ontology, physics (a little), and biology, even if it is largely via Wikipedia. I'm certainly not anti-intellectual. By assuming that watching "hipster movies" makes you intellectual, you've illustrated exactly my point, that (some) people watch these movies because they think it somehow makes them int…

> By assuming that watching "hipster movies" makes you intellectual, you've illustrated exactly my point, that (some) people watch these movies because they think it somehow makes them into intellectuals, which fits the definition of pretentious quite well.

Don't reverse the role, you are the one stating and assuming that people watching movies you don't enjoy are stoking their ego and you are the one who came up with the hipstometer word:

> Rotten Tomatoes is a hipstometer (if you don't believe me, look at the artsy film festival movies that rank highest there, or read some of the pedantic reviews).

> By assuming that watching "hipster movies" makes you intellectual, you've illustrated exactly my point,

Really, what a weird line of reasoning. I never wrote that and you can't conclude that's my opinion from anything I wrote because I never qualified any movies as `hipster movies' (while you did).

> that (some) people watch these movies because they think it somehow makes them into intellectuals, which fits the definition of pretentious quite well.

Likewise you seem to put yourself above them by not watching them and being a real intellectual while they would be frauds. Yeah, not pretentious at all.

Re: Be Suspicious of Online Movie Ratings

#212

Post by eridius » Sat, Oct 17, 2015, 12:10 AM UTC

abruzzi wrote: post #44

eridius wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, what was the 95% fresh movie that you thought was the worst movie in 2 decades?

Snowpiercer. I'm sure some people love it, but I could not think of a single redeeming thing after I got done. I honestly preferred "The Room", (though that ones 'quality' was unintentional.)

Snowpiercer was a brilliant movie. Not the plot, that didn't really matter. And of course there's a lot of rather implausible things going on. But the cinematography, the choreography, the directing, were all fantastic. The axe battle scene in specific was a great homage to Korean films (there's some film in specific it draws from, but I'm forgetting on the name), which makes sense as the directory, Joon-ho Bong, is Korean. The acting was pretty good too, I especially loved Tilda Swinton.

There's also arguments to be made about the philosophical message of Snowpiercer, but I don't think that's particularly relevant to why the movie is great (though obviously others disagree).

Re: Be Suspicious of Online Movie Ratings

#213

Post by dennisgorelik » Sat, Oct 17, 2015, 10:51 AM UTC

InclinedPlane wrote: post #59

Reviews in general are crap for several reasons. One is just pure statistics and design. The typical "average" review score is a mean. And a mean tends to bias towards higher scores, especially when the floor isn't zero. Consider Amazon reviews, for example, which is a 1 to 5 star system. Amazon has half-star increments for the average rating, so you'd think that leaves a lot of dynamic range for reviews, but in prac…

Skewed absolute rating is not a problem at all.

The problem happens when bad things are rated better than good things.

Re: Be Suspicious of Online Movie Ratings

#214

Post by bmelton » Wed, Oct 21, 2015, 12:04 AM UTC

lmm wrote: post #154

lemevi wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found the first half of Wool to be very good and the rest of it readable, although just barely so. Howey is a terrible writer with interesting plot ideas. Howey has a compulsion to explicitly tell you in minute details through every other passage exactly what is on everyone's mind. The concept of using symbolism and actions to portray people seems lost to him. His sentence structure is terrible. He's saved by Wool'…

I think you have it backwards. The ideas of Wool are so common in prior science fiction that authors would take them for granted, play with them. The plot is pretty much that of The Penultimate Truth. Howey succeeded because, for whatever reason, people liked his writing or he details of his version more than previous iterations of the idea.

Very possible. Not suggesting that Wool was entirely unique, but more specifically, that Snowpiercer seemed to have taken the entire idea of Wool and just shifted the axis from vertical to horizontal.

There were a LOT of copied ideas. Perhaps none of them were original to Wool, but Wool was not (to my knowledge) as much a clone of any individual work as it was the compilation of a lot of tropes.