Fanatical Pupil

See also: Like What You Like Already

I was just taking a survey in which they asked what kind of movies I like, and two of the categories were ACTION and SCI-FI. The examples for Sci-Fi were Star Trek and Terminator: Salvation. Fine. The examples for Action were Wolverine and Transformers.

On the one hand, I want to be like “How dare you co-opt Wolverine and Transformers as part of the Action genre?!?” but then I realized that it is merely another example of how Sci-Fi is the new Mainstream.

While I’m happy to see that District 9 is currently at 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, I’m also a little skeptical. Why? Look at these reviews, all of which were rated as “Ripe” as opposed to “Rotten”…

“District 9″ does show that Blomkamp is not without talent and could very well one day make a truly great genre film, even if he hasn’t quite done so here.

But, that reviewer (when you click through) gave the movie 4 stars (although I’m not sure what the max is).

…a marginally entertaining endeavor that’s sure to leave most viewers wondering what all the fuss is about.

That reviewer does give it only 2.5 out of 4 stars, which I suppose does technically qualify as Ripe, but only by 2.5%…

I’m still excited about the potential of District 9. The problem is, I’ve already seen it.

Then that review goes ahead and gives it 3 out of 4 stars. I read the rest of the review, and it doesn’t seem like a 3 star review.

Could have been better if it had remained focused on the main character rather than trying to show off a variety of filmmaking styles with a lot of flashy CG FX-driven action.

Again a 7 out of 10 for a fairly tepid review.

Okay, so I’ve disproved my original hypothesis that Rotten Tomatoes is rigged. A better hypothesis appears to be that reviewers are inflating ratings. Now, whether they only do this for movies that they think they’re supposed to give higher ratings to, or if this is just a widespread phenomena that I haven’t really noticed will require further analysis.

But perhaps not much further… Check this quote from a review of The Time Traveler’s Wife:

It wants desperately to engage our hearts, but for long stretches will leave most of us scratching our heads.

This reviewer gave the movie 3 stars despite not really having anything good to say other than Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams do a decent job of portraying their characters. Again, 3 out of either 4 or 5 stars is enough for it to qualify as Ripe on RT. So, I think that while maybe ratings aren’t particularly overly inflated, perhaps RT needs to raise the level to 65% to cut off movies that only get 60% or 62.5% from reviewers who are working with a scale that doesn’t provide enough room for differentiation.

I guess I’ll have to unsubscribe from the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter and see if MetaCritic will deliver the latest movie releases to my inbox, as their ratings seem to be much more accurate: District 9 gets an 81 and The Time Traveler’s Wife gets a 50.

This is probably as entertaining as the movie. And has at least as many A-List stars.

I don’t watch a lot of movies in the theater, so saying that I really want to see one right when it comes out is saying that I am fairly desperate to see it.

But since everything that Joss Whedon has touched so far has turned to gold, I feel that while looking at these movie posters, someone is flinging some strange liquid at me and yelling:

The Power of Joss Compels You!

There’s 2 more where that came from, and I have duly marked my Google Calendar, just as I did 6 months ago.

It strikes me as odd that I mentioned Terminator: Salvation in this post about The Spirit because it seemed to me like the latter came out almost a year prior to the former. It was actually only a mere 5 months (a few days less, actually), but it seemed like a virtual eternity for me.

Anyway, I saw The Spirit over at a friend’s house in full Blu-Ray definition, and wasn’t all that impressed. I think the main reason was that I thought it was going to be a more serious movie, and it was actually more “comic book”-y and funny than I’d expected. It’s funny how much of my enjoyment of a movie is determined by my expectations of it. Nevertheless, I’m afraid it’s not a movie that I could recommend to anyone. Maybe if I’ve ready the comics/graphic novels, I would have been more into it, but it just didn’t seem to all fit together for me.