is rottentomatoes.com completely unreliable?

Started by jigzaw, July 21, 2006, 03:31:54 PM

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jigzaw

I ask this because sometimes they incorrectly label a review positive or negative. 

For example, for Lady in the Water, Stephanie Zacharek's review was listed as positive, or a whole tomato.  But when I went to read her review, it's negative! 
The subtitle of her review is "Paul Giamatti struggles valiantly to stay afloat, but drowns in the lousiness of M. Night Shyamalan's latest flick."

Another quote from her: "What's supposed to be fanciful storytelling is really just audience punishment"

But this review is counted in the "positive" category.  How often does this kind of screw up happen at rottentomatoes?

matt35mm

Is it completely unreliable?  No.  It's pretty reliable.

But once in a while what you described does happen, and that's to be expected.  It doesn't happen super often, and the broader the samples of reviews, the more reliable it is since a screw-up like that is quite minor when factored into the whole percentage.  With all of the reviews that they have to go through, it's inevitable that there would be a slip-up now and again, but it's almost never enough to alter the percentage one way or another.

In any case, you can look at the percentage of Lady in the Water and see that it's quite low, and from that you can pretty reliably take away that it's probably not that good of a movie, or at the very least, quite flawed.

jigzaw

Went back and they've corrected this one.  I've noticed that kind of mistake before, so I guess it just happens.

Pubrick

yes well you do hav a history of jumping to conclusions, so i don't think anyone was with you on this one.
under the paving stones.

Pwaybloe

Wait a minute... I just heard that Stephanie Zacharek's review of "Lady in the Water" was incorrectly posted as positive!  What?

Unreliable, I say!

picolas

Incorrect, sir!

Observe the percentage of said film: a cocktail brewed from SEVERAL if not MANY reviews. Though regretable, such errors are not super in their ofteness.

jigzaw

Quote from: Pubrick on July 23, 2006, 12:38:51 AM
yes well you do hav a history of jumping to conclusions, so i don't think anyone was with you on this one.

guess you showed me


jenkins

as far as their Five Favorite Films series goes,  just being directly serious when i say it was method man's list that most pumped me up

METHOD MAN'S FIVE FAVORITE FILMS
FRAILTY (Bill Paxton, 2002)
THE STATION AGENT (Tom McCarthy, 2003) 
NAPOLEON DYNAMITE (Jared Hess, 2004)
SNOW ON THA BLUFF (Damon Russell, 2012)
THE RAID (Gareth Evans, 2012)

what he said about the raid:
My last one is a "slash." The Raid / Dredd. Basically the same movie, but both of them were dope. I had to throw a little foreign film up in there, you know, in my taste.

also:
QuoteThe Batman movies, I give [Christopher] Nolan credit. He took it from where it left off with Joel Schumacher, the campy nipples-on-the-batsuit shit and brought it back to what core Batman people love. Now, mind you, Batman is a detective, so, you know, you want to see the detective work. You want to see him in the shadows. But when he's fighting... That fight between him and Ra's al Ghul, man, come on! We're talking about two ninjas. I didn't see a flip or nothing! Oh my god, are you serious? And that first scene in The Dark Knight when he busts Scarecrow and the criminals? Are you kidding me?

flash from past:
FIVE FAVORITE FILMS WITH JOSS WHEDON (Friday, Jun. 14 2013)

The Matrix (Andy Wachowski, Larry Wachowski, 1999)
Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968)
The Bad and the Beautiful (Vincent Minnelli, 1953)
Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999)
The Court Jester (Melvin Franck, Norman Panama, 1956)

what he said about magnolia:
QuoteWe're back to opera, we haven't left it -- because Magnolia. If you think about the moment Keanu wakes up as a battery, the moment Lana Turner loses it in traffic and is in this insane hysteria of flashing lights that is completely unrealistic, and then you look at the moment where it's raining frogs. I saw it, and was like, "Is this going to be one of those movies that I don't like where he looks down on every one?" I think Alexander Payne and Todd Solondz are super talented, but sometimes I don't want to sit through their movies because the bile is just unbearable. I didn't really know PT Anderson's work that well, or what was going to happen. And then, it turns out he loves people so hard that it rains frogs. There is actual opera in this one. Oh, and BT-dubs, there is a musical number. The license and the observation and the amount that he went for it. The craft and his ability to sustain that much -- any one of these movies could have fallen into a puddle of pretension, but the mastery behind them meant that they never could. Jason Robards, who happens to be in two of the movies on this list, him actually dying of actual cancer playing a guy dying of cancer, giving that speech. And Tom Cruise giving the best performance he'll ever give. It just felt so achingly, weirdly logical to me.