I see a lot of movies. I average 70 a year, but that can easily creep into the 85-90 range in busy years. Mostly I see them to review them and because, heck, I like movies. But knowing what to see in the theater and what to give a chance on rental or streaming is tricky business and that’s in large part the purpose of movie reviews. For the last decade plus, my go-to guide to get a general idea of the quality of a film has been Rotten Tomatoes. If you’ve never heard of it, www.rottentomatoes.com is a site that takes all the “qualified” reviewers that it has sanctioned from media outlets all over the world, averages their scores together and comes up with a “tomato-meter number”. This is, essentially, the percentage of the polled reviews which were positive. So if a movie has a 88% RT rating, that means 88% of the reviews were positive. It’s been a good guide, but this year, I don’t know what happened. Perhaps they changed their metrics or started to include more idiot bloggers (I mean what idiot would write a movie blog?), but the disparity between what I’ve liked and their ratings has been enormous on some films. These five stand out because I have them pretty good reviews and their RT ratings are all below 60% (considered a bad review for RT). I’ll spot them Man of Steel because there are many schools of thought on it and even I had to see it twice before I came to like it, but the other four? Come ON!
1. Now You See Me – RT: 50%; Me: 9.5/10
2. Parkland – RT: 49%; Me: 8.75/10
3. Man of Steel – RT: 56%; Me: 8.5/10
4. Oblivion – RT: 54%; Me: 7.5/10