Rotten TomatoesFollow

How well does everyone place this site's ratings of movies? Cause some of the ratings are just entirely off the wall compared to how much I personally like/dislike movies.

I just got done watching The Trigger Effect. It was on the movie channel, I wasn't busy doing anything, so I tuned in. It seemed like it might be able to be a good movie, so I wasn't too concerned about spending an hour and a half or so watching it.

The ending kind of sucked, didn't explain much of anything, and was just "omg, do you trust the black dude and the muslim looking fella?".

Occasionally after watching a random movie I'll look up how others liked it. The last half a dozen movies or so I've looked up on Rotten Tomatoes have been way off from how much I enjoyed the movie. Rotten Tomatoes lists this particular movie at 74%. It seems like a lot of people saw something there that I didn't. I just saw a "Things are bad, well, now they are better, the end" with no explanation.

Personally, I don't like to use Rotten Tomatoes, but then again, I don't like rating systems in general either. Tastes in movies can vary so much that I've never really been able to find rating systems useful. I prefer to use reviews and comments, but on Rotten Tomatoes, those tend to be either too brief (i.e. "flawed but worthy") or too long: links me to a newspaper review.

If I want to know what to expect from a movie beforehand, the first thing I look for is the trailer. While these can sometimes be misleading, I've watched enough movies that I can get a generally get a good grasp on what the movie will be about and if I'll like it or not. Second, if I have doubts, I like to use Netflix's reviews. Usually, I can find a few user reviews on the first page (so I don't have to click a bunch of links) that point out any major pros and cons in the movie.

Anyway, probably not a useful post, but thought I'd share my opinion on the subject.

Similar to Vataro, I think it makes a great first stop. To define it more accurately, they have a comprehensive library and I have an extremely high confidence interval for a moderate margin of error on their ratings. Something they rate as 80 I might find to be a 90 or a 70, but I'll almost never find something they claim to be terrible to be great or they claim great to be terrible.

I do find that there tends to be a significant bias towards independent films. Often you'll find several of their 95+ ratings given to a small independent film that week that really isn't that spectacular.

There is gold to be found there. I got gems like Murderball and Mary and Max from their high rated DVD releases.

Of course, even if a movie scores 15%, you might be in the 15% who thinks it was good times.

I once knew a guy who was sincerely convinced that Showgirls was an amazing satire and everyone else just "didn't get it" and missed its brilliance. Mentioning that movie around him was a surefire way to start a tirade about film-watching mongloids who couldn't begin to pick up on the nuances of Verhoeven's vision and critics who panned the film were the direct cause of all the crap we have today.

Edited, Nov 29th 2010 1:46pm by Jophiel