The End Of The World, Rotten Tomatoes & Taylor Swift
A bunch of thoughts about a bunch of things.
We’re in yet another dead period when it comes to new movies. The summer blockbusters are about done, the film festival selections haven’t dropped for regular audiences yet and The Last Voyage of the Demeter was unfortunately pulled from theaters before I got a chance to see it. Dracula on a boat is a hell of a sell for a shlocky B movie. I’ll get around to it one day.
Anyway, there are a bunch of random things that I wanted to write about. So here they are in no particular order other than I decided to write about this thing now and this other thing later.
The End of the World is Bad
I had a hell of a day on Sunday which included watching soccer, a Brooklyn bar crawl of sorts, a treadmill foray and a late-night West Village trip. Despite the hectic schedule, I was still able to make time to finally see Jurassic Park … in theaters.
I had seen bits and pieces of the renowned dinosaur movie but had never actually seen the entire thing in one sitting. My hot take: Great movie. Really good stuff there from Steven Spielberg and company. Don’t mean to melt your face off with such a flaming opinion but that’s why they pay me the big bucks. And by big bucks, I mean literally nothing for this here newsletter.
Sam Neill, great. Laura Dern, great. Jeff Goldblum, great. Cinematography, great. All of it rules and it’s an action film that actually feels like a true-blue masterpiece. It feels like it’s 30 minutes with how quickly it moves. The dino CGI still holds up as well too, which is kind of miraculous when most blockbusters today look like complete shit.
Anyway, one thing stood out to me now that I’ve seen the entire thing for the first time: How relatively small the stakes are. For such a monumental and critical movie, I really like how grounded and focused the story is.
I’m not sure if this is pulling from a recent superhero trend, but it feels like any action movie has to conclude with a denouement that centers around the end of the world in one way or another. Not only is this exhausting but it’s tough to pull off.
The Marvel fare does this to no end, and it’s no surprise that their best recent stuff Loki and Guardians 3 are most fun when focused on smaller missions and ideas. The same can be said about most of the bigger action movies this year. The new Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles films are most compelling for the first hour when the story is at its smallest. Although the latter is ultimately a much better watch, the two have similar finales that feel like they’re trying to be big because they need to. TMNT: Mutant Mayhem, in particular, is centered on teens trying to fit in and understand their powers. A big bad that transforms into a Godzilla-esque creature feels like it’s out of another movie.
Thus, it’s really refreshing when watching Jurassic Park and having the lives of the main four to eight protagonists be all that matters. There’s no doomsday scenario. It’s just whether these people you’ve grown to care for live or die. The stakes recently have gotten bigger and bigger with the movies (on the whole) getting worse and worse. If Steven Spielberg can do it, so can you.
Well, that’s probably not true, but it’s worth a shot.
Rotten Tomatoes Is Appropriately Named
I don’t want to say I told you so—actually, that’s not true, that’s all I ever want to say—but I told you so.
I’ve always hated Rotten Tomatoes (very Brooklyn of me), which for those that don’t know is a movie aggregating site that has ultimately hurt movies in small ways and sometimes massive ways. The site uses a very arcane rotten or not grading scale that takes all sorts of reviews—whether they be from the NYT, individual critics or a superhero fan site—and mashes them all together.
If a movie hits 60%, it’s fresh. If it’s under, it’s rotten. It’s really that simple and stupid and doesn’t take into account the particulars of movies, just this very generic first thought. The way that these scores work, 10 reviewers thinking that a movie is fine ultimately scores better than eight people loving something with a couple of reservations. It rewards mediocrity and cursory glances.
There have been quite a few issues that have arisen through this with audience scores being manipulated due to sexist, racist, homophobic and other hate-speech ethos. What a shock that woman-centered movies sometimes plummet when hundreds of critical audience reviews drop all at once.
And now we have proof that studios are paying reviewers to say nice things or at the very least hide negative reviews, so as to boost a movie’s RT score.
It’s not just the manipulating of scores but the incessant need to showcase movies to certain fans and critics who will give positive thoughts because that’s what they always do. This doesn’t just lead to a fucked up rating system, but it actually sometimes affects the actual movies and whether they get deals or not.
Between October 2018 and January 2019, Rotten Tomatoes added eight reviews to Ophelia’s score. Seven were favorable, and most came from critics who have reviewed at least one other Bunker 15 movie. The writer of a negative review says that Bunker 15 lobbied them to change it; if the critic wanted to “give it a (barely) overall positive then I do know the editors at Rotten Tomatoes and can get it switched,” a Bunker 15 employee wrote. I also discovered another negative review of Ophelia from this period that was not counted by Rotten Tomatoes, by a writer whose positive reviews of other Bunker 15 films have been recorded by the aggregator. Ophelia climbed the Tomatometer to 62 percent, flipping from rotten to “fresh.” The next month, the distributor IFC Films announced that it had acquired Ophelia for release in the U.S. -Vulture
A movie like Babylon, which I’m on the record of adoring, that takes risks and goes to absurd places is technically rotten according to RT, while movies like The Flash which spend a lot of time targeting its RT audience so as to get positive reviews are fresh. This is just a small example, but RT is actively bad for movies and this hot-or-not metric is a pretty gross way to look at art.
I know I have my personal problems trying to rank everything I see and putting a grade of some sort next to all movies, but this feels like an oversimplification that eventually damages the art form.
I’m not a fan. You should read the story.
Look What You Made Her Do
For those that don’t know, a filmed version of the record-breaking Eras tour will be on the big screen starting on October 13th.
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There have been a lot of incredible jokes and memes about how insane the Taylor Swift movie will be for theaters, but it’s worth noting that Swift kind of fucked over studios (in the most beautiful of ways) to make this work.
Reportedly, the studios tried to lowball Swift to show her concert film in theaters, which led to Swift and her team circumventing the usual film circles and working with the theater chains directly.
Now, this isn’t that easy to replicate as Swift has a built-in fanbase and social media pushing everything she does, but it is a good way to show 1. How dumb the studios can be 2. That there is an alternative to the usual way of putting movies in theaters and 3. That the longer the strikes go on, the more possible things like this can be.
This is a real middle finger to a world that didn’t even pretend to respect her and you can’t deny that Swift is constantly at the forefront when it comes to upending industries. Having $20 million to spend on your own doesn’t hurt, but she’s far from the only individual who can bypass certain age-old routes and build something new (and better).
It’s still insane to me that the head honchos in charge tried to tell Swift and her team what to do and how to do it in the midst of the Eras cultural phenomenon. If they’re treating a cash cow like that, the strikes may never end. Nor should they.
Get what you deserve whether you’re Taylor Swift or a writer on the picket line. Cue the music.