m3tan wrote:ShogunRua wrote:RT is a stupid site and I wish metarankings site would go away in general. Far too many people substitute meaningless metarankings for having an actual, well thought-out opinion.
I won't go so far as to say they should go away, as they have a useful purpose, but many people misinterpret them. A movie that has a 100% RT isn't necessarily great. A perfect example is the film Witches. It's an entertaining family film but obviously not in the same league as the Godfather. Many times a movie that is very effective at being mundane will score much higher than a slightly flawed film that aspires for greatness. I actually find in general that Dreamworks and Pixar films fall into this category. I mean Up and Toy Story 3 are very good but I could never put them in the category of truly great films.
That's part of it, yes. Another part of it is that metarankings sites are a meaningless measure in general, a stupid number determined by worthless shills. And yet, even people that know better use it in place of their own opinion.
m3tan wrote:Takeshi Kitano, Beat Takeshi, Omar Epps.
I've seen it, too. Good movie! I gave it a 71, T8, with the following review;
"Great brutal violence with Takeshi Kitano being a badass as usual. The conclusion is sobering and consistent with the story. The only downside is the majority of the black gang, especially Omar Epps, are either boring or flat-out annoying caricatures. Overall though, a good film."
m3tan wrote:It's on a very short list of mainstream Hollywood war movies made this century that are watchable. By basis of comparison, it crushes Saving Private Ryan on the realism factor. The opening Omaha Beach scene was excellent, but the rest of Saving Private Ryan was laughably bad. But don't get me started on how Hollywood has completely rewritten history. I suspect 99/100 people, I mean Americans, don't realize that more British and Canadian troops participated and died during D-Day than Americans. According to Hollywood, you'd think they weren't even there... I mean according to Jonathan Mostow (U-571 director), it was the Americans who captured the u-boat (actually it was the British SAS) and cracked the Enigma code (actually it was the Polish)...
Well, as a Russian, I also find it laughable that both Americans and Brits think they were the most significant part of the war with Germany.
In reality, 85% of the Nazi troops, 85% of the Nazi tanks, and 76% of the Nazi planes were stationed on the Eastern front. Moreoever, the 15% that was fighting in Africa, Normandy, etc. against British and US forces were usually Nazis that were frequently very old (45+), very young (less than 18), or had already been significantly wounded.
m3tan wrote:A low RT score almost always means I dislike it, whereas a high score means I "might" like it. I'd say the same exact thing about Yelp and restaurants...
I think Yelp is marginally more useful, though. Firstly, Yelp is determined by (mostly) actual people, not idiot critical shills. Secondly, and more importantly, Yelp reviews can be easily read and compared against one another.
If I just paid attention to Yelp scores for restaurants (the equivalent of using only RT scores), I wouldn't get much out of it. Many outstanding restaurants have a 3.5 star average, and the worst place I have ever been at, which I felt compelled to write a 1 star review of (my only Yelp review of a restaurant) was 3.5 stars, too.
However, if I notice that the bad reviews all complain about the same thing, and that happens to be service and wait time, I know that those aspects will likely suck. If there are exceedingly few bad reviews (and most of them are 2 or even 3 stars), with no commonality to them, then the restaurant is probably good. (Although there are exceptions to this, too!)
Thirdly, I will trust aggregate rankings about the food and service at a restaurant long, long before I will trust such rankings about art!