Never Trust a Ho (Named Rotten Tomatoes)

Any movie fanatic is bound to run into the review site Rotten Tomatoes once in a while. It's a great concept; the site compiles all the reviews of a movie, averaging them into a score which is either "rotten" or "fresh," and thereby helping us decide whether to pay $10 for that new movie we're iffy about. Its UK site also has a cute little modified logo:

Thing is, Rotten Tomatoes has always made me uneasy. The first strike against it is its design. I know that's a superficial complaint, but it feels very jumbled to me, and bad layouts greatly influence my opinion. But more than that, Rotten Tomatoes' unweighted system really bothers me. I mean, it's great that bloggers like me can get their voices out there, but ultimately I don't care what they have to say. People go to authorities for reviews, and the fact that Peter Travers and A.O. Scott are on equal footing with Billy of Billy's Movie Blog (exaggeration, but still) doesn't seem right. There may be a top critics tab, but it's the main merged score that's always quoted.

Today, I've found a whole new reason to stick to metacritic.com. One of imdb's daily links took me to Rotten Tomatoes' worst reviewed movies of the past ten years, which in turn took me to their best reviewed movies of all time. It was already strange that the worst of the last decade got 100 spots while the best ever only got 50, but I had to read it.

Though some of the classic examples weren't cropping up, the movies that made the cut seemed pretty plausible. Then I got to number 34.

Um, really? Risky Business is the number 34 best reviewed movie of all time? Even with Rotten Tomatoes' idiotic criteria of at least 20 reviews, I just can't accept this. People may parody and reference Tom Cruise's no-pants dance party incessantly, but gosh, I have never heard anyone call it "critically acclaimed." 

This Risky Business debacle gets even more ridiculous when you consider some of the movies left off the list: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Raging Bull, Lawrence of Arabia and even motherfuckin' Casablanca. RT is supposedly just reporting the facts, but someone there must have a strange vendetta against a lot of good movies, because there is no conceivable world in which Casablanca is not one of the top 10, much less top 50, best reviewed movies of all time. 

Oh and the number one best reviewed movie of all time, according to Rotten Tomatoes?

God, who constitutes "critics" in this list? The site founders and their families? Bitter Casablanca haters? The clinically insane?

It's situations like these where I just don't know what to say. This list is utter bullshit yet it is presented as fact. You can't argue with us, RT says, because we're only presenting data. Well I certainly won't be making the mistake of turning to them for anything factual ever again.