{"id":911,"date":"2007-01-29T17:00:19","date_gmt":"2007-01-29T22:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=911"},"modified":"2007-01-29T19:23:59","modified_gmt":"2007-01-30T00:23:59","slug":"911","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=911","title":{"rendered":"Rating Movie Critics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mark<\/a> has an interesting post which looks at the various “Best Movies of 2006” lists from several critics, and then runs the numbers for each critic to see how much money “their” movies made or lost<\/a>. It’s an interesting read.<\/p>\n

I used to labor under the misconception that movie critics were somehow supposed to predict if I would like a movie or not. I guess the fact that such a task is obviously impossible should have tipped me off. It really confused me when they failed to point out that I would find Independance Day<\/a> to be loud, stupid, and brimming with nonsense. I mean, if you can’t predict that I’ll hate ID4, then your mind-reading skills are highly<\/em> suspect in my book. That one is just so easy<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Of course, I’ve since realized that I was missing the point. Movie reviews are entertainment. It doesn’t matter if you think Gili was a masterwork or that Citizen Kane is a hack job, as long as you keep the reader amused, you’re a good critic. <\/p>\n

However, if we are going to judge critics on their ability to predict if a movie will be generally liked or not, then it would be interesting if you could harvest the data from something like Rotten Tomatoes<\/a> and see who has the best track record for predicting “good” movies. That is, who has the fewest “bad” calls, with a bad call being defined as giving “thumbs up” on movies that scored low on the tomatometer or “thumbs down” for movies that scored well. (Middle-of-the-road movies in the 45% – 59% range would be ignored.) I wonder who would have the best hit percentage? <\/p>\n

Note that this would be different from what Mark has done, since some movie budgets are so low that they will make money no matter how much people hate them. The inverse can be true as well. <\/p>\n

Sadly, I don’t think there is any good (that is, easy and cheap<\/em>) way to obtain that data. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mark has an interesting post which looks at the various “Best Movies of 2006” lists from several critics, and then runs the numbers for each critic to see how much money “their” movies made or lost. It’s an interesting read. I used to labor under the misconception that movie critics were somehow supposed to predict […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-911","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dream-cast"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/911","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=911"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/911\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}