Rotten Tomatoes Plans Further Action to Prevent Trolls from Skewing Scores

It's been a long time coming but, as you've heard and we've covered, RottenTomatoes.com is finally taking some measures to curtail the trolls from skewing scores before release.Thankfully they're going to use the same cutting edge validation technology that porn sites have been using for ages. You know that whole "Are you 18?" page?...yeah, it's basically that. Their plan is to require non-press reviewers to answer a question as to whether they've seen the movie or not. Look, I want to get rid of these idiots just as much as the next guy but there has to be a more effective way. At it worst it enables the proliferation of keyboard cowboy racism and sexism, the courage of these kids (let's be honest they're probably all 12-22 year old white kids) to sit behind an anonymous handle and crap on someone else's creation when their greatest tribute to the arts will probably be an X-rated Rick and Morty fan-fic. The smaller issue that really gets under my skin is that they completely remove the ability to criticize any of these films without feeling like you'll be branded as a sexist or racist. I'm not sure what the answer is, and any step in the right direction is worth applauding. There's no way to eradicate the losers that get their only validation in life from shitting on others, but maybe by quiteing their voices maybe we can get closer to not having user generated content always reek of some dystopian klan rally.

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Internet Trolls Can't Stop 'Captain Marvel' From $20M Thursday Night Debut

Try as they might, Internet trolls couldn't slow down Captain Marvel at the box office. Although they did manage to hurt the film in a different way, despite Rotten Tomatoes' attempts to stop them. But let's start with the good news...

Marvel's first female-led superhero film debuted to an estimated $20.7M in its Thursday preview. Damn.  That's nearly double the $11M earned by Wonder Woman a couple of years ago, and bests The Avengers' $18.7M. The total ranks fifth among Marvel Cinematic Universe films, behind Avengers: Infinity War's $39M, Avengers: Age of Ultron's $27.6M, Black Panther's $25.2M, and Captain America: Civil War's $25M. 

Marvel is undoubtedly thrilled at those numbers, and at this rate it could best the $130M analyst projections, which would put it up there with Suicide Squad which debuted with $133M.

And now, we go to the stinky bathroom that is the Internet, where pathetic people with too much time on their hands and too much anger over Larson's message of diversity dropped an anvil on Captain Marvel's Rotten Tomatoes audience score. Despite the website taking steps to stop trolls from sandbagging a movie's rating before its release, it appears all those folks did was wait. Currently, there are over 58,000 (!!!) audience reviews for Captain Marvel and a score of just 33%, the lowest ever in the MCU.

How do we know these are mostly bullshit reviews? Well, Avengers: Infinity War only has 53,000 reviews and it's been out for a whole year. Obviously, this was a coordinated effort and hopefully it doesn't hurt the movie's box office in the long run. Something tells me Captain Marvel will prove durable enough to withstand it.

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Rotten Tomatoes Is Taking Steps To Combat Online Trolls

I'm sure it still happens, but I remember when the IMDB scoring system used to be regularly abused by trolls who sought to destroy the perception of a movie before it came out. Now that Rotten Tomatoes is the rating system du jour, the toxicity has bled over to there, with Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Black Panther being the highest-profile targets. Well, since we can't have a female-led superhero movie be any kind of success, they've now begun attacking Captain Marvel. This time, however, Rotten Tomatoes is doing something about it.

In an editorial piece written on the popular website, it was announced the “launch the first of several phases of updates that will refresh and modernize our Audience Rating System.”  Included in that is the disabling of comments on a movie before its release date, and the "want to see" rating will no longer be a percentage but a score tallied up in real time...

"We are disabling the comment function prior to a movie’s release date. Unfortunately, we have seen an uptick in non-constructive input, sometimes bordering on trolling, which we believe is a disservice to our general readership. We have decided that turning off this feature for now is the best course of action. Don’t worry though, fans will still get to have their say: Once a movie is released, audiences can leave a user rating and comments as they always have."

“We’re doing it to more accurately and authentically represent the voice of fans, while protecting our data and public forums from bad actors."

This won't be any good for those who just decide to wait until the movie hits theaters, but I think what's more important is that folks with an axe to grind don't dissuade others from buying a ticket. I know too many friends who look at a movie's RT score, see that it's low, and then just decide to wait and watch it at home. Like it or not, these trolls have an influence and I'm happy to see some steps are being taken to stop it. We'll have to wait and see how effective it is.

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'Life Itself' Is Getting Sh*t On By Critics, And Dan Fogelman Is Pissed About It

Any time you invest a lot of yourself into something creative and put it out there to the masses, it really hurts when the audience thinks it fucking sucks. The only thing you can do is grow a thick skin and let it bounce off, because criticism isn't going to go away, it's just a part of life. You'd think people in the movie and TV industry would be used to it, but that's not always true. Dan Fogelman may have a hit show in NBC's This is Us, a show I'm sure takes its share of heat each week, but the reviews for his new movie are what have him fuming, and he wants the world to know how pissed he is.

See, Life Itself is getting hammered by critics. Right now it sits at just 12% among Rotten Tomatoes critics and fluctuating. It was 9% just 10 minutes ago, I swear. And any time you have a movie this universally reviled, critics like to really flex their muscles, max out on the amount of shit they can dump on it. Of the quotes listed on the front page that made me chuckle, USA Today's Brian Truitt scores with "A stuffed turkey that wastes most of its noteworthy ingredients...".  And National Post's Chris Knight nails it with "Never trust a movie that uses the term "unreliable narrator" more than six times." Rolling Stone's Peter Travers was clearly not a fan, asking “How do you rate a cinematic black hole that doesn’t deserve a single star? Do you simply give it five eyerolls?”

Another guy on the front page that I've learned to really trust is Travis Hopson of Punchdrunkcritics.com, who says  "Life itself may be unpredictable yet sadly Life Itself is anything but."

I like that guy.

Anyway, in an interview with TooFab, Fogelman blames white male critics for the bad reviews and the total destruction of film criticism as we know. I blame white men for a lot of shit, too, but this seems excessive. Here's what Fogelman had to say...

“I think that something is inherently a little bit broken in our film criticism right now. I also think it’s somewhat broken in our television criticism, I think that the people with the widest reach are getting increasingly cynical and vitriolic and I think there are a couple of genres and a couple of ideas that they [attack, which] doesn’t speak to not just a mainstream audience, but also a sophisticated audience.”

“I think a couple of the early reviews that have come out about this movie [‘Life Itself’] feel so out of left field to everybody who’s a part of this movie and to people who have been screening this film for the better part of a year now to both fancy filmmakers, critics, and audiences. There’s a disconnect between something that is happening between our primarily white male critics who don’t like anything that has any emotion.”

To be fair, there's been a lot of talk recently about white male film critics reviewing movies they have zero cultural connection to. This subject reared its ugly head with Ava DuVernay's panned A Wrinkle in Time, and we've seen Rotten Tomatoes try to correct course by flooding their ranks with every critic under the sun, all in the name of diversity. 

But if Fogelman thinks it's only a bunch of white dudes who think his movie is shit...well, he's got another think coming. I'm African-American and my review is probably one of the harshest out there. I wanted to rip my eyeballs out. 

Of the 50 listed critic review for Life Itself, 20 of them are by women. The film only has 6 positive reviews in all, which means ladies think it's shit, too.  Men and women can't agree on much, but thinking Life Itself is a terrible movie? That's something we can all find common ground in. 

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Rotten Tomatoes Is Expanding Their Critic Base In A Major Way

If you think Rotten Tomatoes is chock-a-block only with stuffy old white men who write for newspapers in the big cities, well, you're already off on the wrong foot. That said, the site is aware that far too many people think this way whether it's actually true or not, and have taken steps to expand their ranks by over 200, in the process expanding eligibility standards to promote greater diversity.

The plan put into place will allow for those with podcasts, Youtube channels, and "digital video series" to join the Rotten Tomatoes-approved ranks. While they don't outright come out and say it, I also think this is an attempt to stave off attacks against the aggretating site's credibility by including critics who may not be part of the "establishment", for lack of a better term. 

“Over the past few years, our team has added hundreds of new voices to the Tomatometer on top of the thousands we currently have, with the goal of creating a critics pool that closely reflects the global entertainment audience,” Jenny Jediny, Rotten Tomatoes’ critics relations manager told Deadline. “We took another key step today by revamping our critics criteria that both shifts our focus to approving critics individually rather than through publications, and introduces updated guidelines for newer media platforms to be a part of the Tomatometer.”

“Rotten Tomatoes plays an important role in connecting fans with trusted information and recommendations on what to watch in theaters and at home,” said Paul Yanover, president of parent company Fandango. “Advancing inclusion in criticism continues to be a priority for Rotten Tomatoes and we plan to expand our work with media outlets that hire critics, film festivals and other groups, so as an industry we can better serve consumers.”

To me this looks like a carefully orchestrated PR move to combat a recent wave of bad news the site has faced. While Rotten Tomatoes has always been a target by those who claim its percentage-based metrics hold too much sway with audiences (It literally just tells you what percentage of critics think a movie is merely alright.), it has also been the victim of outside manipulation as studios have tried to artifically inflate a film's Tomato-meter score. One of the culprits was MoviePass, who created a bunch of fake RT accounts to inflate the score for the atrocious Gotti (which they produced and distributed), a plan that was discovered and led to even more embarrassment for the subscription service.

As someone who is already a Tomato-approved critic, I'm the prime example of how inclusive Rotten Tomatoes already is. You don't have to read the reviews of the stuffy white dude at the Washington Post if you don't want to. I'm a guy who started a blog in his house a decade ago and it took me years and hundreds of reviews to earn the credibility to be approved. I take pride in the fact that I probably do more reviews each week than the vast majority of bigger critics, but it also pisses me off when I see hacks on there who got in because they know the right people rather than the quality of their work. So I'm kinda torn on this, too. Individually approving critics SHOULD mean that fewer get in and only the best will, but at the same time they just let in 200 out of the clear blue sky, and are welcoming in more with open arms. Something tells me this initiative won't change much, overall, and the same complaints from the same people will continue.

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'Black Panther' Targeted By Rotten Tomatoes Score Saboteurs

Such is the world we live in that a bunch of disgruntled pantywaists with computer access can sabotage a movie's box office potential, but that's how it be right now. The same Alt-Right group that did a massive hit job on Star Wars: The Last Jedi's Rotten Tomatoes score is now planning to attack Disney again, only this time they're targeting Black Panther. The superhero film features a mostly African-American cast and is shaping up to be one of the biggest launches in Marvel history based on presale ticket buys.

The social media group known as  “Down With Disney’s Treatment of Franchises and its Fanboys” set up a Facebook event for Black Panther's release date of February 15th, and encouraged others to give the movie a bad score. They also hope to ruin the movie by spreading spoilers as far and wide as possible:

“Given the massive success of the audience review rigging on the Rotten Tomatoes site for ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi,’ and due to the sudden rise in those disgruntled with Disney business practices among other factors especially due to the corporate manipulations which created falsified bad press for the DCEU, I feel that it’s time to strike back at all those under Disney and bring down the house of mouse’s actions for paying off the critics that hurt DC Comics on film and for other parties affected by them."

They add, “I’ll be making events like this for ‘Infinity War’ and the Netflix shows etc so we can rally together to truly make a difference…If you want to spread spoilers to Marvel fanboys, use this event as a platform to inform us of targets!”

Man, I wish Marvel would pay us to trash DC. Can I get in on some of that action?

How much impact stuff like this has is debatable. The disparity between critic and audience scores on The Last Jedi was huge enough that mainstream media outlets took notice and it created a narrative that the film was poorly received. It still went on to gross well above $1B worldwide, although considerably less than The Force Awakens which was not met with such a negative campaign.

On the plus side, there are only 3700 users who have agreed to attend this event, and most of the comments are insults towards the group itself. So we'll just have to wait and see how this plays out, but my gut tells me Black Panther will do just fine and these nerds with too much time on their hands and no power in their lives will be ignored.

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'Star Wars: The Last Jedi': Disney Slaps Down Trolls Lowering The Rotten Tomatoes Score

Well, I didn't expect Disney to formally respond to Star Wars: The Last Jedi's low audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, but that's where we are now. Even though the film had an astronomical box office debut, too much of the conversation (even here, I must admit) has been about the supposed reaction from audiences who may not have been buying what Rian Johnson was selling. But as we speculated yesterday, it looks like the whole thing was a work, orchestrated by disgruntled fans who just wanted to hurt a major Disney property. The clues were there because the Cinemascore, which doesn't rely on a bunch of nerds clicking on a website, was very positive.

But in case you still think The Last Jedi just wasn't very good, here is the final piece of evidence...

Right. So some loser with not enough real drama in his life came up with this shit, and there is even more  stuff like this around the Internet from other losers.  Well, I guess they got the attention they wanted because Disney has responded to the low scores. In short, they really don't give a fork and will sit back counting that sweet sweet cash...

Rian Johnson, the cast, and the Lucasfilm team have delivered an experience that is totally Star Wars yet at the same time fresh, unexpected and new. That makes this a Star Wars film like audiences have never seen – it’s got people talking, puzzling over its mysteries, and it’s a lot to take in, and we see that as all positive, that should help set the film up for great word-of-mouth and repeat viewing as we enter the lucrative holiday period.

Score trolling is something IMDB has been dealing with for years and it was only a matter of time before it hit Rotten Tomatoes.  Disney may have shown the best way to handle the response to it, though. Sit back and count that money.

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'Star Wars: The Last Jedi': That Rotten Tomatoes Score Is Probably Bantha Poodoo

The response to Star Wars: The Last Jedi has been deafening, overwhelmingly positive. The box office was huge, very nearly record breaking (If it wasn't for that pesky The Force Awakens), and there is already a palpable buzz for what director Rian Johnson plans to do with his upcoming trilogy. So everything's all good, right? Well, not exactly. If you check out Rotten Tomatoes you'll see that critics loved it to the tune of 93% positive and a "Certified Fresh" rating. But audiences? Inexplicably that number sits at 56% and officially "Rotten". What gives?  The Force Awakens and Rogue One had audience scores well into the 80s.

I've posited that the audience scores were weighed down by trolls wanted to stick it to Disney a little bit, but also by angry fanboys who thought the film should've answered all of their questions (Do we really need to know who Snoke is? Come on.) and taken fewer risks with some of the long-established characters. Well, there's more evidence to suggest this is true.

While the Rotten Tomatoes score is weak, its Cinemascore is vastly different. I often cite Cinemascore in my box office roundup each week to explain certain trends, and here it shows that audiences gave The Last Jedi an "A" grade. That flies in the face of Rotten Tomatoes and suggests, yes, that there are some bitter folks out there with too much time on their hands and not enough real shit to worry about.

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Critics Love 'Star Wars: The Last Jedi', But Audiences Are Split

While there has been a continued over-analysis of Rotten Tomatoes and its impact on box offices, mainly because studios need a scapegoat for their own failures, I've maintained one position on the whole thing: Rotten Tomatoes scores don't mean shit.  We put too much emphasis on critic scores when audience scores are just as important, and there are too many hit movies with low scores to draw any kind of correlation. All of this is a long-winded way of getting around to the news that audiences don't seem to be digging Star Wars: The Last Jedi all that much.

Rian Johnson's film has been universally praised by critics, who as of this morning have it at 93% Rotten Tomatoes score. My own score factors into that, as well.  But audiences have it at only 56% approval, which is actually considered "Rotten" and much lower than The Force Awakens (88%) and Rogue One (87%).  So what does it all mean?

I think we need to get a little bit of distance before that question can be answered. If this leads to bad word of mouth that blunts its box office, then we'll know the audience reaction was legit and had an impact. That could have far-reaching ramifications, especially for Johnson's upcoming trilogy. Expectations might have been too high (the constant comparisons to The Empire Strikes Back couldn't have helped), or fans just didn't dig what Johnson did with the characters.  I seriously hope it isn't the latter. 

It's worth noting that most of the time the reaction is flipped. Critics will rip apart a blockbuster film while audiences tend to be more lenient. Case in point: Justice League, which audiences have at 80% while critics have it at 40%. How'd the box office do for that one? Not particularly well.

We'll see how things go when the first weekend numbers come through, but my gut tells me this will have no long-term impact. 

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Greta Gerwig's 'Lady Bird' Has The Best Rotten Tomatoes Score Ever

Rotten Tomatoes takes a lot of heat for having too much influence, and maybe that's true. But it's also kinda cool to have so many well-regarded critics all putting their two cents in on a movie. And that makes it very tough to have a uniform opinion on anything. Damn near impossible is for anything to achieve a 100% Fresh rating, especially a movie in wide to semi-wide release that may have dozens, if not hundreds, of reviews. And that's what makes the achievement by Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird so extraordinary.

Lady Bird has achieved a 100% rating with 164 reviews. That's crazy. The previous record holder was Toy Story 2 which has 100% and 163 reviews.

So obviously Lady Bird > Toy Story 2, right?

So obviously Lady Bird > EVERYTHING!!!!

Nah, obviously it doesn't work like that, but this is one Hell of a feather in Gerwig's cap, especially for her directorial debut. Talk about setting the bar for yourself super high.

Record broken! With 164 Fresh reviews and 0 Rotten, #LadyBird now tops the list of 100% movies with the most amount of reviews at 164. Congrats to Greta Gerwig and @A24

— ErikDavis (@ErikDavis) November 27, 2017

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You'll Be Waiting A Bit Longer For A 'Justice League' Rotten Tomatoes Score

"Rotten Tomatoes Causes Controversy By Announcing Score Reveal For JUSTICE LEAGUE This Thursday"

That's the headline over at Comicbookmovie.com, where I guess the fanboys are up in arms over Rotten Tomatoes' decision to delay their score for Justice League an entire day. And I get it; the website has been a prime target for scorn as its scores have been given greater importance and influence. For comic book fans this has been especially true; a hit film like Suicide Squad was publicly ripped for its 26% Tomatometer score from critics, when in fact audiences liked it enough to give it a 61%. There's a wide disparity between what the fans approve of and what critics do sometimes.

But is Justice League's score delay really a big deal? Not really. Despite the embargo being lifted later today, Rotten Tomatoes is holding the score reveal until 12:01AM Thursday not as part of a vast Warner Bros. conspiracy, Alex Jones, but so it can debut on their awful "See It/Skip It" TV show that runs on Facebook.

I can see where the paranoia comes in, though. Warner Bros. owns a minority stake in Rotten Tomatoes, right? But nah, the site actually did this before with A Bad Moms Christmas, and will probably keep doing so with major releases. To be fair, I thought it was a conspiracy at first, too, until I remembered they needed to hype that shitty show with the shitty hosts.  While I understand the need to do that, Rotten Tomatoes runs the risk of alienating those who really do rely on the site. Make them wait and they'll just go someplace else to find out what critics think. It's not like there are a shortage of options out there.

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Brett Ratner Has Beef With Rotten Tomatoes, Says It Hurts The Business

Every week I get dozens of messages from readers saying things like, "Travis, thanks for steering me away from that movie!", and my response is usually something to the effect of "Don't just listen to me. Decide for yourself." Unfortunately, for most people that means just heading over to Rotten Tomatoes, where I am a Tomato-Meter critic, and judging movies on their critical score. As you might expect, a lot of filmmakers have taken issue with having their movies reduced to a simple percentage score, but you might not have expected Brett Ratner to be so vocal about it.

Ratner cut loose on the review aggregating site at the Sun Valley Film Festival, in particular over its negative impact on Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, which he helped finance. In honesty, the points he makes about that movie are exactly like what I've been saying for the past year...

“The worst thing that we have in today’s movie culture is Rotten Tomatoes,” he said. “I think it’s the destruction of our business. I have such respect and admiration for film criticism. When I was growing up film criticism was a real art. And there was intellect that went into that. And you would read Pauline Kael’s reviews, or some others, and that doesn’t exist anymore. Now it’s about a number. A compounded number of how many positives vs. negatives. Now it’s about, ‘What’s your Rotten Tomatoes score?’ And that’s sad, because the Rotten Tomatoes score was so low on ‘Batman v Superman’ I think it put a cloud over a movie that was incredibly successful."

“People don’t realize what goes into making a movie like that. It’s mind-blowing. It’s just insane, it’s hurting the business, it’s getting people to not see a movie. In Middle America it’s, ‘Oh, it’s a low Rotten Tomatoes score so I’m not going to go see it because it must suck.’ But that number is an aggregate and one that nobody can figure out exactly what it means, and it’s not always correct. I’ve seen some great movies with really abysmal Rotten Tomatoes scores. What’s sad is film criticism has disappeared. It’s really sad.”

I agree. Not to get into another 'Batman v Superman' discussion, but that movie made a lot of money, the fans generally liked it, but the only thing people referred to was its Rotten Tomatoes critic score which was in the tank. And that negativity has carried over to everything Warner Bros. has done, regardless of the fact each of their movies has been financially successful. 

That said, it's kind of funny for the guy behind Rush Hour, Hercules, Tower Heist, and X-Men: The Last Stand to be complaining about bad reviews. He's actually a very capable producer with good taste in choosing movies, but as a director he leaves much to be desired and, shocker, his movies have horrible Rotten Tomatoes scores. To be fair, practically all critics, even some of the greats, reduce their reviews to either a score, a symbol, or a thumbs up/thumbs down system. The goal for each of us is to make it as easy as possible for curious readers to figure out how we feel about a movie, and Rotten Tomatoes is just an expansion of that. [EW]

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Negative 'Suicide Squad' Reviews Prompt Response By David Ayer And A Fan Petition

Oh boy, here we go again. I wouldn't be surprised if Warner Bros. stops screening their DC Universe movies in the very near future, because every time they do a wave of terrible reviews rises up and crashes down on top of them. You may recall some of the early pre-release buzz on Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice was actually pretty good until those reviews started to hit and that Rotten Tomatoes score plummeted.

Well now the same thing is happening to David Ayer's Suicide Squad with the first fusillade of reviews, and already it's dropped to a poor 35%, a mere 6 points higher than 'Batman v Superman'. Ayer isn't having it, though, and he took to Twitter to stand by his movie, even quoting Mexican revolutionary  Emiliano Zapata in the process.

Prefiero morir de pie que vivir de rodillas - Emiliano Zapata

— David Ayer (@DavidAyerMovies) August 2, 2016

Zapata quote is my way of saying I love the movie and believe in it. Made it for the fans. Best experience of my life. ❤️

— David Ayer (@DavidAyerMovies) August 2, 2016

Basically, he ain't goin' out like no sucka. It's good to see Ayer taking a strong, defiant stance in support of his movie rather than sitting back in weak acceptance the way Zack Snyder always does. Ayer has good reason to be optimistic the fans will take to it more than critics (as they did with 'Batman v Superman), as early tracking predicts a $125M opening weekend. Of course things could change the following week, but that's a good start for a film about supervillains most people haven't heard of.

Ayer may find himself surrounded by supporters, too, as fans with a lot of time on their hands started a Change.org petition to shut down Rotten Tomatoes over its reviews of DC movies, which it deems "unjust" and "affects people’s opinion even if it’s a really great [movie].”

On that last point I will absolutely agree. Maybe not on the "great movie" bit, but definitely the rest. Even though I am an RT critic I've seen the way it can influence others into a sort of pack mentality. One or two prominent critics write a review and others, usually the lesser critics, let's keep it real, will follow in-kind so as not to be seen as outsiders defending a movie they probably don't really give a shit about.

And this negative buzz can and often does hurt a movie's long-term chances of success. For instance, a friend shared a critical Suicide Squad review from Indiewire's David Ehrlich, and it inspired a bunch of comments from people who had never seen the movie yet echoed his sentiments because he's a pretty popular guy. Chances are those folks won't be buying a ticket. While I'm not one to claim that our reviews have unlimited capability to sway others, when it comes to movies that people are already skeptical about, yes it definitely has an impact. Clearly we can't tell you shit that would keep you away from Captain America: Civil War or The Avengers, Marvel has a track record of quality films that Warner Bros. does not have yet. It just goes to show how difficult it is to shake off a negative stigma once it's latched on.

My review of Suicide Squad will be up later tonight. Will my score hurt or help its chances of being "fresh" or "rotten"?

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Time for a rant: Movies not screened for critics

You'll see in the graph above a listing of movies not screened for critics and their respective scores on rotten tomatoes. I do not propose this as a bad thing, you know what...for that matter I'll just say it F most critics. They make me sick, never have I met such a group of self indulgent WEINERS (Movie refernce:Comment with the answer for a prize), who have their jobs so ass backwards it'd almost be funny if it wasn't so sad. It sickens me how smart and refined these people think they are because they waste their time watching artsy movies that are about as fun as reading War and Peace during a colonoscopy. Shit, half of you are so easily swayed by a little studio swag that you'll give a good rating to the worst peice of shite you can find for a few t-shirts and a beer coozie. Why do you go to the movies? I go to have fun, to watch something that will amuse, scare, or enlighten me, not to try and decipher some shit that a long haired unshaven, unbathed, douche of a writer wrote specifically so people could feel smart when they figured out his obvious sub plot. Back to the point of this story....all of the movies on the list, well they did pretty allright at the box office for the most part. What does this tell us? That the average critic is too busy trying to impress his/her critic friends with a flashy quote line bashing the latest big budget movie thats hip to bash (See Transformers 2), then to tell the public if they'll like the movie or not. YOU'RE OUT OF TOUCH PEOPLE! I mean come on...the average 30 year old man or woman would much rather see Terminator: Salvation (which was a letdown for me but fun nonetheless), than freakin' 'Frost/Nixon' or 'The Reader'. Yeah they are great cinematic accomplishments but you are missing the point of why the average joe goes to the movies, and that is to be ENTERTAINED. Anyway, that's my rant for the day and dear readers know that we Punch Drunk Critics try to bring you fair and honest reviews and news of the movies you'll actually want to see. We will not sell out, we will not back down, WE WILL NEVER LOSE OUR FREEDOM!!!!....oops, gotta a lil hyped there...forgot all we do is watch movies then type about them, but in that arena of typing we will be sure to let you know what you will have a good time with.

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