by foobarqux | 2025-08-22 23:47:31+00:00
> This was the original point of contention...

The original point of contention was that the "percent that approve" of the film that RT uses is surprising and not as useful as a regular rating system. (By the way the average score is now hidden on RT).

> So your argument against a broad-sample aggregator (RT) is to use a slightly-less-broad-sample aggregator (MC)?

My argument is to use useful aggregation of experts instead of a much less useful one.

> You complain about "every-person-with-a-substack" but you're still relying on an aggregation of dozens of critics you've never heard of.

I don't need to have "heard of them" to know that the NYT film critic, the reviewer at Siskel and Ebert and the film critic at Vanity Fair are probably more worth listening to than the "MacGuffin or Meaning Substack".

> You're just drawing an arbitrary line in the sand and calling it "quality."

No, the opinions of the film critics for the top publications in the world are not arbitrary.

> You're confusing your personal, subjective viewing threshold with an objective measure of quality. A score is what it is. 75/100 is the top quartile. That is, by definition, a high score. Whether you have enough time in your life to watch every movie in the top quartile is completely irrelevant to the validity of the score itself.

Beside the fact that the rating isn't the percentile ranking of film the entire point of the discussion is which site better helps you choose films. Again the definition of "high score" is completely arbitrary and irrelevant.

> Now this is more besides the point but i really do think that you're using a tool (Metacritic's average score) for a job it wasn't designed for: being the sole arbiter of what's worth your time. A film's "quality" is not a single, objective number. It depends on genre, intent, and audience.

I never said that. It's a helpful filtering mechanism. I watch low rated films if they are a genre I particularly like (just like I eat junk food without claiming that it is haute-cuisine) and I don't watch movies if they are not in a style I enjoy. Apropos of your example I don't like horror so I don't watch it, irrespective of the score.

> Not to mention your method is overly biased towards one specific type of film: the prestige drama. If that's the only kind of film you like to watch then cool i guess, but if not then what you're currently doing is nonsensical.

Most films are dramas as far as I know. In any case you can filter on categories so it's irrelevant.

> The RT score tries to answers the question..."What are the odds i'll like this movie?".

Well it's closer to what are the odds the average person will like it, which isn't what I want: I want 1. to be able to pick a better movie rather than a worse one and 2. be able to threshold on higher quality than the average person.

> This is a very useful information to have especially because i'm not a zombie picking movies to watch because of a single average score from an echo chamber of critics (which is bizarrely what you seem to be doing).

No one is doing this, they are using Metacritic as a starting point to filter and rank movies which, once again, RT doesn't do a good job at because of it's binary classifier system and inclusion of everyone under the sun.

> If the synopsis of Bob Trevino is more interesting to me, I would absolutely pick it over Past Lives. They are complementary scores.

That's fine and as I said something I and everyone else does, just like I eat junk food (and maybe sometimes actually prefer to some 3-star Michelin restaurant). The problem is pretending that those two films are roughly the same quality, or that because someone sometimes prefers a lower critic ranked movie that ratings don't matter: you can make the same argument about preferring a "rotten" RT movie.