I’ve been reading and sending link-love to Rotten Tomatoes for years now  and have never seen them as partisan or even political before. They were just a terrific concept of a site that’s very well executed. Well, not anymore. Looks as though they’re just another member of the club. More childish nonsense from the Left.

From the indispensable Kerry Picket at the Washington Times:

["The Undefeated"] is listed on the popular Rotten Tomatoes movie review website as not only a documentary but also a science fiction and fantasy film.

Hopefully, Rotten Tomatoes will claim this was all just some sort of mistake. Nothing would be more fun than to write  a follow-up investigating that theory with the full list of categories the Palin doc could’ve “accidentally” been placed under. But, you know, it just happened to be “science fiction & fantasy.”

Oh the sarcasm we’ll share.

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***UPDATE: Armond White, whose need to be a contrarian bores me to death, loved Grown Ups and compared the film’s director Dennis Dugan to Renoir. His praise is a little hyperbolic — desperate for attention — but he at least gets the movie.

It’s fair to say Kyle Smith, one of the few right-of center critics out there, hated Grown Ups. He even accuses Sandler of begging for applause with the flag-raising scene. I think that’s unfair. The moment is really about how a family is coming together and to tell the audience it’s the 4th of July. The flag-raise is a story device to make a bigger dramatic point, not pandering. The scene’s quite short — a blip, really — and it’s not like Lee Greenwood’s singing in the background. The moment certainly caught my eye, but only in the sense of how refreshing it was to see this portrayed as the ordinary act it is for most of us. Hollywood’s succeeded at making such things feel so exotic that when what’s commonplace for a majority of  Americans occurs on screen it can only be interpreted as a Big Message.

Currently “Grown Ups” sits at a pretty rotten 8% Tomatometer rating. With “Top Critics,” the story of 5 childhood friends now grown and gathering together for a funeral, rises to 11%. As Christian Toto pointed out, “the reviews aren’t pretty.” No, they are not. Many are downright hostile.

I love Adam Sandler, especially when he teams with director Dennis Dugan. That doesn’t mean he hasn’t made a bad movie, but as prolific as he is, Sandler’s track record when it comes to delivering for his fans is impressive. Especially now that he’s moved successfully beyond the rage-prone juvenile persona that made him famous and started playing family men. Until I came across James Rocchi’s review at MSN, however, my intentions were to rent this, especially since Big Hollywood had already posted a review. In his hostile review entitled “Grown Ups is Infantile Trash,” Rocchi closed with this enticing piece of information:

In the present moment, though, in the theater during “Grown Ups,” I felt a deep and abiding sadness every time the audience laughed and the sounds of their chuckles turned into the ringing of the cash register, and all I thought was a sad, simple truth: This, America, is why we can’t have nice things.

In other words, the audience was amused, the critic was not. That’s all I need to know. Within a few hours I was sitting in a packed house, munching popcorn, and laughing my ass off. (more…)

With an 82% fresh rating, most all the Usual Suspects are gushing over ‘Avatar,’ but everyone knows that when you trash America you can bank the glowing reviews. So here are some contrarian voices not on Big Hollywood — others who had many of the same problems we did with the dull, cliched story and, in some cases, with the over-hyped visuals [Nolte review here; Kozlowski review here]: 

Nerve.com:

“If Cameron wasn’t going to make a great movie with his rumored half-billion dollar budget, he could have at least given us an entertaining train wreck. But Avatar, which plods on for a punishing two hours and forty-two minutes, is more boring than bad. There’s no denying that the motion-capture 3D visuals are some kind of technical achievement, but after spending a while in the aquarium-like world of Pandora, I started to feel like I was staring at the world’s most expensive screensaver. The New Age-y rituals of the Na’vi put me in mind of dancing Ewoks, and the big battle scenes looked like outtakes from Attack of the Clones. Maybe that’s a little too harsh, but certainly Cameron does nothing with digital warfare that Peter Jackson didn’t do better in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Your mileage may vary, but to these eyes, Avatar looks like the emperor’s new clothes — and the King of the World is naked.” (more…)

Well after its phenomenal success of eight Oscars, four Golden Globes, seven BAFTA’s, and $350 million at the boxoffice, “Slumdog Millionaire” has managed to stay alive. As much an amazing longshot victor as its hero, an urchin from the Mumbai slums cum tea server at a phone call center who wins a fortune in an Indian version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?,” “Slumdog” has kept making news in ways deeply rooted in its own depiction of the world.

Recently the film’s British director Danny Boyle, serving as jury president of the 12th Shanghai Film Festival, confided during a panel discussion that on “Slumdog” he had shed the patronizing, “imperialist” mentality, relying heavily on a local Indian crew. Boyle also observed that while it was “regrettable” that Beijing imposed censorship restrictions on its filmmakers, he’d nonetheless love to work in China, as it would be a “challenge learning Mandarin.” Boyle neglected to mention that on “Slumdog” he’d skipped the challenge of learning Hindi, necessitating an Indian co-director, and also skipped the patronizing practice of paying Western wages, and the low pay for local child actors would fuel most of the subsequent controversies. (more…)

Just before seeing ”X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” I checked the Tomatometer, hoping against hope that there had been a sudden surge since I had last checked it a half hour previously. No such luck: The ”Wolverine” TM still stood at a dismal 38%. I glumly trucked over to the theater, fairly certain it would suck, just hoping it wouldn’t ”Fantastic Four” suck.

Having now seen it, I have just one question: What are these critics smoking, and where can I get some (ok, that’s two questions)?

To be sure, the first installment of the proposed “X-Men” prequels has its share of flaws, and some of the criticism is more than fair. So let’s get the bad out of way first: (more…)

Watching Gomorrah is like learning Latin: You’d rather say you’ve done it than actually do it.

Gomorrah is a slightly fictionalized portrayal of life under the influence of the criminal organization Camorra (unknown to most of the U.S., but apparently running things with bloody fists in Italy). It’s a situation that deserves attention. A picture could have presented events as riveting entertainment or art, and perhaps helped to bring about change. Yet Gomorrah fails as art, entertainment and promotional tool. Any publicity about the horror of the Camorra has come from the existence of the film, not the watching.

Gomorrah is dull and flat and emotionally uncompelling: It is a sprawling tour of future-less lives and hollow days punctuated occasionally—very occasionally—by brief set pieces in which something violent and terrible happens. That may be true-to-life, but so is sitting at a desk all day, and neither is particularly interesting to watch. If filmmakers have any foundational obligation, it is to make a picture that makes you want–need–to keep watching. These filmmakers feel no such burden. It is as if they have taken the seriousness of their subject as license to relieve themselves of the obligation to sustain the interest of the audience. They’re counting on guilt or something to keep us interested, and they could not have been more mistaken. (more…)

This is somewhat anecdotal, but when you look at the Metacritic scores below it boosts my theory that truly awful leftist films frequently get better reviews than deserved while solid, entertaining conservative films (now that the left’s ceded “liberty” to the right) get worse reviews than deserved and films critics didn’t understand were pro-Bush receive fantastic reviews, but once found out, no Oscar nominations. (more…)