The Internet Movie Database (IMDB.com) tweaks the ratings of the new documentary ‘Fauci’ to compensate for the barrage of one-star reviews. Review site RottenTomatoes.com says critics give it a 91% rating, but the audience slams it with a 4% rating. If they’ll do this for a documentary, how can viewers trust either service? Does data manipulation make for better movies?
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42 replies on “No Rotten Tomatoes for ‘Fauci’? IMDB Tweaks Ratings to Boost New Documentary”
It would seem “Alternate Weighting Calculations” have become the norm on every thing we see and hear from media, and everything we see, hear or say on web/social media.
The “Lets go Brandon”now should , no MUST Include “Go F*** fauci”
elites vs normals
The breakaway hit from ‘Fauci: The Musical‘:
“Deeeeear, kindly Doctor Fauci, Ya gotta understand!
It’s just my fear of ouchies, that gets me out of hand!
Moderna gives you blood-clots, J&J makes you die!
Golly, jeepers! naturally I’m shy!…..
….Gee, doc-ah-tor Fauci,
FAUCH YOU!”
Sung to the tune of…..?
Clearly – Office Krupke from West Side Story
Loved West Side Story
I’m sure that Rogers and Hammerstein are glaring at me sharply for bastardizing their work!
The worst part is that more lyrics keep creeping into my consciousness, unbidden. I may need to start holding auditions!
Um…this is fun… And I’m 3 days late to see this….but another suggestion would be “The Vax Man”, to the tune of the Beatles “Tax Man” “4 jabs for you but none for me….VAX man! “
It seems to me that “Alternate Weighting Calculations” may also have been applied to the 2020 election … for much the same reasons!!!
Regarding the use of the reviews as a political weapon. Surely the massed ranks of the Faucists and their allies are equally, if not much more, capable of using the review system to push their agenda. If there are great masses of them they could easily have “rebalanced” the anti-Faucist activists leaving low rated reviews. I would say that the fact they did not/could not means the whole review thing is a pretty good ersatz political thermometer on the subject, even if it’s not completely vegan-kosher.
Dr. Faulci:
“With all due respect, you audience members do not know what you’re talking about!”
Since he’s nothing but a charlatan, neither does he.
There’s no doubt that Rotten Tomatoes has gone woke.
A friend and I are sci-fi fans. I have a fairly decent home theater set-up so we get together and watch a movie a couple times a month. My home theater is way better than going to a public movie theater if you ignore the “theater experience” and are solely concerned with watching a movie.
While you get the “theater experience” by going to a public theater, here I get the ability to pause the movie so someone can go to the can. I can turn on or off subtitles. I have better sound than a theater (5.1.2 with Dolby Atmos, etc.) and the sound stage is acoustically much better than a cavernous open theater. The screen experience is about the same ratio as sitting in the center row, center tier of a theater. I have a real, commercial style popcorn machine that makes excellent theater grade popcorn. You can drink whatever you want including bourbon, beer, sodas or water. Etc.
The point is that we like to watch a movie now and then, and we don’t have to drive into town, wear a mask, deal with dipsticks shooting laser beams at the screen, etc.
So, we’re always on the lookout for a decent flick for “movie night”. Finding such movies is a challenge. We look at trailers, read reviews, and do whatever else seems productive in this quest.
Up until about 8 years ago Rotten Tomatoes was an arrow in that quiver. Generally if a movie was otherwise something we’d be interested in and it got better than 60% on the Tomatometer we would consider it. Then we started to notice a definite divergence between Rotten Tomato ratings and actual good movies.
Woke movies that promoted a politically Left agenda, climate change, feminism, homosexual validation and such started getting higher and higher ratings. The good stuff, the kind of movie we like to watch, started sliding in the other direction. It didn’t seem to matter if the woke movies were crap films and the other movies were actually good productions. It became so pronounced that we stopped checking ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. Rotten Tomatoes stopped reviewing movies and started promoting an agenda that we’re adverse to.
This Fauci Movie is the furthest I’ve seen that pendulum swing so far. This is a real thing, it’s not just Bill’s opinion.
Now we generally go ONLY by viewer and not critic reviews in the process of weeding out the stinkers and finding something that’s worth a couple hours of our lives to sit through.
I won’t be watching The Fauci Fiasco. I have no interest in giving that liar more opportunity to lie to me.
Because of the crowded nature, I don’t enjoy the “theater experience” at all, so I’m have a similar preference of staying home.
I’ve never found Rotten Tomatoes to be a reliable indicator for movies I like.
Your final sentence is the most reliable indicator to me why this Fauci movie is a loser. Since I don’t listen to that annoying that ideologue in any other venue, why would I subject myself and $$$ to watch a documentary about him? That seems to be nonsensical to me. Hard pass!
To us it seems like a no-brainer, Fauci is a lying bureaucrat and a man of low character, a weasel word spewing government pogue.
What I find mildly terrifying is that there are people who fawn over such a man and shower that worm with adoration.
The thing is, I don’t know how many people really feel that way. I don’t need an exact number, I mean just a general idea. Are the men who would lick Fauci’s shoes and the women who melt in adoration at his mere glance simply outlying anomalies or are they something more?
Which brings us right back to the issue of a biased press again. Even on our side of the issues it’s more profitable to scour the internet looking for shocking examples of blind and blatant Fauci worship if for no other reason than just to have something to post about.
Bill brought up a good point the other night on TSL. He said that it’s a serious challenge to find things to kernel a show around without just repeating the same ol’ schtick every time. I have every confidence in the integrity of our hosts here on this site but it’s a tall order to fill even so.
For those of lesser or no integrity it’s less of a problem. Their audiences like eating political slop at their intellectual hog trough. In fact they seem to prefer mental mush so feeding them is easy but …
Either way, on either side, we have only so many ways to obtain real, actionable information and manipulating information skews our opinions.
To summarize Stalin; “It’s not who votes, it’s who counts the votes”.
Scott implies that only the reviews by the masses are politically based. Maybe the “note” that Scott calls for should also indicate that there may be some political bias in the official reviews as well.
Does anyone here remember Joe Bob Briggs Drive-in Movie Reviews? Now there was a movie critic that told it like it was.
LOve Love Love Joe Bob – broke my heart when I cancelled Shudder because of their affiliation with Netflix, which I also cancelled, of course, right after the Saint George nonsense and their sickening pandering to BLM, not to mention the progressive far left direction of their selections. Joe Bob and the MST3K cast made stinker movies so much fun to watch.
I believe that none of the people who gave this movie a review actually watched it. The whole idea of rotten tomatoes and IMDB ratings came from an ad agency trying to latch on to crowd sourcing / mob mentality.
The more interesting part for me, and I think the valuable data point, is that over 7000+ took the time to give it a 1* rating, even if they hadn’t seen it. This to me speaks volumes about what average people think about Fauci. Given the Apostle status bestowed upon him by the left and the on-line vigor of the army of Karens and Brads out there, I suspect that there will be a surge in 5* ratings.
I also don’t think those 7000 represent “right-wing” citizens as, generally, they don’t give a poop about something like RT or IMDB. These 7000 have to be people who think these ratings matter to somebody and maybe even use them to make their streaming choices, else they wouldn’t have bothered to register their disapproval in this manner.
I had to look up “Rotten Tomatoes” just to see what that was, besides what I occasionally find in my refrigerator.
While I think Roger Ebert was a very good film reviewer, he allowed his ideology to cloud some of his reviews later in his life. I recall his review of the film Gods and Generals… a film which he did not like, which is fine, as it was a film with some flaws. In his review, however, one of his complaints of the film was that it didn’t explore the issue of slavery. Ebert didn’t understand why every Civil War-related film didn’t discuss the evils of slavery… which is a very odd belief. It would be like saying that every WWII film should cover the Holocaust. How, I wonder, would Spielberg have carved out a space to talk about the Holocaust in Saving Private Ryan? What about the films Where Eagles Dare? Kelly’s Heroes? Patton? Ebert’s later tendency to inject his ideology into his film reviews was a disappointing turn of events which, I believe, clouded his ability to judge films on their merits and not by their level of “wokeness”.
For those who are interested in Ebert’s review of Gods and Generals, here is the link: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/gods-and-generals-2003
I never watched Gods and Generals. Ebert may have injected his ideology in his later reviews, but I agree with Steve in his praise. His reviews gave such insight into the movies he reviewed, whether I liked them or not. Either way, he was one heck of a writer!
I thought Ebert was a very good film critic, and I watched he and Gene Siskel’s show for many years. His ideology started noticeably creeping in to his reviews later in his life, and I considered that a real shame, primarily because he was such a good film critic.
Stalin said it isn’t who votes but who counts the votes.
I don’t watch the volume of movies that I once did, but my first clue that a movie is bad is a high rating from the critics. That’s my sign to pass it by.
My bigger question is, what idiot thought that making a movie about Faux-chee was a good thing anyway?
Next will be the Gen Sacky documentary “Circle Back”
😂
The reviews I pay attention to are from sources whose opinions I trust and respect. For example, whenever Bill, Scott or Steve mention something they’ve seen and recommend I know it’s a movie, series or documentary, article or book that would interest me. Same with my fellow members – boos or accolades from you guys will influence me. IMBd or Rotten Tomatoes? Ha! If their metrics trash a movie I know there’s a high possibility it’s entertainment worth seeing. Those two sites are political.
An “alternate weighting calculation” sounds exactly like what happened in the 2020 presidential election.
How bout, instead of weighting the votes, the review sites put up a prominent disclaimer saying that the site has no way to confirm that audience reviewers have actually seen the movie but that it can confirm that critic reviews have watched the film.
BTW: I seem to recall there was a scandal a few decades ago about movie critics not actually seeing the films they were reviewing. Either writing a review based on the trailer or the review the studio wanted.
but that it can confirm that critic reviews have watched the film
Can they though? The critics are supposed to but can the site really confirm it? It has been noted several times that Academy members rarely watch the films on which they vote. Lot’s of polling and voting is this way. College football and basketball coaches don’t watch a lot of football or basketball in season; yet there are “Coaches” polls that everyone knows are completed by some Asst AD, who hasn’t watched the games.
I would also point out this is not a new phenomenon. They same thing happened to lady Ghostbusters in 2016. All the “right” people and our betters gave it glowing reviews and us great unwashed masses hated it. And IIRC, the exact inverse happened to American Sniper. This is political alright. But the politics is coming from the reviewers and Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB. Much less so, if at all, from the audience.
Scott, why do you assume it’s the audience being political. The reviewers all have a left wing bent (to say the least) and swim in hard left circles. Not to mention that reviewers are part of the “Zoom” class that were hardly affected by the lockdowns as opposed to the audience which is at least a slightly wider swath. Why don’t you think these reviewers are giving Fauci a top score because of their predilection towards towards him or because of the HUGE ration of merde they’ll get from their employers and social circles if they do pan the film?
I think Bill should have shown his chart prior to asking Scott his question. That chart showed 400+ top ratings. I might hazard a guess that the same percentage of those 400 actually watched the movie as the 7000+ 1* reviews, i.e. virtually none. I base this on the fact that “critics” never see things the same way and there were almost no 4* reviews. How many 5* reviews do actual critics who have seen a movie give out. The answer is very few. And they never all agree.
Just to add an anecdote as to why I think the 400+ 5* ratings are just as fraudulent as the 1* reviews.
The wife of the Pastor at my F-I-L church recently wrote a book of devotions. Now, my wife and I have met both the pastor and his wife on several occasions and our opinion of them theologically, spiritually and intellectually is, to be charitable, not high. Think Jim and Tammy Faye without the TV audience. So the idea that she wrote a book intrigued us. We looked it up on Amazon and there were about a dozen reviews; all top stars (whatever that is on Amazon). Then we looked at the comments. There were the same number of comments as ratings (hmmm). All glowing and about 2/3 from names we recognized as members of that church. I would be willing to bet that none of them read her book, even discounting that it was a 40 day devotional and all the comments were written the day the book dropped on Amazon (double-hmmm). I may not be Sherlock Holmes and I didn’t stay in a holiday inn express, but I can follow a straight line.
I’m not sure Scott spoke to the “professional” reviewers but was mostly focused on the larger number reviews that were consistently similar. We have seen similar behavior in other forms over the last few years, where a particular topic, public survey or thing of interest is picked on various forums or boards and a large number of people have gone to “weigh in” in whatever manner is available.
I would agree with you and the others that the professional reviewers are all leftists and would speak highly of something that aligns with their world view whether they have read the book or watched the movie or not but I think Scott is just taking a different tangent on this and is probably something we need to consider with these kinds of things. That the experts will remark according to their world view and not the character of the reviewed item is independent and only sometimes offset by the mob mentality of volunteer comments that may follow an organized message and be just as divorced from the subject matter.
See now, Steve, I’ve always appreciated movies. But it wasn’t watching some reviewer. It was working at MGM for 6yrs where my job was to watch movies. A little over 30 a month and I didn’t get to pick which films. It was watching such a huge variety of films that really taught me about filmmaking and storytelling behind them
Do you still enjoy just watching a movie and can you do it without being judgy?
It reminds me of a guy I knew way back who actually had a job of rating women’s fashion, especially lingerie. He spent his days with a bevy of beautiful young women parading past him (and others) in next to nothing and giving his opinion. He said it didn’t take long for it to become mundane.
Yeah, that’s pretty much what happened to me. Working in the industry, I can’t help but take films apart as I’m watching them. Sometimes I get on a binge, but I hardly ever watch any scripted content anymore.