JP and I have been talking about movies since I was a freshmen in college. Lately, I have been watching more and more movies and I've been starting to write my thoughts down. So I guess it only makes sense to have a blog. The only issue is that there are so damn many blogs. So I guess we have to have some clear goals in mind.
I think mainly this will be a good resource for writing down our thoughts about movies and improving our ability to critique and think critically about movies. Even though I have seen a lot of movies, I don't think that I'm particularly good at picking out the good from the bad. So hopefully putting some thought into occasional reviews will help.
We should also have more than just movie reviews. I think it would be cool to have top 10 lists, movie trailers, and just comments about movies that are coming out. We might also post about the movies that we buy and the ones we hope to see.
I don't expect there to be a huge readership. In fact it will probably be just me and JP reading this. Regardless, I think it will be nice to have a place to post our thoughts about movies.
Anyway, I think the first thing I want to talk about is movie review systems. In general, I think it's hard to trust a single movie review unless you are really familiar with that critic. That's why it's so nice to have the movie review aggregators. They're handy when you don't really know what's in the box office and you just want to see something good.
There are three big movie review aggregators that come to mind: Rotten Tomatoes, metacritic, and MRQE. All three are kind of different but my favorite has to be MRQE.
Rotten Tomatoes was the first movie review aggregator that I used. I really liked it. The biggest problem with Rotten Tomatoes is that it's at very slow site. It also doesn't have a mobile version. None of these three sites actually have a mobile site for that matter. I'm not sure why. Don't they think people will be at the theater with their mobile phone and want to check out the aggregate review?
The other issue I have with Rotten Tomatoes is that a review is scored as a 0 or 1. Basically, the critics' reviews are scored somehow as being either good or bad (fresh or rotten). The aggregate score is the percentage of good reviews. This makes sense in principal, but if a lot of critics feel that a movie is worth seeing but not great, it seems like the RT score will be inflated. But that's a minor issue.
The issue I have with metacritic is that the ratings seem to be artificially precise. Like what exactly is the difference between a 75 review and a 70 review. It seems like it would be hard to quantify.
MRQE on the other hand seems to be just about right. It's breaks the reviews down into A/B/C/D/F buckets and aggregates over that. One of the nice features is that you can actually see the distribution of ratings. What MRQE is missing is a good Forum or social networking kind of aspect. Users can submit a review, but there isn't a way to see all the reviews you've written. That just seems silly. You also can't comment on other users reviews. I think MRQE has a lot of potential.
Well, I just wanted to write about something. Mission Accomplished.
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