#i don't understand how that movie has such a high score on rotten tomatoes

[inkoutsidethelines]

So I watched Spy (2015) last night, and I've come to a realization. I just don't like Melissa McCarthy's brand of comedy.

[msclaritea]

Martin Freeman Says Backlash Over Age Gap in Ortega Movie Wasn't Fair

Eve Crosbie Apr 27, 2024, 8:36 AM ET

Lionsgate

Martin Freeman addressed the controversy around his latest film, "Miller's Girl."

Freeman, 52, plays a teacher who has a relationship with his student, played by 21-year-old Ortega.

He said the movie isn't endorsing age gap romances any more than Holocaust movies endorse genocide.

Martin Freeman addressed the controversy caused by his latest film, "Miller's Girl," in which he stars opposite Jenna Ortega, who is 31 years younger than him.

The movie, which landed on Netflix on April 25, follows a high school student, played by Ortega, who begins a sexual relationship with her English teacher, played by Freeman.

Audiences were quick to criticize the film due to the age gap between the two actors — Ortega is 21, while Freeman is 52. Some said the film romanticizes the relationship between minors and those in positions of power.

Speaking with The Times of London for an interview published Saturday, Freeman defended "Miller's Girl" as "grown-up and nuanced."

"It's not saying, 'Isn't this great,'" he said of the film's dynamic between his character and Ortega's.

Freeman said the film had been "tainted by association" with a difficult subject.

He said that derision wasn't distributed equally, though — saying that people seemed to understand the level of distance involved in stories depicting Nazism.

"Are we gonna have a go at Liam Neeson for being in a film about the Holocaust?" he asked, referring to Neeson's starring role in Steven Spielberg's 1993 film "Schindler's List."

Martin Freeman and Jenna Ortega in "Miller's Girl."

Martin Freeman and Jenna Ortega in "Miller's Girl." Lionsgate

Although the controversial relationship at the center of "Miller's Girls" prompted a lot of comment, the film wasn't a hit.

It premiered at the Palm Springs Film Festival to underwhelming box office numbers.

The R-rated film was given a small theatrical release in the US, showing at just 350 screens for just one week domestically, earning $321,000 in ticket sales, according to box office tracker The Numbers.

It took an additional $568,522 at the international box office, bringing its total gross to $889,522 — less than a quarter of its $4 million production budget.

On review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, the film earned a critic score of 29% based on 58 reviews. Its audience score is 42% based on 50-plus verified ratings.

This could, of course, change now that "Miller's Girl" has been on one of the most popular streaming platforms."

(Disclosure: Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Business Insider's parent company, Axel Springer, is a Netflix board member.)

Dear GOD. Did he just... Martin, I know you're not this stupid, so seeing you being put up to behave like this, is just...gross. Your co-star had just come off of an Antisemitic publicity stunt with Tom Cruise, she's a one note actress, and we all know how films that are supposed to be cautionary tales, usually get turned into the opposite. Wall Street kicked off the age of Greed. The Fight Club inspired real underground fight clubs. If a film is not clear about its moral stance, then it WILL be misinterpreted. I don't know what's going on with you, but I'm going to pray for you, Martin. You need it. Especially working for Lionsgate.

[jellogram]

I feel like rotten tomatoes gets far too much hate considering it's actually a pretty neat service. People say shit like "Rotten tomatoes doesn't know anything" and like... that's not how it works. They don't write the reviews. They compile a wide variety of critics and give a general idea on whether they liked the films, which is valuable insight. Is it the summarizing score of how Good a movie is? Of course not. But if you have any understanding of what critics tend to like and dislike, and if you take into account the age of the film and whether the reviews they used are contemporary or modern, it's incredibly useful to gauge what kind of movie it is. I also like to use this in tandem with audience scores.

For example, if a film came out in 1955 and has a shitty rotten tomatoes score but a great audience score, I know it's more in cult classic territory and likely ahead of its time. If a film has a great RT score but a terrible audience score, I know it's probably award fodder. If both are high, it's probably a genuinely good movie with universal appeal.

tl;dr Your hatred of rotten tomatoes isn't actually their fault, it's the fault of the critics who wrote the reviews and the people who take the critics' word as the end-all-be-all. Rotten tomatoes is actually a really cool service that can be highly useful.

[average-guy-reviews]

The Subjective Nature of Movies.

Movies are, by and large, made by studios to make money. They do this by trying to make films that appeal to the largest number of people possible. It's a simple practice and, for the most part, it works. But it's never that simple...

Watching movies is one of the single most subjective things any people can do. Despite the studios trying to make movies for the masses, it's often difficult for those masses to agree on what they do and don't like.

I'm not going to go into the toxicity of specific fandoms, that's a whole other post, this is simply about how wildly varied people's views of the same films can be. My own personal experience of this is the 2022 MCU movie Thor: Love And Thunder. I read reviews, and I talked to people, who absolutely loved it. They thought it was witty, and brilliant, and up there with some of the top MCU films. I thought it was a nonsensical pile of mostly irredeemable farce, with very few positive moments. I ranked it lower than Thor: The Dark World, which says a lot.

That being said I still gave it a 5/10, which is not a really bad score. It probably could have been considerably worse, as films go. It's this kind of disparity, from fans of the same types of film, that has made me write this piece, but it's not this minor level of difference that's the star of this post.

I recently watched, and reviewed, The Whale starring Brendan Fraser and directed by Darren Aronofsky. This is a film I cannot say enough good things about it. I called it a cinematic masterpiece that was a perfect character driven movie. Now I am fully aware that not every person that watches it will see it, or be affected by it, the way I did or was, but some of the responses blew my mind.

I have attached a screenshot from Rotten Tomatoes below. Other than covering the usernames this is unedited. I haven't found two reviews to make my point and joined them together. Nope. These two reviews literally followed on from each other as I scrolled through the site. The massive disparity between these two reviews is the biggest I think I've ever seen, and it is staggering.

To paraphrase the the first: it says "incredibly moving and probably the best film I've (the reviewer) seen in ten years". I don't need to paraphrase the second, just check the image, as it says: "Cheesy and paper thin. Felt like a high school play written by a 14 year old."

Everybody is allowed an opinion, and I would never ever tell you your opinion on a piece of entertainment is wrong, but how is it so huge? I am squarely in the camp of review one, but this threw me. I always knew people saw films differently, that no two people are going to like the same films, or even the same bits within specific films, but I guess I'll never really understand how two people can see a film like The Whale, and see it so massively differently.......

Anyway, I don't have an answer to the question of why this occurs, but i would love to sit down and discuss it with these two people and see if I could work it out in this case......

Movies are subjective and people are contrary. This is the only conclusion I have, and sadly it's obvious and not revolutionary, but it's simply all I can come up with.....

[mister-dungus]

M3gan was such a bad movie, I don't understand how it has such a high Rotten Tomatoes score