As long as I am going to have no friends in social media I had better deserve it.
Rotten Tomatoes went from a website for people to identify ROTTEN films to one for corporate entities to imply that average films are exceptional. Which is, essentially, the OPPOSITE of its intended purpose: to sort through the rubbish hype.
If I hear one more movie ad reference its Rotten Tomatoes score I am going to punch the tv, And that is going to hurt my hand, which will not be productive!
I NEVER heard that happen in the 170 years of Rotten Tomatoes’ existence, then this year suddenly I have heard it at least five times. And I do not expose myself to television deliberately. It is probably much more rampant than that.
“95% on rotten tomatoes” just means 95% of reviews didn’t say the film was TERRIBLE. There is more to great than a lack of worst.
I think I heard it first for Spot-Light, then Zutopia and I lost track after that despite the scores being so ludicrously high that the described items should be immediately unforgettable.
I actually saw Spoflight, and while it has an interesting story, it is not a stellar cinema experience. I didn’t even think Mad Max Fluffy Robe was stellar, and while it predated the rotten tomatoes fad, It was apparently the only action movie ever allowed to win awards. I appreciate that it got fight to the point and didn’t fixate on irrelevant non-participants for half its run-time like the Transformers movies did, but its action portions were just as cluttered, zoomed in, camera-changey and indecipherable. And I resent any adventure that turns around and goes back the way it came. I don’t even go back the way I came when I go for a walk. I have compromised my personal safety to not be bored in this miserable overpriced dead-end boat town. In a movie whose base premise is the absence of safety, you can find a different route! Or else what were you running from?
The tomato system is not any more accurate and inarguable than the thumbs-up/down system that once was a ubiquitous citation in movie advertisements, but it SOUNDS like it is, since it has a specific number. Wow that is 95 out of 100 instead of 4 out of 5 or 2 out of 2! That is so statisticy!
Additionally, the thumbs at least belonged to certain people. I do not consider any film critic a general, unimpeachable authority on entertainment, but it is possible to personally trust the opinion of an individual human on individual matters. Those tomatoes could be anybody. And a percentile does not indicate the total number of people who voted, either. I suppose to get to 99, depending on how you round it, requires at least 34 participants, since I have never seen a decimal score. But still we don’t know that 33 of those 34 thought toozopia was GREAT. Maybe most of them did, we don’t know, but I don’t believe 99% of zootopia viewers thought it was better than 99% of every movie they have seen, which is what I am intended to think. That it is one minor scrap away from perfection, and I can tell from here that it isn’t. My guess is it is more j-j abrams brand minimum level of effectiveness that doesn’t offend anyone in its intended audience. I have so little faith in the current culture to create stellar films that advertising which implies it happens constantly, to near PERFECTION, is suspicious to me.
undoubtedly no effort was spared in creating a city essentially identical to a real one except with every human shape changed to a humanized animal shape with an accompanying stupid animal pun to refer to it, but that just does not appeal to me Especially not after Pixar, now a wholly-owned subsidiary of the disney company and indistinguishable from it, has already done this about fifteen times, with monsters, insects, automobiles, or whatever. I’m even tired of remarking on how unappealing I find it! I was going to keep it to myself, because honestly I don’t have time to make my thought coherent but my rotten tomato gripe flowed into it and I have no choice.
My biases did not develop independent of the world. they have validity, somewhere. i did not choose to cringe when stuck in a cinema showing a preview for this. Ha ha ha! They are at the D M V and they hate it! Just like YOU hate it! Right? Therefore you RELATE and you feel validated by this experience and demand nothing more from it!
I am open to the idea that there is more to the film than that, but it makes no effort to imply that there is, nor do any of the fans of it whom I have encountered, even two months on. I certainly do not accept that it is one point off from perfect. Of course by now its score is only 98 percent! ha HA! also, Hoodboy, from 2014, has 98%, and I actually saw that and had more problems with it than I hypothetically anticipate having with zootopia. The Wrestler, my personal quintessential critically acclaimed aimless misery –literally the first movie I cite when the topic comes up– also has a solid 98% on rotten tomatoes. I wouldn’t even give The Wrestler a rotten pineapple. Toy Story 3, which I found bearable but frustrating and objectionable has 99% points. The two before it both have 100 despite being built on the same “don’t acknowledge master” premise that I can’t get past.
Singing in the Rain, which I do like, better than most films I have seen, having been able to see it without considerable hype that I was aware of preceding the viewing, is on there with a 100% score as well. But I hate that “Moses Supposes” song and the 1-dimensional treatment of the nontagonist Lina Lamont, and Donald O’Connor yelling out “mammy” several times for no clear reason. The “Gotta Dance” segment is incongruous with the rest of the picture, and doesn’t even make sense in the movie-within-a-movie-context it is presented as belonging to.
SO I like the film better than most I have seen, certainly better than its contemporary iThe Band Wagon, in which EVERY musical number is annoying and/or incongruous, but 100% implies perfection, which it is a long way from.
To contrast, the film I have watched within the past few years that I perhaps enjoyed best, 1980’s Flash Gordon, has a tomato score of 82%, which is probably about right; I am sure it has just as much stuff wrong with it as Singing in the Rain, and 82% is a pretty good time, for me. I can’t really hope for more than that, knowing me. Maleficent, which I found totally loathsome, and had just as much paid promotion and dumb fan hype as Zuzutopia, possibly slightly less porn fan-art, has 47% tomato points. However its “audience score” of 71% is higher than Flash’s 69%. What does all this mean? It means nothing! That’s my point! None of these figures have any value behind them. If a movie that real people LOVE has a low score from purportedly more valid people, and a movie that only I like has a high score, and a movie that is not really any better has a yet higher score, then the scores are garbage.
The television ad for zootopia literally says “residents of zootopia are just like you.” as if there is literally nothing else going on than another hideous 3d animated allegory of society with a few superficial things changed. The announcer doesn’t even add a big EXCEPT like game over 13 years ago. Why then are these residents interesting? Their appearances are, apparently, superficial. How does this remain fun and new to people?
The other cinema poster, that I didn’t take a picture of, because I hated the idea of somebody seeing me take that picture and assuming I just thought it was clever, shows a restroom door with different sized inset doors for animal people of different sizes. I do not want to watch a movie about people “just like [me]” going to use the toilet. Meanwhile, despite forcing all these differently shaped species into one excretion chamber, the sexes are still segregated down a strictly this or that line. They choose their human fashions based on binary sex rather than a limitless multiplicity of species that ought to create more specific needs. Maybe that is even addressed in the film. Although “addressed” does not mean “resolved,” or even “addressed in a meaningful fashion.” And the promotion implies that it is a-bcdefghijklmn-ok anyhow. I received enough addressed-without-resolution gags in Deadpool, where they work because that movie doesn’t think it is telling me something about society. Also its smug scumbag main character gets plenty of abuse for being one, which I appreciate.
With that said, telling me the zootopia fox takes a bullet through the rectum isn’t going to change my plan.
Nor will telling me the rabbit is actually the main character. It would be most implausible to shoot them both that way with the same bullet.
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Purplespace sez:
I haven’t seen zootopia, but I heard there are no birds because all birds live in their own bird nation, so they conveniently don’t appear in the movie.
I would prefer a movie with entirely too many birds.
Frimpinheap sez:
I suppose that saves the artists from having to decide whether the bird-folk have hands that can manipulate objects or that permit them to fly.
Although in the context of social allegory I don’t understand how that works.
Although quite honestly I didn’t even like the famous Art Spiegelman Maus comic story since I couldn’t make any sense of it being ostensibly a true story while ethnicity is inextricably tied to species. There was one part where some mice folk wear cat face masks to help them get on a train safely, it is completely ridiculous, and it’s not even acknowledged by the text anywhere, like the artist just threw that in on a whim when he realized his gimmick didn’t work, and also because he doesn’t really acknowledge the animal characteristics at any point. He is trying to prove something and it just doesn’t work for me. Animal people are silly and aren’t perfect stand-ins for real people in real stories.
And are they mice-folk because they are of Hebrew descent or because of their religion? If someone converts, does their entire biology change? And does that mean all nationalities have been completely in-bred since the dawn of civilization? In reality you can’t tell somebody is Jewish by looking at them, unless they are REALLY Jewish. Because we are ALL the same species and have a common ancestor and interbreeding between ethnicities is rampant anyhow.
PurpleSpace sez:
Ah, now I have not actually read Maus, but mostly because I’ve seen enough things that have supposed to have been allegories for atrocities that happened in ww2. Allegories for racism using animals fall a little flat when you realize all human races can breed together where very rarely can different animal species produce a viable offspring. Usually certain things that already share a common ancestor like certain differing species of large cats or various species of ungulates.
Indighost sez:
I liked Zootopia because of the romance and the art, and yes the mere average-quality existence of a furry animal story above-average entertains me, but I felt like it wasted a lot of potential by having a pointless plot. I agree the high tomato score is excessive and weird. It’s more “90+% binary yes as opposed to no ” then “99% perfect movie”.
While watching it I kept enjoying the character development and hoping for the plot to become interesting but it didn’t happen. SO I went and enjoyed the fanworks online later.
I really encourage you to check out Bernielover’s fan comics on fA, she did a wonderful job.
Indighost sez:
And above all I DO encourage you to actually see the movie, if only to do a grumpy 99,001-page point-by-point explanation of why evertyhing is miserable (that would entertain me).
Indighost sez:
Excuse my spam. But you’ll enjoy many pantsless scenes without anything in between anybody’s legs except an eerily smooth, featureless surface.
Frimpinheap sez:
I think I am a long way from a mentality where I would want to enjoy toozopia, much less actually be able to. In general I find contemporary mainstream animation completely intolerable and I would be far too embarrassed to pay money to watch this in public. I was exposed to Frozen, the previous highly visible animated property released by this company, twice, by chance, and I was wholly unable to appreciate anything other than the craft on display in the environments. I am sure this one will likewise find its way into my visible range without my seeking it out.
I just plain don’t like the way American animators and animation writers do things.
I was curious about seeing the Shaun the Sheep film last year, but an opportunity did not present itself.
Frimpinheap sez:
I could not either justify going to see a film that I expected to hate, just to write about it; even this entry here took me hours to write across several days. This stuff takes too long for the amount of attention it receives. Topics of complaint just COME to me, without my needing to seek them. If somebody else really wants to see this thing and take me along (as occurred with the Trans-formers and Boyhood), it will be on the other party to suggest.
Prescription Pudding Pinged With:
[…] about or grasp my specific complaints, but whoa don’t touch disney. Don’t mess with my zootopia. The collective lowering of standards dinty and friends inflicted upon imaginary internet culture in […]
Frimpinheap sez:
Hey I finally looked up those comic strips, which I must have missed the recommendation on initially.
golly gee they are more poorly drawn, sappy, inaccessible to an outsider and obscenely popular than I would have guessed. And the dialog isn’t even arrayed in a way that can be read coherently. And beyond that the person abruptly quit the site once that movie stopped being trendy and went to make, presumably, equally infantile low-effort high volume lego movie fan-trash on tumblr. Literally has NO artistic passion that is not directly tied to a lucrative media property. Really the opposite of me; I desire approval but I would not sell my soul to get it. Not without there being guaranteed good money in it, anyway. Why was I even TRYING to talk to someone who would recommend that to me? Or letting anybody within that system make me doubt my own self worth? I wish I had checked and been thoroughly disgusted with that years ago.