Criticism As A Democracy...For What It's Worth

If you're familiar with the site Rotten Tomatoes, you know that it aggregates the opinions of many, many critics in order to present a general sense of a film's critical response. These are critics who have at least some credentials; they're not rounding up everybody with a blog and a ticket to the cineplex.

What emerges is an imperfect system in which every registered critic's opinion is counted, meaning that some people you wouldn't trust with your cable remote are weighted equally with people you've been reading for 25 years. It's absolutely, emphatically not a substitute for reading real reviews, and it's not a substitute for thinking for yourself, and it would be a grave mistake to suggest that the quality of a film is reliably reflected in its ability to appeal to the largest number of critics.

Nevertheless, what they call "Tomatometer" rankings do make for an interesting data set, and they've now released the "Golden Tomato Awards," in which they determine which movies were, overall, the best-reviewed of the year.

In the past, this hasn't correlated reliably with awards performance. I was intrigued by the fact that the top-rated dramas of 2007 were, in order, Away From Her, Gone Baby Gone, The Savages, There Will Be Blood, and This Is England — only one of which got a Best Picture nomination. (I noted with some satisfaction the very high placement of Gone Baby Gone, which I thought was outstanding and very unfairly left out of almost all awards consideration last year in favor of more bombastic movies.)

So what happened this year? We investigate, after the jump...

 

The best-reviewed drama 2008 (by this measure) was not Slumdog Millionaire. It wasn't Milk, Doubt, Revolutionary Road, The Reader, or Frost/Nixon.

It was The Wrestler, which has also quietly made its way to #52 on the Internet Movie Database's Top 250 Films list — right between A Clockwork Orange and The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre. Still in very limited release, The Wrestler brought Golden Globes to Mickey Rourke and Bruce Springsteen on Sunday night, so keep an eye on it going forward.

Other interesting tidbits? Best Musical went to High School Musical 3, which beat out the infinitely more "respectable" Cadillac Records and Mamma Mia!. That's right — more people liked High School Musical 3 than Mamma Mia!. Yow.

Taking all movies in wide release together, WALL-E edged out The Dark Knight for the top spot, while the limited release list tops out with two documentaries, Man On Wire and Taxi To The Dark Side. The top romance of the year was not Vicky Cristina Barcelona; it was the sadly little-seen Ghost Town, with Ricky Gervais.

Again, democracy is not meritocracy, and you can learn much more that's interesting by reading the actual reviews than by looking for test scores like it's the SATs. Having said that, in the cases of both Ghost Town and High School Musical 3, it provides some interesting food for thought. Are there really critics who think HSM 3 is better than a movie with Meryl Streep in it, or is that good evidence that the standards are different depending on the movie's aspirations? And if Ghost Town was positively reviewed by about as many critics as Tropic Thunder, why didn't anyone go to see it? And do we have any right to be heartened by the fact that the great majority of the best-reviewed wide-release films of the year enjoyed great commercial success?