Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Rotten Tomatoes

I was wondering what everyone thought about the site Rotten Tomatoes. It's a movie website that compiles the reviews of movies from critics everywhere and combines them to create a "Fresh Score". The higher the score...the better. Example...Fred Clause is only 27% Fresh (well, that figures..). You can also get any sort of information on a movie: trailers, posters, cast information, release dates, box office earnings, you name it. Between Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB, my movie needs are totally covered.

The design of the site is a little overwhelming at first, as there seems to be a lot to click on and many choices. However, spending a few minutes with the site, you can see that the information is strictly on a "want to know" basis, and that you can easily skip ahead and search for a movie coming out, read reviews, check out trailers, and more!

I recently used RT to check out the reviews for Southland Tales, which have definitely been mixed (it's the second film from the Donnie Darko director, Richard Kelly). The link I provided is a good example because you can see the layout of the reviews and how its handled (an excerpt of the review up front, with links to the full reviews provided). Full tomatoes = good. Splattered tomatoes = bad.

Check it out. I love the site.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I really liked this site alot more than IMDB. It gave it's users alot more useful information.

Paul Fleck said...

Rotten Tomatoes is the best site I know of as an indicator of how a movie will be. I still use IMDB religiously for info on actors and films themselves, but if I want to go see a movie I go here first. Generally you can read why some people liked it and some people didnt. I hate movie reviews in the paper because you have to assume you have the same tastes as the reviewer. Here at least you can see many points of view. If they all say rotten, then you know the movie really does suck.