Movie Reviews

Back home, there’s one section of the newspaper that always writes reviews and gives ratings of the big new movies when they come out. Generally, a good rule of thumb about these reviews is that I think the opposite of what the reviewer does: if the reviewer didn’t like it, I will like it, but if the reviewer did like it, I will not like it. While this rule usually gives me a pretty good idea of which movies are worth my time to go and see, I would like a slightly more logical approach if possible.

Online movie reviews are supposed to be a good way to fix this problem. The idea is that anyone who has seen the movie will get online and give it a rating and write a short little review. This way, I can base my decision on whether it will be a good movie or not based on the reactions of other, “normal” people like me, instead of some big shot who makes a living watching movies. This is very different from traditional reviews such as those I saw in my newspaper back home. Those reviewers are trained in the movie-reviewing process, and have a full-time job doing nothing but reviewing movies. This is supposed to make them experts at deciding what makes a movie bad or good to other people, but in reality it often seems to isolate them from the average experience people have with the movie. Of course, it is always possible that I will disagree with the majority of people who saw the movie before me, so online reviews are not a perfect process, either. However, with more people contributing to the initial rating and reviews, it is more likely that at least some of them will share my tastes than it would be that one “professional reviewer” would agree with me.

Despite this, I still don’t find myself basing my decision of which movies to go and see on online user reviews very much. I tend to base my decision mostly on the advertised plot line of the movie, and also on the opinions of any friends I have who may have seen it earlier. My friends are people that I know and trust to like the same kind of movies that I do, or at least to know if it was the type of movie I would like or not. However, in the end, my decision of whether to go and see a particular movie or not usually comes down to what I know about the plot, and whether or not that sounds interesting to me. Online rating systems and reviews are nice tools, but they are not the final factor for me in deciding whether or not I want to see a particular movie.

Shown below is a screenshot of the first few user ratings for the top-rated movie on Yahoo that is in theaters right now, Under the Same Moon.

- Scott Campbell

 

Tags: CS292, Web 2.0, Yahoo, movies, reviews, user reviews, Under the Same Moon

~ by scotthcampbell on April 11, 2008.