f1reblog

On my way in to work today, I heard Kenneth Turan savage “Beowulf” on NPR’s Morning Edition. I was expecting that, since Manohla Dargis didn’t have much good to say in her NYT review which was released on the website yesterday (although it’s dated today).

So it was quite a shock when I decided to visit Rotten Tomatoes for the first time ever and saw a 73% Fresh rating (after initially seeing it as a 73% Rotten rating — I mean, really, is red the best color they could find for a positive rating and green for negative? I know it goes with the tomato theme, but it’s backward and confusing).

The callout that RT used for the Dargis review is: “You don’t need to wait for Angelina Jolie to rise from the vaporous depths naked to know that this Beowulf isn’t your high school teacher’s Old English epic poem.”

That’s the first line of the review and, I suspect, as far as they actually got when deciding that it was a positive review.

How about these lines, also from the Dargis review:

“Grendel soars through the air pretty much the way Mr. Zemeckis’s busy camera does [...]. They’re certainly fun to watch [...] though neither goes anywhere meaningful. By contrast, the human characters move [...] with none of the kinetic vibrancy of real bodily locomotion. That makes the 3-D effects all the more important, because the only time the movie pops is when something or someone seems to be flying at you.”

“Yet the 3-D is necessary to the film only in so far as it keeps your eyes engaged when your mind starts to wander. Stripped of much of the original poem’s language, its cadences, deep history and context, this film version of “Beowulf” doesn’t offer much beyond 3-D oohs and ahs, sword clanging and a nicely conceived dragon, which probably explains why Mr. Zemeckis and his collaborators have tried to sex it up with Ms. Jolie, among other comic-book flourishes.”

“The reader’s imagination, of course, has long been one of the banes of cinema. [...] The solution for many filmmakers is to try to top the reader’s imagination or distract it or overwhelm it, usually by throwing everything they can think of at the screen, including lots of big: big noise, sets, moves, effects, stars and, yup, even big breasts. Mr. Zemeckis throws a lot of stuff at us in “Beowulf” besides Ms. Jolie, including spears, swords, pools of gore, dribbles of mucous and images with extremely forced perspectives, which direct your vision toward the center of the frame, goosing the 3-D effect. Mostly he throws technology at us.”

As I read it, this is not a good review. She criticizes the direction, the ‘performance capture’ technology, the story, well, pretty much everything. She does have some good things to say: “There’s plenty of action in “Beowulf,” but even its more vigorous bloodletting pales next to its rich language, exotic setting and mythic grandeur.” and she does give credit to ‘performance capture’ as a “sophisticated visual technique” although she pans the end result.

That’s all an aside, because my real issue is with Rotten Tomatoes itself. Dargis’ review is just a convenient illustration of how badly you can go wrong when you try to take a nuanced opinion and distill it down to black or white (or in this case, red or green). Still, I don’t know how someone could read her review and see it as a positive one. I sampled some of the reviews RT listed as “Fresh” and they were all pretty cool if not downright cold. I guess if your job is summarizing movie reviews on a website that depends on movie ads, you tend to see the good in every review and throw the switch accordingly. That “73% Fresh” rating is a sham.

Maybe my reading comprehension skills are on the wane, maybe they aren’t. All I know is the confusing colors and a questionable rating methodology mean that I won’t be going back to Rotten Tomatoes again. But I’ve lived my life so far without it, so I bet I’ll probably figure out how to cope.