It had not dawned on me how low the bar to admission as one of the critics of rottentomatoes.com had been set until I happened upon one of the so-called "reviewers" of Toy Story 3 who saddled it with a negative review and therefore being one of only three reviewers to have done so out of over one hundred and sixty. The negative review I read was pedantic, pretentious and downright pompous. The writer seemed intoxicated on some misplaced sense of self-importance.
The thing is, I don't even blame him; I blame rottentomatoes.com for giving him his fifteen minutes of infamy.
In fact, I noticed something in reading the reviews posted on rottentomatoes.com that quite honestly annoyed me more than any self-dubbed critic ever could: the site apparently cherry-picked negative reviews of Toy Story 3 and planted them right in the middle of the film's otherwise perfect score to generate outrage and therefore traffic. How do I know this? One of the three reviewers whose negative reviews was cited, infamous "contrarian" Armond White, whom I wrote about previously and who was probably sharpening his knives for Toy Story 3 the day he found out it was being made, wrote a scathingly negative review about Shrek Forever After which for reasons I do not understand never made it onto the film's "tomatometer" over on RT. I've gone over it twice (during my free time, of course), and White's negative review simply does not register. For the record, the Shrek sequel registers a 53% score on the site (rotten), while the Pixar sequel is quite lofty with 98%. White's review would not have registered at all over on the fourth Shrek film, which nearly half of the reviewers polled hated anyway, but because it had the shocking effect of being the first review to spoil Toy Story 3's heretofore perfect score it made more sense to throw it into the mix. The comment count on White's TS3 review is at something like 750+ and climbing. Ironically, the same people clamoring for White to get fired keep on taking the bait again and again, which is why rottentomatoes is so ready to lay it out; in the case of Shrek 4 it would have been meaningless so they never included White's bad review.
With TS3, however, they clearly they saw the opportunity to stir up the usual gang of idiots. It strikes me that RT sought even more opportunity to generate traffic by including the rare negative reviews on their site, so they dug up some blogger whom they probably otherwise wouldn't give the time of day and slapped his review there, which is now generating traffic as well.
Now, people are free to log onto or avoid RT altogether, but what's sad about this charade is that the reason why RT rose to prominence in the first place was that it afforded people the chance to know what reviewers...serious, HONEST reviewers and not attention whores, think about movies. It's supposed to be a MOVIE LOVERS site, and while that certainly does not mean they will only post positive reviews, it should mean that they will post reviews from writers who are more or less sincere in their liking or disliking of films, not people who post purely for the attention they generate. Whatever they started out as, they've devolved into something else, something...less.
Hey rottentomatoes! Toy Story 3 was a putrid film! Make ME one of your critics!
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