I Hate Metascores, And You Should Too

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Metascoring, in case you aren’t aware, is the process of gauging a movie’s quality through aggregating lots of different reviews and spitting out a score based on the percentage of positive reviews it’s gotten. Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic are two very popular websites that metascore, and you’ve probably visited one or both at some point in your life.

The entire concept is bunk.

Even just the idea of applying a ‘score’ to a movie is stupid, and yet it’s become customary for critics to tack them on at the end of their reviews for some reason. We’ve all seen the five-star system, the four-star system, the percent-out-of-a-hundred system—or out of ten, but with decimals—or maybe the most offensive, the A to F grading, which treats the film as though it were a High School essay on Wuthering Heights rather than a comprehensive piece of art.
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The Words Don’t Matter: A Review Of ‘Shredder’

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Shredder (2011)
Written & Directed by Cody Clarke
80 min.

I feel strange writing this. Not just because a personal blog post about Shredder led me to corresponding with Cody, and subsequently becoming a guest writer for this site in the first place, but because Shredder as a creative work is now so familiar to me it’s difficult to imagine being someone who hasn’t seen it.
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3 Films I Saw At Sundance London (Touchy Feely, In A World, History of the Eagles Part One)

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The Sundance film festival has become so large, powerful, and popular in recent years that they’ve begun shipping it on over to my neck of the woods, the United Kingdom. Only a couple of movies make the trip, presumably the best, or at least, the ones the yanks think we’ll like. I saw three while I was there. Here are my thoughts.
Continue reading 3 Films I Saw At Sundance London (Touchy Feely, In A World, History of the Eagles Part One)