Rotten & Starred: What Movie Review Aggregators Actually Say

Last week, Vulture published an exposé on the practice of ‘buying’ positive reviews to inflate a film’s ratings on the movie review aggregator, Rotten Tomatoes. In their investigation, they found that a PR firm called Bunker 15 ‘encouraged’ writers to review 2019’s Ophelia, if they hadn’t already, because previous critics might have been ‘too harsh.’ According to Vulture, Bunker 15 was reaching out to lesser-known critics, $50 bill in tow, suggesting they could write whatever they liked about the movie, but that a “super nice [writer]” might be willing to put a negative review where the Rotten Tomatoes aggregator was unlikely to find it… Yeah, that’s sleazy, to put it lightly. Over the past month or so, criticism has been on my mind a lot. I’ve been talking with friends, fellow writers, and family members about the strange system in which writers and commentators—even in fields like academia and beyond—analyze media and cultural phenomena. I enjoy writing film criticism now, but I’ve also written and thought a good bit about communication theory—about the way we say and read things, and how that affects what they mean. So when I saw all this Rotten Tomatoes drama…the gears started turning. What role does a site like theirs play in the overall ‘system of criticism’, I wonder? What does it do for us? <a href="https://medium.com/counterarts/rotten-starred-what-movie-review-aggregators-actually-say-668c46141153">Read More</a>