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http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/SpiritedAway-11160 64/

I've had the wonderful opportunity to see this movie several times already. It's my favorite Miyazaki flick. It's great eye-candy and wonderful fantasy. Highly recommended. See it in the best theater you can.

Keanu already took A Walk in the Clouds before and it was terrible! What idiot thought that having him take a flight through the clouds would be better? :]

And don't forget the Sci-Fi thriller, Cube.

Well, at least it isn't The Master of Disguise. Ouch.

Well, at least it isn't The Master of Disguise. Ouch.

Anyway, I was glad to finally see some exposure for the tinfoil hat brigade. Finally a movie that teaches our children the value of paranoia ;)

(RTFA or WTFTrailer)

Rotten Tomatoes, one of the two great meta-review sites, doesn't seem to "get" that this release is very different from all previous cuts of the film, especially the recut, tinted, rock-n-roll-soundtracked 1984 Moroder cut. Many of the reviews refer to the "out of place rock-n-roll soundtrack" and "terrible image quality". This is a real problem, because people will be choosing whether or not to see the film based on extremely inaccurate data.

I've emailed them about the problem (and offered to provide them with a list mapping reviews to releases), but they seem to be ignoring me. If we can get enough people to let them know that yes it is worth taking the time to be accurate about this, this release might actually get the respect and attendance it deserves. Please mail them and let them and (as politely as possible) inform them that this is important.
Thank you.

Rotten Tomatoes, one of the two great meta-review sites, doesn't seem to "get" that this release is very different from all previous cuts of the film, especially the recut, tinted, rock-n-roll-soundtracked 1984 Moroder cut. Many of the reviews refer to the "out of place rock-n-roll soundtrack" and "terrible image quality". This is a real problem, because people will be choosing whether or not to see the film based on extremely inaccurate data.

I've emailed them about the problem (and offered to provide them with a list mapping reviews to releases), but they seem to be ignoring me. If we can get enough people to let them know that yes it is worth taking the time to be accurate about this, this release might actually get the respect and attendance it deserves. Please mail them and let them and (as politely as possible) inform them that this is important.
Thank you.

The anime was the best! I loved the ragtime soundtrack. They didn't even credit Fritzy though :(


That's because the anime was actually an adaptation of a Japanese comic book, and not a reincarnation of Fritz Lang's masterpiece. Here is a handy link, if you want to learn more about the anime, or get trailers, etc.

(And guys - if you're looking to improve the quality of submissions Slashdot gets, it would probably be a really good idea to allow a limited form of feedback for rejections - even if it was just a choice from a drop-down menu ("This story was rejected because we have a writer working on the same story right now", for example.)

Oh - and in response to one user's post - go see it, but with lowered expectations.

Review: Minority Report

Reviewers of Spielberg's latest film are falling over each other to laud his new, gritty noir vision of the future, "Minority Report", based on the Phillip K Dick short story of the same name. Roger Ebert loves it; the movie is currently standing at 93% at Rotten Tomatoes, and Salon gives it a thumbs-up. But what's the reaction of your average geek?

(Full disclosure - while I am familiar with his work, I have not read the Phillip K. Dick story - so you're not going to read any comments about how the movie did or did not live up to the book. It stands and falls here on its own merits. Plot of the movie is discussed, but the ending is not given away. Plot of other Spielberg movies is also referenced.)

For those of you who have not yet been saturated by press releases or the trailer - Tom Cruise plays John Anderton, an investigator in the "pre-crime" police division of Washington D.C. in 2054. The department's work is facilitated by "pre-cogs", beings with the power to see the future - in particular, future murders. Alerted to crimes before they happen, the pre-crime unit can interpret the waking dreams of the pre-cogs and intercept the perpetrators before the event. This program has been such a success that murders in the D.C. area have been practically eliminated, and the government is considering taking the pre-crime unit national. Pre-cogs, it is claimed, are never wrong.

As a final safety check, federal investigator Danny Witwer (played by Colin Farrell) is sent to inspect the pre-crime facility. Anderson and his boss, Director Burgess (Max von Sydow) fear that the program is going to be taken away from them. However, things quickly get far more complex than mere power games over jurisdiction.

Another alert from the pre-cog pops up. This time, Anderson sees himself killing a man - a man he does not know. Convicted by the infallibility of his own system and convinced he has been set-up, Anderson runs, determined to escape his own destiny by finding out who framed him.

The Washington DC that he runs to is a computerized Paniopticon, biometric readers omnipresent and blithely accepted by the populace. However the street (to paraphrase William Gibson) always finds a means to subvert every technological innovation - and to continue to run, Cruise must sink into the underbelly of the world he knows and confront his own past.

As a geek, your acceptance of Minority Report's plot will depend a great deal upon your stance on temporal paradoxes. The effectiveness of the pre-crime unit rests in the belief that once the future is "seen" it must occur, and Anderton's unit is therefore justified in taking pre-emptive action. However, as Witwer points out, by intervening you have forestalled the event - is it therefore right to incarcerate someone who has not committed an offense? Determinism is assumed to be a fact, but it turns into a question central to the film.

Spielberg has received a lot of recent press claiming how much "darker" and dystopian this movie is than much of his early work. I've seen comments that extrapolate from "Saving Private Ryan" through "A.I." to this movie that suggest the man is on a trip that rivals Poe in bleakness. Suffice it to say that anyone who believes this has "E.T" burned into their minds but has forgotten "Empire of the Sun" or even "The Color Purple", films as equally as grim as "Minority Report".

In fact there comes a point about fifteen minutes before the end of the film where Spielberg could have wrapped it up, leaving every plot thread neatly tied, and delivered a much darker ending. However Hollywood, or his own essential optimism, has driven him to deliver a brighter alternative, much like "A.I." It is not a completely unsatisfactory conclusion - the climax involves a very nice moral conflict - but it is not the bleak outlook I expected from reading the pieces on Spielberg's new "dark vision".

Spielberg does not fail to hit upon themes that are central to his work - the breathtaking innocence of childhood; the loss of humanity and its possible redemption; and the two-edged sword of technology. (Spielberg is no starry-eyed technologist - the potential misuse of man's tools has been an ongoing thesis since "Duel". In "Minority Report" there is an interesting sub-theme of technology as a new religion, with Anderton, the tool user, set against Witwer, a traditionally trained Jesuit seminarian before he became a cop.

Spielberg's visualization of the near-future of 2054 is complete and compelling. Animated advertising crawls over every surface; enhanced personalization of every experience has come at the price of a sharp loss in privacy; the gap between the well-to-do and the drug-addled poor has grown massively. One wonders, however, if the appearance in the film of companies we have today is there for verisimilitude or is merely clever product placement - how many corporations do you expect to survive another 50 years with the same logo? And while the technology shown is (for the most part) very believable, it is ironic that the cause behind the pre-cogs ability is somewhat glossed over.

In his directing Spielberg has taken note of his younger, hungrier competitors, such as David Fincher.. Part of this change was to hire Alex McDowell (the production designer of "Fight Club" and "The Crow"). In addition, his camerawork, in cooperation with cinematographer Janusz Kaminski (who worked with him on "Schindler's List") is more fluid than ever, using juxtaposition and video techniques to sometimes dazzling effect. And unlike his peer Lucas, who seems happy to place ultra-mirrored spacecraft in pristine environments and shiny robots on rich green grass, Spielberg's use of CGI is more subtle, "dirtier" and almost invisibly integrated in the scenes.

In terms of the cast, Tom Cruise is, well, Cruise. He's been chosen for roles for twenty years because he is an effective actor who is also cute, charming and bankable. His role as Anderton doesn't tax those abilities in any way. Max Von Sydow is the slightly scary Old Testament father figure he established himself in even before "The Exorcist". To me, the most effective player in the cast is Colin Farrell. Given a smaller role with far less screen time than Cruise he still succeeds in making his character deep, complex, and far more dynamic than the leading man's, with better lines and sharper delivery.

The plot is certainly enough to keep you guessing, with enough twists and turns to throw most. The movie has one "discovery" and an attendant chase scene that does stretch credibility somewhat, but otherwise the plotting is coherent and relatively bulletproof. There are holes, but none large enough to spoil the movie.

As a vision of the future, "Minority Report" is chock-full of ideas. As a movie, or even as a cyberpunk thriller, it leaves a little to be desired. After the film you won't want to tear your eyes out, but you may feel a sense of disappointment that Spielberg, who has demonstrated time and again that he can be deeply insightful into the human condition, warn of the dangers of technology while showcasing its attractions, and deliver a wild ride, could not quite succeed in delivering all three at once in this movie.

I agreed with you up until you said the words A-10 Warthog. To say the JSF is better than an A-10 is like comparing apples and oranges. you will not find a close air support fighter that can carry more ordinance or has a heavier cannon or is more survivable in the environment a Warthog is designed to operate in than the A-10. The best I could see a Lockheed JSF doing is operating similar to a Harrier in that roll. Sure, it sounds like this thing can crawl on the deck, but I seriously doubt the JSF can take the punishment the Hog was designed for. Remember, the A-10 was designed at the height of the cold war to severly maul any Soviet heavy armour that crossed the line in Germany and engage them in an intensive AAA/SAM environment. I'm sure the Lockheed JSF can do it's job, and do it well, but it's job is not floating around and chewing up tank after tank after tank after tank while taking 20/30mm shells in the gut at close range and continue to fly. Ever see "Flight of the Intruder"? That's a far more realistic role for the JSF.

When most people think about nanotechnology, they usually conjure images of microscopically tiny contraptions such as the invisibly small submarine that was injected into a character's bloodstream in the classic 1966 sci-fi movie "Fantastic Voyage."

Actually, I think Innerspace was better (you know, the one with Meg Ryan, Dennis Quaid, and Martin Short?).

I liked Memento as much as the next guy and Nolan's style is fantastic. But there is NO point in seeing or even making this film. The 1997 version was spectacular. The inverted film noir concept is brilliant and well done and provides the mood that Roman Polanski's Frantic, another sleep deprivation classic, fell short of conveying.

We saw a cultural and generational coup d'etat this month

We saw a cultural and generational coup d'etat this month

We saw a cultural and generational coup d'etat this month

I'd agree that the "500 meters" statistic is probably oversimplifying an accurate statistic in the original, something to the effect that the total estimated volume of water on Mars is (500 m * surface area of Mars). That's not the same as saying that Mars would turn into WaterWorld if we melted the ice.

If you mentally filter out every sequence that Jar Jar is on the scene, and maybe the midochlorians, and trim that Pod Race scene down, there's a good movie in there.

I know where you're coming from Taco, but you're just wrong. It's not our job to "filter" jack squat. That's Lucas's job, one he's not doing.

FYI everyone, Rotten Tomatoes has it at "barely fresh", with 61% positive reviews. For the selected, more reputable reviews it's rotten at 47%. Doesn't bode well.

Like it matters. The jackass has us all by the nape of our childhoods. I'll be there tonight. Already got my tickets in my pocket. There'll be bits that make me happy, but they'll be like reflections on water, untouchable & disturbed if you try. Ah well. We should all just realize we can't go back again.

Some of the biggest films lately, such as Spiderman, Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter all got mostly positive reviews from major newspaper critics. Maybe they don't like Episode 2 cause it sucks, and not because they're just trying to act snooty.

Some of the biggest films lately, such as Spiderman, Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter all got mostly positive reviews from major newspaper critics. Maybe they don't like Episode 2 cause it sucks, and not because they're just trying to act snooty.

Some of the biggest films lately, such as Spiderman, Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter all got mostly positive reviews from major newspaper critics. Maybe they don't like Episode 2 cause it sucks, and not because they're just trying to act snooty.

3) Films that are absolute critical flops often appeal to filmgoers a great deal. Witness Titanic

According to rotton tomatoes, Titantic got a rating of 67% approval from real critics.

This film didn't shock anybody. The critics pretty much universly loved the film. JonKatz should do just a tad more research before he bases an entire article off of a preposterous claim.

If you just go to RottenTomatoes.com which compiles move reviews into one big list and takes the ratio of good to bad you'd know that SpiderMan got an unusually high 84% positive reviews. Check out the reviews

Offtopic: also check out the review for one of the worst movies of all time: Battlefield Earth. Some of the reviews are so funny it nearly makes me want to cry.

This film didn't shock anybody. The critics pretty much universly loved the film. JonKatz should do just a tad more research before he bases an entire article off of a preposterous claim.

If you just go to RottenTomatoes.com which compiles move reviews into one big list and takes the ratio of good to bad you'd know that SpiderMan got an unusually high 84% positive reviews. Check out the reviews

Offtopic: also check out the review for one of the worst movies of all time: Battlefield Earth. Some of the reviews are so funny it nearly makes me want to cry.

At this point Clones has 58%.

As a comparison, TPM as a 58% positive review rating. Compared to Star Wars at 97%, Empires at 97%, and Jedi at 79%.

If we look at the cream of the crop section (AKA the real film critics), TPM has a miserable 33% positive, but still beats Clone's current rating of 25%.

At this point Clones has 58%.

As a comparison, TPM as a 58% positive review rating. Compared to Star Wars at 97%, Empires at 97%, and Jedi at 79%.

If we look at the cream of the crop section (AKA the real film critics), TPM has a miserable 33% positive, but still beats Clone's current rating of 25%.

At this point Clones has 58%.

As a comparison, TPM as a 58% positive review rating. Compared to Star Wars at 97%, Empires at 97%, and Jedi at 79%.

If we look at the cream of the crop section (AKA the real film critics), TPM has a miserable 33% positive, but still beats Clone's current rating of 25%.

At this point Clones has 58%.

As a comparison, TPM as a 58% positive review rating. Compared to Star Wars at 97%, Empires at 97%, and Jedi at 79%.

If we look at the cream of the crop section (AKA the real film critics), TPM has a miserable 33% positive, but still beats Clone's current rating of 25%.

At this point Clones has 58%.

As a comparison, TPM as a 58% positive review rating. Compared to Star Wars at 97%, Empires at 97%, and Jedi at 79%.

If we look at the cream of the crop section (AKA the real film critics), TPM has a miserable 33% positive, but still beats Clone's current rating of 25%.

If you're looking for a somwehat comprehensive listing of reviews, check out this [rottentomatoes.com]. While the press seems divided almost 50:50 on the issue, those not liking the movie are the most vocal...

AotC got a C+, while Spider-Man got a B (different reviewer though).

AotC reviews have also been summarized at Studio Briefing (first headline under "Film"), although it mistakenly points out that Episodes IV-VI are the top-selling DVDs (instead of the top-REQUESTED DVDs) on Amazon.com, and listed at Rotten Tomatoes.

I saw The Amazing Spiderman back in the late 70's, with a friend, both in our early 20s then. We went to an early showing. The theatre was packed, but we were the only ones older than 16 years of age in the theatre! Spot the nerds!!

Rotten Tomato has Spiderman cleaning up good reviews.

Every month or two there's a "PC game reviews are all fixed and corrupt" story on Slashdot, and occasionally I see such stories other places as well. This one made me start thinking about other types of reviews, and whether they're subject to similar "corruption". The ones that come to mind quickest are movie reviews, of course.

One of my favorite sites is Rotten Tomatoes. Basically, they collect every movie review they can find about every movie that comes out, then rate each review on whether it is overall positive ("fresh") or overall negative ("rotten"). RT then gives the movie a rating representing the ratio of positive to negative reviews. So a movie that has 90% of the reviews marked as "fresh" gets a score of 90%. Movies that have a rating of 60% or higher are themselves declared "fresh", but 59% or below and they're "rotten". RT also takes a subset of the reviews for each movie, called the "Cream of the Crop," which represent reviews by "major" sources, like the LA Times, NY Times, Entertainment Weekly, CNN, USA Today, Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert), and so on, and calculates a rating for just those reviews. (The "other" reviews, which represent the bulk, tend to be from smaller, less well-known sources, and as such include people who are not necessarily career movie reviewers.) It's interesting to see the contrasts between the Overall rating and the Cream of the Crop rating.

I haven't done anything even remotely resembling a statistical analysis, but from my experience, the Overall ratings tend to be fairly well-distributed. I always see the claim that video game magazines tend to give better reviews because they fear that game companies won't advertise (or send them free games) if they don't give them good reviews (or at least if their reviews don't average up to "pretty good"), but since movie reviews tend to be in newspapers, AND since movie ads have the showtime listings attached to them, there's much less of a probability that "review well or we won't advertise" will happen.

As an example, there are 10 movies opening this week that have enough reviews for RT to give them an overall score (I believe that they don't rate a movie until they find 6 reviews for it). They are:

- Changing Lanes (75% Overall, 67% CotC)
- Frailty (82%, 100%)
- The Sweetest Thing (29%, 20%)
- New Best Friend (7%, 0% - ouch)
- Time Out (88%, 88%)
- The Cat's Meow (79%, 86%)
- Maryam (75%, 71%)
- The Piano Teacher (74%, 86%)
- Human Nature (29%, 29%)
- The Other Side of Heaven (23%, 0%)

Some movies won't have enough reviews to be statistically significant, but most movies will have 30-60 reviews attached to them by the time people stop reviewing the movie. (The numbers above may change as more reviews are found and added to their database.)

I find it a fairly useful site, actually, and RT's "meta-reviewers" do a good job -- I rarely find myself disagreeing with their opinion of the tone of a review (i.e. whether a review is overall negative or positive about a movie).

Anyway, I'm babbling, but back to the original topic... I wonder if there's any site like Rotten Tomatoes that does the same for video game reviews? I know of PC Game Review, except that it consists entirely of contributed, player-written reviews, and not "professional" reviews collected for analysis.

Go here .
May I note that this movie gets a 77% aproval from critics around the Net, which is unusually high. Then again, that's from profesional reviewers, not wanna-be geeks who think they know about everything because they get to write in Slashdot.

My conversion was when Jim Carrey won two Best Actor in a row in the Globes (including for The Truman Show but wasn't even nominated either time for the Oscars. Said everything I needed to know about them.

Course, I guess I'm gonna have to be a hypocrite this year.

100% on the TomatoMeter, and a big f-u from the oscars. Sigh...

• http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/08/movies/08COLL.ht ml
  
• http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/movies/57462_collate ral08q.shtml
  
• http://reuters.com/news_article.jhtml;jsessionid=L SAL0EGPXD1T0CRBAE0CFFAKEEATGIWD?type=entertainment news&StoryID=582870
  
• http://www.rottentomatoes.com/movie-1110242/
  
• http://www.joblo.com/collateraldamage.htm
  

More reviews (Not that many right now actually, more are added as more reviews are published)

Right now, my favorite's the one that says "It could well end up being the worst movie of 2002. It's that bad."

I'm still trying to figure out how anyone could have found the trailers interesting though...

It mentions Metropolis, which will not be released in the US until 25th of January, 2002. Quite new actually.

A review might help to introduce the movie. Pointers to better SF movies will be received with gratitude.

Anyone can guess as to why the twin towers are edited out of movies. Sad as it is, as of 9/11 NY has no twin towers. The movies would not be accurate if they did have them.

As for the Arnold movie, It's called "Collateral Damage". This clearly states it is to be released Feb. 08, 2002. How can you compare a ban on GTA3 in AU to the delayed release of a movie? It's not even on the same level.

"If you're looking for anything beyond flashy entertainment, Behind Enemy Lines feels out of whack from the start."
-- Stephanie Zacharek, SALON.COM

"The exhausting obsession with gizmos and gotchas only accentuates a baffling disinterest in the story's emotional crux."
-- Jessica Winter, VILLAGE VOICE

"The Bosnian War becomes a video game, Gene Hackman turns into a pseudo-John Wayne, and Owen Wilson and Vladimir Mashkov impersonate The Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote."
-- Michael Wilmington, CHICAGO TRIBUNE

"Pro forma stuff, so much so that you start to wonder why no fetching femme resistance fighter materializes to help the Americans on the ground."
-- Kenneth Turan, LOS ANGELES TIMES

"An implausible military technology adventure that takes about 10 minutes to get started, then climaxes for an hour-and-a-half."
-- Paul Tatara, CNN

as the top five reviews I have to wonder. Couple that with the fact that Film Threat (with whom I agree about 90% of the time) gave it one star, and the sleaziness factor from knowing they moved the release date up to cash in on the September 11th bombing and I think I will be taking this review with more than a grain of salt :)

...not *all* trailers spoil the entire plot for a movie. But some do. And in my experience, the ones that do that do so because they had to scrounge the entire film in order to find enough interesting, amazing, or funny bits to make a trailer. Once you've seen the trailer, you've seen all the bits worth watching. (Commercials for sitcoms work much the same way.)

Case in point: Disney threw in a trailer for their theatrical sequel to "Peter Pan," cleverly entitled "Return to Neverland." It involves Wendy's daughter and the entire Neverland cast of the original movie, and apparently some Wacky Adventures. Based on that (and, admittedly, my previous experience with non-Pixar Disney sequels), I now know everything I need to know about this movie. My wife and daughter can go see it themselves in February; I know for a fact I won't be missing anything.

If they don't provide an entire plot to you, then you're probably safe going to see it. There will be enough surprises to make it worth your $7.50. Otherwise, take a pass and wait for the Rotten Tomatoes rating to come in.

not a troll, but there are certainly better reviews out there. Check out salon for an honest review that goes beyond plot summary. As always, rotten tomatoes has a plethora of opinions. Remember, there's more than Katz out there (thank god)

Support independent films! This is where all the gems are. Low budget movies are generally always better, because they can focus on plot instead of pleasing the low attention spans of the MTV generation. Look at Rotten Tomatoes top films of 2001 (so far). All of them are independent films! This is where the great films are. I recently saw Hedwig and the Angry Inch in theatres, it was awesome!
All metropolitan cities have at least one theatre that runs these kinds of movies. They are just like any normal theatre, including jacked up prices on pop-corn and coke. In the Seattle area, you can go to the theatre in Broadway Market on Capitol Hill.

Hopefully FF:TSW will get most of it's money back when it comes to international and DVD markets, however I can't imagine this bodes well for the future of photorealistic movies. (or maybe it just doesn't bode well for the future of Square movies)

Oh yeah, Duchovny is off to a great start with Evolution.

--
Aaron J. Shaver
http://aaronshaver.com/

Jason

"First, his jurassic park III "review" was a cop-out"

No kidding! What the hell was that?? "Gee, I went to see Jurassic Park III, but much to my surprise when the movie started, those losers actually made it about DINOSAURS again, so I left without even giving it a fair chance."

For some real reviews of Jurassic Park III check out Rotten Tomatoes (No I am not affiliated with them) The reviews are about half positive, half negative.

"I was disappointed to see that every single review of [The Score] has trashed it."

Actually most critics are generally liking it it... check out Rotten Tomatoes which is kind of a meta-review site; they don't review anything themselves, they just keep track of dozens of REAL reviews (read: Not by Jon Katz).

At the time of this writing, The Score has a 71% approval rating, which is VERY high for that site. (For example, Tomb Raider has 15%, Pearl Harbor has 25%. The general consensus seems to be that the script is only average and somewhat predictable, but this is made up for in spades by the magnificent acting of De Niro, Norton, and Brando.

Personally I thought it had some familiar caper-plot elements, but was NOT a cliched, predictable plot. Spoiler warning: Norton's retarded janitor angle was original and brilliantly played, as was how De Niro broke the safe. And I'd like to meet someone who wasn't surprised (at least for a second) when Norton suddenly started lying and delaying in the middle of the heist in order to eventually betray De Niro.