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LotR Takes Top Spot on IMDB
Dwarf_Sibling writes "Hard to believe but with over 11,000 votes tallied LoTR:FoTR has displaced "The Godfather" as the highest rated movie at IMDB. Over time I'd guess this will fall lower, but this is an amazing accomplishment for a fantasy movie."
I guess my point is that maybe this is why it's doing so well - even the people who aren't into fantasy like it because of the action and great effects. (And all the hype surrounding it.)
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suwain_2
Don't get me wrong, but I don't think that LOtR was any better than the godfather, or for that matter, better than any of the top ten movies on the IMDB's list. While it was great, and I was happy to see it twice this week, it just doesn't have what it takes to beat the godfather (for that matter, it doesn't beat the rest of the top ten, by and large).
I mean, yes, it was great. Great FX, great cast, great story. But better than Citizen Kane? no way. I mean, the movie it knocked out of the top ten was Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. In my mine, there's no contest. Strangelove wins every time.
Nothing finer than starting off monday morning burning some karma.
Brant
Argle. Bargle.
The problem is that there are lots of newbies who recently began voting on IMDB hence this "all new - all beautiful" effect this had on the votes.
;-)/VHS/Betamax... ).
Now, I'd be curious to see if it'll still be at the same place in several months whenever an even more over-hyped blockbuster will have taken place.
Don't take me wrong, I am not flaming whoever for this choice but I firmly consider that there should be a separate voting booth for the film which are less than 2 years old (IE: which are either still playing or not yet available on DVD/LD/DivX
Trolling using another account since 2005.
And no, seeing Casablanca once on your local PBS station does not qualify you as an expert on the history of moving pictures. The only way to become an authority is to view several thousands of movies whose release dates are balanced across the first 100 years of movie making. Only then can a reasonable judgement of what is really "the best" be offered.
NOTE: I've read the book about 15 times over the years, so I'm not exactly a casual LOTR fan, but nor am I a rabid "Gandalf is God" fan.
One of the very few negative reviews I've found expresses exactly my feelings about the movie.
Basically I thought the film was OK as big superproductions go, but I was disappointed that it doesn't add anything to the book. On the contrary, it seems to replace most of what's good with tired old Hollywood shticks: meaningful glances, silly special effects, poor character development, ugly sets (the Elves' residences are especially disappointing), and so on.
There's a very few things I liked: the Hobbiton sets, Bilbo and Gandalf smoking a pipe, the grief-stricken fellowship outside Moria, maybe a few other things. The rest seems like a big waste to me.
The most dramatic thing here is that Hype and litlle script kiddies ( i hope no one serious got into this it's rubish ). Have one more time ruined a good internet rating system. Next week Spice Girls 24 the return topped the IMDB for a third week !!! ... Ho my God!
.. gosh that was a good one, prefered the books, but who can compete with that ;). Seen it 3 times in 5 days for now. But not ready for the top of IMDB .. best film of all times .. no it don't have what it takes.
Not that i disliked the movie
This would seem to demonstrate that LoTR has satisfied its target audience, us geeks. It remains to be seen whether it will become a cultural juggernaut like Star Wars that appeals to all segments of the population.
It's worth remembering that newer films tend to achieve high ratings initially. By my count, 33 of the top 100 rated films at imdb were made in the last ten years. The database hasn't been around that long, and young people are more active on the net than older ones, so you're bound to see more votes for movies that have come out recently.
Lists like this are meaningless anyway. They only serve to stir up discussion and draw attention to good films that people may have forgotten.
And no, I haven't seen it yet, but I will.
Promote proofreading. Don't mod up sloppy posts.
I give all the films I see a rating out of 5 on my website and generally start mulling it over before the film has finished. I really wanted to give this film 5/5 but it never felt right, 4/5 seemed like a better fit.
Large parts of the film felt pretty flat, though technically accomplished and well performed. At several points I was thinking 'okay, let's just move on now'.
I guess that for me it was like a date where the girl is hot, you've been looking forward to it for ages but when you're sat in the restaurant you realise that the spark is missing. There's a few pregnant pauses in the conversation so you fill in the time looking at the eye candy ; )
So, very good film overall, perhaps even top 100 material but it does lack a certain something that would justify it's current IMDb position.
I've yet to see the film, but I intend to. However, I'm wondering how many people are going to see the film because LoTR is derigeur for the geek crowd? Even when I was a young lad, attending university in the mid-sevnties, the LoTR was required reading for anybody that wanted to fit in with those who spent more time at computer terminals than at their studies. I liked the books, but I didn't think they ranked as great literature.
But, did you know that for a large portion of the source code to Perl, after the usual copyright disclaimer, there is a quote from something by J. R. R. Tolkien?
Yes, there are people who DO read source code, and I'm one of them. It's a great source of education and inspiration if the code is well written and a wonderful source of amusement from code that is badly written.
You have got to be kidding. Firstly, how many supposedly excellent "mob" movies have there been? COUNTLESS. How many TV series "mob" shows have been praised and given accolades because of their authentic portrayal of the mob? Dozens.
Script:
Vinny (talking as if he has some gauze in his mouth):
"We need to wipe dat rat bastard out!" (eating spaghetti)
Tony: "And piss of Scarpose? You nuts? Getouttahere..."
:-)
Any filmmaker need only watch a couple of existing movies and television shows and they've got the knowledge they need to make a mob movie.
How many people vote for a film
... boy was I dissapointed - the words "extremely" and "boring" come to mind.
1) Because they think it's good
2) Someone else thinks its good, and they want to be seen in the same light.
I haven't seen 50% of the top 10, I have seen Godfather, Godfather 2, Citizen Kane, Star Wars, & LoTR.
But it gets me eevry time *why* is Citizen Kane considered an all time top 10? Have the people who voted for it actually seen it? I bought it because of the hype
Sorry for being a philistine, but it seem to me people vote for "old" films because they think they should, because they are supposed to be classics.
And if you reply to this also I want a synopsis that explains why Citizen Kane is good and why I am wrong, just so I can be shown the error of my ways.
try to make ends meet, you're a slave to money, then you die
While there have been some posts highlighting the fact that the IMDB rating is only representative of those individuals with web-access, I think this doesn't fully address the limits of the IMDB ratings and how in particular they may not accurately reflect this film.
Specifically, the IMDB ratings are the product of those individuals who care enough about a film to take the time to enter a rating. It is likely to contain significantly more strong positive or negative reactions and far fewer moderate reactions than other means of statistical analysis. This can produce skewed results.
Furthermore, to make use of the old 'geeks and dungeons & dragons/tolkienesque fantasy' stereotype, while it is highly doubtful that Hollywood would produce a film with such a small target audience, the IMDB is particularly biased towards this group. In my experience, there is some validity to the claim that computer 'geeks' have generally had a higher level of exposure to fantasy novels and have had more opportunities to form opinions based on this exposure. Tolkien, at least within the circles I frequent, has always been a favourite of computer professionals. While these are not the only people who will see the film, they are the group most likely to head home and make use of an online rating service to make their opinions known and to have the tools available to do so.
To summarize my own rather rambling post, I think there is some justification for the belief that those people who are both willing and able to use the IMDB rating system may be bias through their own background and interests to grant this movie an abnormally high rating.
Before I conclude, however, I would like to say that I did enjoy the film a great deal and would not hesitate to say that it is one of the better films released in recent years, though not the best ever.
"Be proud to be a fighter" - Martial Arts Adage
People who are seeing LoTR now will probably carry it with them as the "best film" like baggage many years from now. Personally I think the Star Wars series is tripe, but obviously at the time it hit people the right way so they carry it with them (and convert others to see what they see) and that's the nature of things like that. The Godfather is an okay series, but it really isn't _that_ great, but again to people for whom it was great at the time they carry it with them. Every year a local radio station does a "top 100 songs of all time", and of course like 50% of the songs are this year's songs, but almost every year the "top" song is "Stairway to Heaven". Give me a break. That's the "in my era music was better" influence.
You have got to be kidding. Firstly, how many supposedly excellent "fantasy" movies have there been? COUNTLESS. How many TV series "fantasy" shows have been praised and given accolades because of their authentic portrayal of their original books? Dozens.
Actually that's entirely wrong: Fantasty movies are significantly harder to turn into a credible film. The majority of fantasy adaptations were brutally panned.
That's a double-edged sword though: Often older movies are rated higher than they should be either by people for whom it was "their" generation's movie (see Star Wars for a great example of this), or by kids looking to be different so they reach into the past for something to respect. I know more people who will give accolades to anything older for no reason than I know people who discount older creations because of their age.
Whether this was the best movie ever or not, I think that there is no competition for it in the fantasy genre. The only movies that have a prayer of competing are:
Dragonslayer (reigning champ finally unseated)
The Dark Crystal (very cool, but ulitmately just puppets)
Excalibur (honorable mention)
Willow (not enough cool monsters)
Conan the Barbarian (ah-nuld)
Beastmaster (kitschy)
Clash of the Titans (uber-kitschy, outdated special effects)
Am I missing any? I can't think of any other half-decent fantasy movies that are even playing the same game here.
Bryguy
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
This gives great credit to anybody - adapting a work of such linguistic depth and complexity, with so many characters and so much plot, even into a 9 hour trilogy of movies is not easy, and though we don't all agree with all the storyline cuts and modifications, these people deserve the money they are making from the film for such a good job done.
However, while you are reading, let me give my two cents of things I didn't like, cinematically and directorially about this movie: the atrocious use of music in gaudy fashion, trying to push audience emotions around to make up for mediocre acting in some scenes. It was just overdone - music is fine and necessary, but in a good movie you should barely notice it, unless it's really appropriate in a scene. In LoTR:FoTR I noticed it on several occasions, and in a bad way and it made my cheese-factor detector kick into high gear. The other thing that greatly diminished the experience for me was the overly sappy filming of the scenes at the end of the movie. Elijah Wood is not a great, emotive actor. Long face shots of him with tears flowing trying to look like he is distraught are just not engaging in cinematic form. I saw the audience squirming in their seats in the last 3-4 minutes of the movie last night (the second time I was seeing the movie by the way). While you can't change the division of the movie into three parts and keep to the book, you have to do the best you can to at least make the ending _feel_ more engaging.
I have not read the books thus the movie was just a bunch of sfx cut together, woven in with some *sniff sniff* scenes and some panoramic view shots.
Did you miss the history of the Ring, Isildur, Gollum, and Bilbo in the beginning? Did you miss Gandalf's quest to uncover the truth of Bilbo's ring? The head of Gandalf's order switching sides? The choice of Arwen? The burden of Aragorn? The temptation of Galadriel? The breaking of the fellowship? My wife has only read The Hobbit, and she thought the movie was a great story. One of the things about having read the book - it allows for lazy movie watching. Not having read the book... maybe you just need to see it again.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
That is why sample size is important.
81 people voting (pardon me, only quoting) "Gay Niggers from Outer Space" up to 8.5 is not the same thing as 13,000 people voting FOTR up to 9.2.
I would expect that number to go back down as the people who didn't particularly care for it get their lazy butts around to making their preferences known. The people who cared already cast their votes.
There's a minimum number of votes required to get in the top 250. They have a formula where even after that a movie still is penalized for having fewer votes (as more people vote, the ranking of the movie approaches the average of their votes - it is otherwise drawn towards the average score of ALL movies (which is still like 6.9, showing IMO a major flaw with online voting))
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
Nobody who voted at IMDB ranked the movies. Nobody went to a page and filled out a form that said, LotR is better than The Godfather. People voted on a scale of 1-10 based on how good they thought that this particular fantasy-epic was. And they thought that it was better than any fantasy-epic movie that they could have imagined.
The fact that it has become the "#1 movie of all time" according to IMDB is not the fault of either the viewers or the voters. It is the fault of the IMDB for comparing the voted ratings of different types of movies.
It makes no sense to compare the user ratings of older movies with the user ratings of newer ones. After all, IMDB was not around when the classics were released and first appreciated. Nobody flocked to IMDB to fill in "10/10" and click Submit. The core IMDB users have probably voted for it, but people such as you and me have probably never thought to vote on something like Dr. Strangelove. And of course, when IMDB compares ratings between movie genres, we get into an obvious comparing-apples-and-oranges scenario.
So why should we put any stock into the Top Ten movies as selected by IMDB ratings? I think that we shouldn't. The IMDB is a wonderful tool to tell us how much we might like a particular movie, based on the people who have seen it and thought that they should vote for it. But it can not fairly tell us how well one movie compares to another, and it should not try to.
As I said earlier, I really think there was an excellent reason - it shows the very simple gold ring to be a violent, powerful insturment of war. The focus on the ring as Sauron's source of power is what occurs during that scene. It's not just "power", but the power to wage a massive war.
Tolkien was an excellent author, focusing on some things, and glossing over others. Someone said that one of the battle scenes in the movie was 500 words in the book. Well, you can't just *say* there was a battle on screen... if you skimp, it looks like a minor tussle or scrape. So the battles got drawn out. Other things he went into great detail about, spending page after page on glorious details. Those visual details, by and large, were followed to the letter in the movie, but they are in the background or fleeting. The clasp to the cloaks, Bags End covered in kickknacks (I can't remember the Hobbit word for them off the top of my head, but there is a long description of how they are passed back and forth), and a myriad of other details are just set design in the movie. So to a certain extent, the focus shifts... but unlike 99% of book to movie jumps, the *same* details are there... the sign on the gate during the party preperation, the colors of signs and doors, even every drawing that Tolkein did was followed perfectly (the door to Moria, for instance).
But some of the details (like exactly *how* the ring was cut off the hand of Sauron) are missing (okay, at least I don't remember the exact lines, and I'm not gonna look it up right now). I always pictured it as it being cut from his corpse, but that may very well be wrong according to the book - but the three of us (you, myself and Jackson) pictured it three different ways because there *are* many parts of the book that are vague... or at least too vague to hand to a set designer and actors and expect a coherent result.
But the details that were there were left in, and the sweeping changes were (IMO) kept to a necessary minimum. That's a good thing.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
the sample size is plenty strong, but it is only a sample of the people who have voted for lotr on imdb. if this poll were conducted by calling (mostly random, they have phones though) people and asking them to rate 10 movies you would only need a sample size of about 800 for pretty dead on accuracy. if your sample group isn't varied enough it doesn't matter how large your sample size is.
Frodo offered The Ring to Galadriel because it was to heavy a burden for a little hobbit, who never did any stupid adventure-stuff. He saw what it did to Bilbo, and how Gandalf died for it, and after all, Galadriel is a wise elf-queen, surely she can handle it much better than he does and Frodo could go home with Sam and have his 9 meals a day in peace. Saving the world is not for everybody.