by Chas Danner
Landon Palmer laments Rotten Tomatoes' prominence in the world of film criticism. In light of a recent flare up of vitriolic comments concerning The Dark Knight Rises, he worries the site promotes the same kind of thinking that infects American politics:
By reducing any discussion of a film’s worth and value into the categories of “Fresh” and “Rotten,” it constructs a simplistic binary that asks its audience to define themselves as part of one of two fields. It’s like juxtaposing a Keith Olbermann quote next to an Ann Coulter quote, both out of context, and letting their readership have at it. Except the writers quoted on Rotten Tomatoes largely aren’t film criticism’s equivalent to pundits. They’ve written paragraphs discussing a film’s merits, and their opinion on a film may not fall squarely into a ridiculous fresh/rotten binary. Thus, arbitrary distinctions are put in place to retain the false binary despite its contradictions. If a writer assigns films letter grades, for instance, a B- will place the review in the “fresh” category, while a C+ designates it“rotten.” Both are rather middling grades, ones that acknowledge that a film possesses positives and negatives. But the fact that Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t even bother to create a third category to identify films that are received straight down-the-middle (“eat soon”?) signifies a most unthinking approach the film criticism.
The Dish 