The Good, the Bad and The Fruity (rottentomatoes.com)

Member Name: marandina

Product:	rottentomatoes.com
Date:	28/12/06 (151 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Loads to see and do

Disadvantages: US bias as it's US based

***Intro***
We all love movies, don’t we? Well OK, most of us do and reading reviews is all just part of the fun. I read a lot of movie reviews. From Jonathan Ross in The Sun to Cosmo Landesman in The Sunday Times, reading what the critics say can be just as much a part of the movie going experience as actually taking a hike to the multiplex itself. The Internet is great for reviews. Of course, there are the good people of sites like Dooyoo, Ciao and even epinions that will carry a decent standard and the Internet Movie Database is a veritable cornucopia of movie data that will keep even the most intense of movie anoraks at bay for a few hours. One of my favourite resources for reviews is at the wonderfully named rottentomatoes.com. The site was created by Senh Duong in 1998 and has grown to the point where over 5.4 million users visit every month. Considered to be relatively independent, reliable and comprehensive, RT has more than 127,000 titles and 644,000 review links in its ever-growing database.

***The Site***
The main page is reasonably quick to load although it does carry a lot of content and is slightly slower than some. In an unattractive green and red and livery, rottentomatoes.com is a visual assault on the eyes, further compounded by the mass of articles and links that take a little unravelling. With a search facility along the top together with a sitemap link and a help function denoted by a “?” then navigation is good and the visitor can roam around the site and find stuff which always helps. You can register for free which opens up a whole new can of worms including: Personal Journal Facility/Group Journal/Forums/Sweepstakes & Promotions and Newsletter. Some of these are reasonably obvious at to what they do but the first two i.e. Personal Journal and Group Journal involve publishing your own views on movies and celebrities via a personal journal/weblog with the option to customise colors, layout, friend's list, bookmarks etc in what amounts to your own webpage. The Group Journal option involves creating and moderating a Group Journal and inviting others to build an online community. Registration is simple requiring basic details including name/address/date of birth/gender and e-mail address. The site does carry adverts in the guise of Google sponsored links for the main part although these aren’t that intrusive compared to other sites.

***What’s Good***
The movies section is comprehensive. With virtually every movie you can imagine covered at some point, you can call up reviews on the most obscure of movies although you will still find some with only a scant number of reviews and it is possible to find some with none at all (I did when I tried to find out a bit more about "Rawhead Rex" a while back). For the latest movies, everything you could want will be in one place including a brief overview, clips and trailers and links to recent reviews. You’ll also find a cast list, still photos and the stats for the movie’s box office taking amongst other data that will satisfy the most voracious of film buffs craving the need for information.

The Multimedia section carries a very browsable part of the site including featured trailers and clips. With an a-z link where you can chose the movie you want, once chosen the user can call up either a hi or lo-resolution streaming clip of the movie as well as having the option to download to their pc if they want. Whilst this isn’t that remarkable in terms of what else is out there in Internet land, it is well organized on the RT site and easy to use. Latest additions include clips of “Black Christmas” and “Night at the Museum” and the quality is spot on being played back using the site’s own steaming media.

The News features are also very readable featuring the latest stories to break in the movie media world. Examples of the kind of stories you’ll find at the moment include a piece about the director Spike Lee directing a James Brown biopic (talk about not hanging around just a few days after his death!), Guillermo Del Toro fighting for the rights to “Hellboy 2” and director Rob Zombie’s progress in the re-make of the 1978 horror classic “Halloween”.

It is possible to filter for the best (and worst) movies using some of the site tools on the right hand side of the main portal. “Certified Fresh” means that where a film has 40 reviews, 5 of which are from Cream of the Crop critics, and has a Tomatometer (see below for explanation) of 75% or higher, it is Certified Fresh by Rotten Tomatoes. It stays "Certified Fresh" unless the film falls below 60%. "TomatoPicker” allows the user to browse the database of over 100,000 movie titles and filter the results by Tomatometer, genre, subgenre, mpaa rating (age guide), decade, year, and/or keywords. "Top Movies" is a section devoted to the best reviewed movies of Rotten Tomatoes and the winners from various Awards categories, such as the Oscars and Golden Globes.

***Other Stuff***
There is a tickets and show time facility on the main portal although this is restricted to US cinemas so of little use to us in the UK unless you happen to be on holiday in the States at the time. There is an interesting indictor to the side of the current movies listed in this section that shows how much the film has grossed in dollars so far which is some indication of its success with an even more interesting list of forthcoming movies below the current crop for those wanting to know what’s due at the Box Office next.

There is an online shop (as I’m sure you’d expect from a US site!) which sells DVDs and VHS/movie posters/DVD players/soundtracks and video games. If you did want to buy something then you’d have to take care being based in the UK as DVDs and DVD players can be incompatible with UK playing standards so it’s well worth making sure that you will actually be able to use your merchandise in this country.

***My Experience***
I’ve been using Rotten Tomatoes for a while now. What I haven’t used it for is the Personal Journal cum weblog or any of the other communal aspects of the site. The fact is; I’m happy with the connections that I have already without creating yet more but I’m sure that the folks that engage in this side of the site enjoy it. I don’t really use the games links either although the reviews of the numerous X-Box, PS2/3 and now Nintendo Wii probably make addictive reading for those involved in the gaming community, I’m sure. What I do like is reading the views of the American Press and am often surprised at the diverse opinions a movie can spark. Some reviews can be fairly brief whilst others are longer and they often include localized American vernacular but that just adds to the spice of the review for me and reading what the critic from the Boston Globe thought is quite an exotic experience. The Critics Tomatometer is quite handy too as it gauges a movie are overall rating. In the spirit of the site, the higher the score out of 100, the better quality the movie and the fresher the tomato if you see what I mean and a recent example is “Night at the Museum” which scores just 49%.

***Summary***
Rotten Tomatoes is a free facility with a comprehensive archive of movies and games alike. There are so many facets to the site that it’s been impossible to cover every one here but if you like your movies then check it out and, chances are, you’ll become a regular visitor like me!

Thanks for the read

Mara

Summary: Overview of rottentomatoes.com