MetaMania

I've written in the past about "meta" entertainment sites that compile criticism about music, movies, and TV, providing a more statistically-sound way to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to planning one's consumption of the best films, records, and shows out there. After all, we're all getting older, and we don't have the time we used to have to fritter away just watching shows and buying discs willy-nilly because they kinda looked cool.

My first love in this department was allmusic, which is now called "allmusic by Rovi" because every goddamned thing in the modern age has to have some sponsor or corporation or other thing behind it. Alright, that was a bit of an old man rant, but allmusic seemed just fine before "Rovi" popped in (though I love the latest redesign of the site).

Allmusic doesn't compile criticism the way a Metacritic does, as it's still basically one review, but allmusic has terrific editorial supervision and has an uncanny knack for slotting things in properly. Go ahead, visit the site, check out a band you like, and I bet they'll have the ratings for their discography arranged the same way you would. They probably (not always, but usually) picked your favorite as the "AMG Album Pick." It's really a useful way to get started with a group you think you might have some interest. It's very professionally done and accessible too - this isn't, say, Pitchfork with its often off-the-wall ratings and style trying to out-hipster everyone. For the record, I have an overall rating of my collection of 4.27 - allmusic has me at 4.33

If you're interested in going a step further, I recommend Acclaimed Music, which has done a remarkable job compiling and comparing criticism across eras. If you're interested where your favorite band or record fits in the canon, this is your spot.

Metacritic does a nice job too, but I have to say that their music ratings are typically not that reliable for a record-buyer. Music criticism tends to be all over the place, and by averaging reviews from across the rockosphere, they generally end up with less of a consensus and more of a flattened-out score. It seems like everything gets somewhere between 60 and 80, which isn't always terribly useful as a single-number metric. It does offer a lot of value in that it links to the reviews from which it draws so the user can get individual perspectives.

The current king of aggregated criticism is, of course, the fantastic Rotten Tomatoes. I'm sure that, if you're here, you've dropped by RT once or twice, but if you haven't, stop in and open your eyes. The concept is relatively simple: the site collects critic (and fan) reviews, marks them as either "fresh" or "rotten," and assigns the movie a score from 0-100. It's an endlessly fascinating site to browse through, to see how your favorite movies stack up, but its chief value lies as a screen for what's worth seeing and what isn't.

And trust me, Rotten Tomatoes is a remarkably accurate tool for that. It's particularly strong at the upper and lower ends - a movie that tops 90% is virtually guaranteed to be excellent, and a flick that can't crack 40% almost certainly sucks. It's so effective, in fact, that Nick recently made an excellent point that, thanks to RT, "I never see a bad movie." And it's true - I'm virtually never disappointed in the theatre anymore, simply because of how easy it now is to identify the best movies. (Metacritic offers a similar service, but I find that its system tends to flatten the scores a bit, as it does for music.)

That doesn't mean that I don't still apply my own judgment with what to see. I just like to run it by RT first to make sure I haven't misjudged. I don't want to see The Sessions, and I'm not going to check it out just because it scored a 93 - there are enough movies out there that appeal to me and have high scores that I can still happily apply the filter of my own preferences. That having been said, I was very intrigued by the previews from Argo and was happy to verify that with Rotten Tomatoes' 96% blessing. (It was outstanding).

It seems like an unmitigated good, having all this expert opinion at your hands and cleanly sorted, but there is one minor drawback, which is that it's easy for one to have one's expectations set for him or her ahead of time. There's something to be said for discovering something great, for forming an opinion without knowing what the "right" opinion is, and that's the price we pay for going into something "knowing" that it's going to be good. Admittedly, it's a small price, but it's still something. This is even more complicated with TV, because (a point Nick also made), we're currently in something of a Golden Age of television, but no one has time to watch everything, so we pick and choose our shows as best we can and enter these deep relationships with them. Try having a normal conversation with someone who's really into Mad Men or Breaking Bad - you'll see everyone's inner fanboy come out when they talk about their favorite programs. I obviously do that too - that's about half of TFB's content. But the wealth of available perspective, much of it spread by the internet, puts a lot of pressure on the viewer to really get into whatever he or she chooses.

The other minor quibble with a Rotten Tomatoes is a minor one, but worth noting: sometimes it's fun to watch bad movies. I mean, if I always watched highly-rated movies, I might never have seen The Next Karate Kid, Speed 2, or Rocky V. OK, fine, those all really suck. But I might not have seen gloriously goofy classics like Jingle All the Way, Ace Ventura, or Demon Knight, all of which are very low-rated, not very good, and absolutely delightful to watch.

I suppose aggregated criticism is a double-edged sword, though the attacking edge of the blade is considerably sharper. Was that a good metaphor, or a stupid one? I mean that sites like Rotten Tomatoes are predominantly good, with only slight drawbacks. And hey, if you check out a movie or a band every once in a while just because it seems cool, and damn the critics, there's nothing wrong with that either.