Footloose dance Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert also sped

Footloose dance Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert also sped footloose dance of a reductive form of criticism with their introduction of the thumbs up/thumbs down reviewing system on their television show, which debuted in the 1980s. Ebert himself is no fan of the star system. I dont know where the stars come from, but theyre absurd, he says. Often, people will cite my stars who obviously have not read my review. In the past, he has called his own thumbs up/thumbs down system wacky but acknowledged it answered the basic question many review readers ask. The New York Times, like The Wall Street Journal, doesnt assign stars. We dont seek to reduce our arguments about a particular piece of art to a number, or letter grade, or golden spatulas, or whatever, says Sam Sifton, the Times culture editor. These are numbers that arent based on any rational or countable thing. However, restaurant reviews in the paper have long included rankings from poor to four stars. Sifton, the former dining editor, calls those the exception that proves the rule here. Not all critics loathe the stars. Joshua Rothkopf, senior film writer at Time Out New York, hands out a maximum of six stars which unintentionally enables studios to label his middling recommendations as four-star reviews in ads. Hes heard from readers who say they are drawn in to reviews by the star rating. We were all a little worried about it, but we made the system work, Mr. Rothkopf says. Critics are also movie fans, and when theyre off duty, some look to the stars as a spoiler-free signifier of a films worthiness. I prefer that critics use some sort of scale, personally, because I dont want to know much about a movie before seeing it, says Mike DAngelo, a film critic for Las Vegas Weekly. No one, though, likes choosing a number for the vast, mediocre middle of cinema. Nick Schager, film critic for the online Slant Magazine, puzzled over how to rate The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Thats a film where I wanted to be clear that I thought the film was worthy of praise, and yet I didnt want to diminish my reservations about quite a few aspects of it, Mr. Schager says. He ended up giving it three stars out of four, but could have given it two and a half stars a rating that doesnt tell you anything, except I felt of two minds about it. Such reductions are distilled even more in the numerical scores on Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes. Metacritic follows the Entertainment Weekly model of averaging various critics scores assigning scores when critics dont. Their employees frequently get it totally wrong, says Mr. DAngelo of Las Vegas Weekly. One critics pan of Pearl Harbor originally was ranked 40 out of 100, until he contacted the site to say it was more like a Marc Doyle, co-founder and senior product manager of Metacritic, which is now owned by CBS, says the sites employees read reviews carefully, will change scores if they are protested by reviewers, and will reconsider them if readers object. Its just a tool, like any other tool, he says of the site. Rotten Tomatoes reports the percentage of critics who footloose dance the movie as expressed either by their ratings or their words. A movie that pleases everyone but thrills no one thus can beat out a polarizing masterpiece. Sometimes, the films that are most hated are the most original, says Phillip Lopate, a writer and film critic. The Wrestler, for instance, was recommended by 98% of critics tracked by the site, the seventh highest Tomatometer of the year, but scored an 81 on Metacritic, which didnt even crack the sites Top 20 list. It just means that the overwhelming majority of critics at least liked the movie; it doesnt tell you if they loved it or not, says Scott Tobias, film editor for the Onions Club.