Good review, bad review
| Monday, June 23rd, 2008 | --Sean |
Whenever I'm scanning through movie reviews, I usually find that it helps to read through the outliers. If one critic tears a movie a new one, what was his main beef? Were there any positives grudgingly admitted? And how does that compare to this other review that waxes poetic about the movie's instant classic status? Are any of the perceived flaws from the first review explained away? It's a nice way to end up with a fairly unbiased picture of what you might actually get out of your hard-earned $10.
The Summer Movie Guide presents the same idea on its review pages (for example, Get Smart) by calling out some of the best reviews both from people who hated and people who loved a movie. It takes it one step beyond just plucking out the Highest and Lowest grades that it can find by apparently mashing those concepts together with the Most Helpful reviews to make sure that your contrasting viewpoints are worthwhile. It's still up to you to decide which thumb direction is right for you, but at least you have easy access to a good variety of opinion.
EDIT: Except, of course, now I can't find a link to the cool reviews page from the actual movie page within the Summer Movie Guide. :P It's very possible that these are manually generated one-off pages for all of the big name movies so that we can link to a review page from the Yahoo! home page, which makes them slightly less cool. But, still, it's a neat idea.
Other examples: The Incredible Hulk, Kung Fu Panda, Sex and the City. You can pretty reliably come up with the URL based on the movie title; I just can't figure out why this wouldn't be linked to from every page if it's actually programmatically generated.