The Case of the Missing Movie Reviews: LA Times and Rotten Tomatoes

Posted on November 6, 2017 at 10:29 pm

What happened to the missing movie reviews? The LA Times did not have a review for one of the biggest movies of the year, “Thor: Ragnarock.” And in the same week, moviegoers saw something unusual on Rotten Tomatoes when they searched for a review of “Bad Moms Christmas.” For a day after tickets were available and the movie was being shown, no reviews were on the site. What gives?

There are two very different answers. The LA Times was barred from covering “Thor: Ragnarock” because Disney, which produced the film and owns Marvel, did not like a story the paper did on its Anaheim theme park. This is an awful precedent and likely to produce more bad publicity for Disney than if they just left it alone.

As for Rotten Tomatoes, early speculation that there was some plot afoot to avoid bad reviews turned out to be wrong. The only entity attempting to maintain some leverage was Rotten Tomatoes itself, and its premiere of a new movie review web series. According to a Forbes investigation by Scott Mendelson:

Rotten Tomatoes debuted a new Facebook movie review show on Thursday night. And as part of that show, which features Jacqueline Coley and Segun Oduolowu sparring over new movies and TV shows for around seven minutes, Rotten Tomatoes will select one new movie or TV show and reveal that film or show’s Tomatometer score on the webcast itself. In this case, since the embargo for A Bad Moms Christmas was essentially 15 hours before the broadcast, they chose that newbie as the exclusive “unveiling” title. Maybe next week it’ll be Paramount/Viacom Inc.’s Daddy’s Home 2, which I imagine will also have an embargo pretty close to the Nov. 10 release date. Or maybe they will pick something with a long-lead embargo that doesn’t open for a bit. We can expect much hand-wringing if they select the obvious pick for Nov. 17 as the “keep away” title.

I spoke with my Rotten Tomatoes contacts, who assured me that this is not any kind of under-the-table deal with studios and that Rotten Tomatoes will not be holding back reviews and scores until a film’s or TV show’s opening day as a matter of course.

Another Bad Call from the MPAA

Posted on November 1, 2010 at 10:45 pm

The ultra-violent “Saw 3D” gets an R. The ultra-explicit and disgusting “Jackass 3D” gets an R. But how does “The King’s Speech” get an R? This is an acclaimed historical drama about the King of England (Colin Firth) who has to have speech therapy to help his stutter. As a vocal exercise, he has to say some bad words. And so it gets an R rating. The LA Times’ Patrick Goldstein has an excellent article about the arbitrariness of the MPAA’s rules and the outrageous results.

To call the decision crazy and unhinged would be to let the MPAA off too lightly. Its ratings decisions, which frown on almost any sort of sex, frontal nudity or bad language but have allowed increasing amounts of violence over the years, are horribly out of touch with mainstream America, where families everywhere are disturbed by the amount of violence freely portrayed in movies, video games and hip-hop music.

He quotes Tom Hooper, director of “The King’s Speech.”

“What I take away from that decision,” says Hooper, “is that violence and torture is OK, but bad language isn’t. I can’t think of a single film I’ve ever seen where the swear words had haunted me forever, the way a scene of violence or torture has, yet the ratings board only worries about the bad language.”

And he quotes me:

he ratings board judges violence on a far more amorphous and clearly subjective sense of overall tone. That discrepancy sets up the MPAA for all sorts of criticism, much of which has come from Nell Minow, a corporate governance expert whose must-read Movie Mom blog has frequently taken the MPAA to task for its inconsistencies.

“The ratings decision on ‘The King’s Speech’ is just another example of how completely out of touch and useless the guidance is that we get from the MPAA,” Minow told me Monday. “The one thing we want from them is a general sense of where a movie fits into our family values. But by putting ‘The King’s Speech’ in the same ratings category as ‘Kill Bill’ or ‘Scarface’ or ‘Saw,’ then it really makes a mockery of the whole system.”

Don’t Trust the Toy Lady

Posted on September 17, 2010 at 8:00 am

The LA Times reports that back to school reports on a number of national and local newscasts have included commentary from “a young mother and ‘toy expert’ named Elizabeth Werner,” described as “perky and positive-plus” in her demonstration of seven recommended toys for children. She talks about all the things the toys do in her segments on the air, but does not mention one fact parents might like to know — she is paid $11,000 for each toy she presents by the same company that is hoping you will buy them.
James Rainey points out that it is a violation of FCC rules for a news program to present a sponsored segment without disclosing that it is, in effect, an ad. It is also a violation of journalistic ethics which even chirpy morning shows are supposed to uphold.
Rainey, who by example demonstrates exactly what those standards are for, notes that

Werner is a lawyer who worked for a couple of toy companies before she went into the promotion business. She told me that the company that hires her to do the tours — New Jersey-based DWJ Television — scrupulously notifies TV stations that toy makers pay for the pitches. DWJ founder Dan Johnson, an ABC News veteran of decades gone by, said the same.

So I picked three stations and morning programs that Werner visited over the summer — Fox 2 in Detroit, Fox 5’s “Good Day Atlanta” and the independent KTVK’s “Good Morning Arizona” in Phoenix to see how they plugged the Werner segments. A spokesperson for the two Fox stations and the news director at the Phoenix outlet told me they had been told absolutely nothing about Werner being paid to tout products, which ranged from a Play-Doh press to a new Toy Story video game to the Paper Jamz electronic guitar.

He notes that the burden is not on the promoter who is being paid but on the news programs, who should always be suspicious of anyone who claims to be an expert, especially one who is touring the country without any visible means of support.
The burden, unfortunately, is on parents, who must also learn to be skeptical about “experts” who are just live-action versions of Marge the manicurist or Mr. Whipple the store manager.

The Case of the Missing Movie Reviews: LA Times and Rotten Tomatoes

Another Bad Call from the MPAA

Don’t Trust the Toy Lady

More Comfort Films: LA Times List