Hacker Cinema
Knock Down the House
2019 · Film · documentary · 86 min
Directed by Rachel Lears
In 2018, a young bartender in the Bronx, a coal miner’s daughter in West Virginia, a grieving mother in Nevada and a registered nurse in Missouri join a movement of insurgent candidates challenging powerful incumbents in Congress. Without political experience or corporate money, these four women are attempting to do what many consider impossible.
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4 comments on Hacker News
I can understand this for Nvalny given I think CNN help with the production...but Knock Down the House was an indie producer and just happened to choose AOC as one of four candidates she was covering. When it was filmed I don't think the producer would anticipate her explosive popularity after the election so its hard to concede that it was a puff piece. The premise of the film was the massive wave of females deciding to run for office in 2018 after Trump's win in 2016. There was the collective awakening that despite females making up 50% of the population they in no way had anywhere near the representation that they should have. Due to AOC's popularity the film took on a new meaning as a historical record of her campaign.
If you apply your logic to all political documentaries then you're just going to end up not watching anything.
On the one hand Its fun to watch movies alone on a big screen. My area of NJ apparently could care less about movies like Knock Down The House(Biography of AOC and other house candidates), Navalny (Movie about the murdered politician opposing Putin), The Imitation Machine: Movie about Alan Turing or Last Night in Soho (A wonderful Edgar Wright thriller)
On the other hand, I feel sad that no one in my region seems to care enough about these topics. Instead the latest superhero movie is next door packed to the brim and is so loud it rattles the walls to the room playing my quiet documentary with only me sitting inside watching it. :/
Its absolutely hopeless. The rankings are gamed because Rotten Tomato still carries some semblance of credibility (although in this post Trump winning era, sources of credibility can get eroded more quickly)
It does not get clearer than when a political movie comes out. 2018 was an interesting year, two movies came out that really allowed me to get a clearer picture of what was going on: "Knock Down The House" and "Death of a Nation".
When "Knock Down The House" (documentary featuring the leftwing US politician AOC) came out, I got interested in scraping the data off of Rotten Tomatoes and studying it.
Before making any moves, I first watched the movie for myself in a theater (and also got to see a live Q&A with the director to understand her thought process)
The movie had at the time a 100% rating from critics and ~80% from viewers. After watching it, I would concur with the viewer ranking but felt that the critic ranking was unusually high. Seriously? 100%? (It has now gone down to 99% but still). In regards to the viewer ranking I conceded that I was probably biased which is why I also ran this experiment on Death of a Nation (also saw in theaters but to a room with only one other moviegoer).
Knock Down the House eventually got featured on Tucker Carlson like a year after release(I think it coincided with Netflix making it free on youtube). I watched in realtime how the movie critic score kept going down and down and down to where it is now (11%). Dumping the scraped data, I ran a simple analysis and discovered a large portion of the people ranked it with no comments, or simplistic things like how stupid AOC is and many had had no other ratings other than this movie or the only other film is the one featuring Illhan Omar (another politician hated by the right).
For Death of a nation, the scores were flipped. A whopping 0% in the critic score(12 reviews) while the user score stood at a respectable 87% (again at the time when I did my scraping yet again we saw tons of 1 movie reviewers). Yeah the movie royally sucked and was painful to watch but 0%? That was a bit fishy. This essentially killed any credibility that I had in Rotten Tomatoes.
I started to trust places like /r/movies and /r/AMCsAList only to get burned by that as well when movies recommended in the comments would end up being terrible and then when I went back to criticize the films, I would get criticized and downvoted to non visible status. It was not a definite signal but gave me the feeling that there is a lot of astroturfing going on there as well.
Furthermore, these movies promoted on Reddit would typically be in 3/5 range on Rotten tomatoes which further made me think there is no real way to get a real signal if a film is likely to be good or not.
What I started to do was not a great metric but has helped cut down on the cruft: Follow specific actors/directors I really liked and ones that I felt were in it to make good films. As an example, actresses like Mary Elizabeth Winstead have turned down big roles in favor of indie films or other interesting scripts to the detriment of her career but the films have been more enjoyable and interesting. In each film I also find other actors to follow and if I start to see more studio promotion of a specific person (for example Anya Taylor Joy after The Queens Gambit) I start to caution away and sometimes just drop that actor from the list. In her case I stuck to films she worked with other people that I determined I liked(like Edgar Wright) before feeling like there is too much promotion going on and just dropping her from the list. Other than this, I fill out my list with franchises I like or subjects that I always give a chance to (science/space, etc.).
I know I am leaving out a lot of potential good films but the noise has become unbearable to the point where I don't want to waste my time anymore.
A few years later Rotten Tomatoes introduced "Verified Reviews". I thought this will be amazing as now it will only include people with skin in the game (ie. verified to have paid for a ticket)...except now this has been completely hijacked as well.
Going back to the example of political films now what the right wing does is they have a billionaire finance a film through some intermediary group then free tickets to the movie are given out at conservative events. People books seats to the movie, promote it on social media, post a "Verified Review" and then often don't show up to the screening. I have discovered sold out screenings to some of these movies but when I went to the theater to see some other film, i'd often peek into the screening of these films only to find they are almost empty. The movie plays regardless of if someone shows up or not. Furthermore some of these films actually have a code that they show at the end of the film to gift a free ticket to a friend so the box office numbers of these films are inflated and its all a bunch of hogwash.
Like I said its hopeless. In a way we saw the rise of this new fake world play out in Hollywood before it took over social media and the rest of the internet now. How will it end? People trusting only what they already know they like or from trusted friends and everything else is ignored.
This article has got me thinking of an interesting idea though: What if we go and determine which of the critics are known to provide reviews that reflect our tastes (maybe by reading reviews of movies that we enjoyed), then pull only those review data and compute a new Tomato score based only on those critics? We could toss the Rotten Tomatoes tomato meter in the trash and get back to a legitimate review that you could use as a positive signal again.
>The ultimate solution is, sadly, even more of a filter bubble: If I could click a button and have every like/dislike by pernicious players (in my opinion) completely removed from any measure shown to me, I would respect online ratings better. And maybe, eventually, given that the majority of people are rational and have better things to do, the bores might get bored of trying to manipulate every measure.
We have this problem with movie reviews as well. I lost all faith in Rotten Tomatoes when I saw Knock Down the House's viewer ranking go from the upper 80s to single digits over the course of two years. As more and more people found out that AOC was a star in the film, the score went down. It is a great film in my opinion. I wrote a script to scrape the reviews and provide details about the reviewers. So many 1 star reviews were new accounts that had just rated this film + maybe the Ilhan Omar film. Furthermore most of them don't even explain why they rated it that way(we all probably know why). This led me to think, what else is being manipulated? Are studios just buying up good reviews?
Recently they have introduced "Verified Reviews". This attempts to link your Rotten Tomatoes account with the movie theater so you can get a Verified Review checkmark if they have confirmed that you actually bought a ticket to the movie. Users can then filter on Verified reviews. This is a good first step and will probably help to curb abuse.