Hacker Cinema
Paddington 2
2017 · Film · 104 min
Part of Paddington Collection
Directed by Paul King
Paddington, now happily settled with the Browns, picks up a series of odd jobs to buy the perfect present for his Aunt Lucy, but it is stolen.
2 positive1 negative2 neutralfrom 5 commenters
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5 comments on Hacker News
>Paddington 2
After Chat recommended this as "on par with Shawshank," I watched this last week.
What did I just watch? Why would I recommend this movie to anybody?
"Paddington 2" is one of the best movies ever made, it is up there with the "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari".
I think this is mostly just a misunderstanding of what the RT score means. The scoring falls apart at the edges because its a measure of recommendability*, not a precision measure of quality.
Exceptionally good movies (which Paddington 2 is btw) will trend heavily toward 100% and any drop from 100% are from outlier reviewers. Citizen Kane has 1/131 negative reviews and Paddington 2 has 2/253 negative reviews.
If you want a rating of quality you can always just click on the score and see that paddington 2 has an 8.7 aggregate compared to Citizen Kane's 9.9.
* what percent of viewers will not regret watching the movie. That makes this a combination metric of quality and variance. A low variance 7/10 will beat a high variance 8/10 in RT score
For me, it was after they invited a new batch of reviewers who ended up bumping Citizen Kane from RT's "best movie all time" down a bunch of slots to such an extent that it was outranked by Paddington 2
I still use the ratings (because they're built into Plex) but mostly as a novelty, and sometimes as a puzzlement. Increasingly, you see scores like 5% tomato, 95% audience (or vice versa!) that I'm sure mean _something_ but rarely anything to me.
RT ratings are weird because they don't reflect how much critics liked a movie, only whether they rated it "positive" or "negative". The movie with the highest rating ever is Paddington 2 - not because any reviewers thought it was the best movie ever, but because nobody hated it. It ranks higher than Citizen Kane, despite many reviewers literally calling that the best movie ever - but at least one reviewer didn't like it. So RT ratings favors inoffensive and uncontroversial movies appealing to the largest possible demographics.
And shows are often reviewed after only a few episodes. Typically two to four episodes are released to reviewers before the premiere, and this is what the review is based on.
So a high rating means most reviewers reacted positively to the first few episodes.