{ "id": "1997-september-paper-rates-critics", "slug": "1997-september-paper-rates-critics", "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1997-september-paper-rates-critics.html", "year": 1997, "month": "September", "monthNum": 9, "headline": "Paper rates critics", "kicker": "Hooray for CAR", "author_name": "Heather Newman", "author_title": "Reporter", "affiliation": "Detroit Free Press", "summary": "The Detroit Free Press conducted a computer-assisted analysis of movie reviews from seven major newspapers, tracking ratings for over 200 films from January to March 1996 to compare critical opinions with box office performance and Academy Awards. The study found that critics rarely agreed with each other or with the public, with only eight movies receiving unanimous ratings across all reviewers.", "keywords": [ "analysis", "critics", "movies" ], "topics": [ "Investigative Methods", "Business & Economy" ], "technologies": [ "Paradox", "Nexis" ], "full_text": "Readers love movie critics, and movie reviews are one of the most- read parts of the paper. That's what led us to try a com- puter-assisted analysis of film re- views for the Detroit Free Press. Knight-Ridder/Tribune Graph- ics puts together a weekly summary of starred reviews of current mov- ies. We typed in their record of the number of stars given to each film by reviewers from nine newspapers into a Paradox database, starting with the ratings given in January 1996 and ending the last week of March. We ended up with ratings for more than 200 movies. Eventually we cut the number of papers we used to seven, because two of the newspapers only appeared in the graphic for about half a year each. Appearing in the final story were reviews from the Dallas Morning News, the Miami Herald, the Phila- delphia Inquirer, the New York Daily News, the Seattle Times and, of course, the Free Press. We typed in the Motion Picture Associa- tion of America rating (PG, R, etc.) for each movie, the number of critics who had re- viewed a particular film - useful for doing averages - and the month, day and year when reviews first appeared. We also included an arbitrary \"category\" for each film. Free Press movie critic Terry Lawson and I sat down to go over each film, deciding whether it was a comedy, a drama, horror, suspense, a children's film and so on. This let us do averages by category, to see which types of films were getting the best ratings that year. Critical analysis Once the grunt work was done, we moved on to the analysis. First up: a quick check to see what the most popular rating was (two stars) and averages by category. Dramas averaged 2.51 stars each, followed by children's films at 2.44. Horror movies, to no one's surprise, were dead last, with an average of 1.8. Next was a check to see what the best-rated films were for 1996, we wanted to use the year to compare critics' opinions to the public's vote (as measured by box office take) and the Academy Awards. The movie with the most stars? \"The Hunchback of Notre Dame,\" whose average of 3.86 put it firmly at the top of the pack. Unfortunately, the \"Hunchback\" had not done so well at the box office, where it didn't even make the top 10, or at the Oscars, where it didn't get a major award nomination. \"People at Disney didn't even think that was a great film,\" we were told by Bruce Davis, executive director of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the folks who give out Academy Awards). Thumbs up or thumbs down? Now we had the basis for our story. We knew, after further checking, that critics didn't often agree with the public or the Academy. The next numbers we crunched told us the final link in the story: They didn't agree with each other, either. We found just eight movies in the study where critics unanimously gave the same rating. Four of those were bombs. (\"Remember Eye for an Eye,\" \"Kazaam?\"). Just one made three stars (\"Fly Away Home\"). None made four. In fact, critics didn't even agree if some mov- ies were good or awful. We had four movies that had gotten both one and four stars by different critics. Sixty-five films got both one star and three stars from those who reviewed them. We used Lexis-Nexis to look up some of those reviews, then called the critics who wrote them. In what turned out to be our lead anec- dote, Rene Rodriguez of the Miami Herald talked about reviewing \"Austin Powers,\" Mike Myers' spoof on secret agents. He loved the film, laughing out loud in the near-empty the- ater, and called Myers \"a comic genius\" in his review. We followed it up immediately in the story with a quote from the \"Austin Powers\" review by Tom Maurstad of the Dallas Morning News, who opened that the movie \"fails to provide a single reason why we'd want to sit through it.\" We included comments from a half-dozen reviewers, including one-half of the most-dis- agreeing critic duo in America: Siskel and Ebert. (We got Gene Siskel. Rogert Ebert was at Cannes.) To round out the piece, our critic Lawson wrote a first-person story about being a movie critic, which led with his confession about how he deals with people looking over his shoulder on airplanes and wanting to know why he's writing about movie stars: \"With no shortage of professional pride, I reply: 'I do internal system analysis for a Korean portable computer manufacturer.\" Heather Newman can be reached at (313) 223-3336, or send e-mail to newman@det-freepress.com", "provenance": { "extracted_by": "pre-v2", "extracted_at": "", "verified": true }, "similar": [ { "slug": "1998-february-behind-the-ratings", "score": 0.135 }, { "slug": "1998-august-analyzing-school-analysis", "score": 0.096 }, { "slug": "2002-september-october-uncovering-back-door-vouchers", "score": 0.09 }, { "slug": "2003-february-free-stats-programs-compare-hospitals", "score": 0.088 }, { "slug": "1997-september-fun-with-car", "score": 0.08 } ], "html_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1997-september-paper-rates-critics.html", "json_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1997-september-paper-rates-critics.json" }