Beginning at the four minute and 53 second mark in this excerpt from “At the Movies” with Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper, Ebert goes into the importance of the meat of a review and not the rating a critic gives it as Roeper basically equates Ebert’s rating of Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds as to suggest someone should go see either The Honeymooners or The Longest Yard instead.
To quote Ebert:
“How many times do I have to explain to you, ratings are relative, not absolute… People should be smart enough to listen to what we say instead of looking at the dumb thumbs or the dumb stars, because there are gradations and context that go on.”
It has happened less and less with the RopeofSilicon readership where I will have to explain my distaste for grading movies and to more-or-less use them as guides and pay more attention to what is written in the review rather than the grade, I still loved seeing this little clip when it was brought to my attention. It’s the reason sites such as RottenTomatoes and MetaCritic are only relevant to such an extent and why it’s so important to find a critic you can trust to, at the very least, be consistent.
