The reviewers reviewed
November 26, 2014 3:27 AM Subscribe
Paul Rose, late of surreal teletext magazine Digitiser, writes about scripting the Pudsey The Dog movie, a film about a dancing dog with the dubious honor of retaining a 0% rating on RottenTomatoes.
I was subjected to some lobbying by my seven-year-old to take him to Pudsey at a cheap matinee screening. Fortunately I was able to distract him with a shiny thing.
It's an entertaining post, but underlines the problem with RT's Tomatometer: 0% just means, in this case, that no reviewer out of the 12 consulted considered the film passable, i.e. 5/10 or better. That can still mean the movie isn't the worst thing ever filmed. The average rating gives a better sense of it: 3.3, which implies most reviewers gave it 3 or 4 out of 10. Meanwhile, 59% of 1300 moviegoers told RT they liked it. That suggests it's a pretty ordinary family film that young kids will probably like well enough. If my son had insisted on going, I would have survived.
posted by rory at 4:10 AM on November 26, 2014 [2 favorites]
It's an entertaining post, but underlines the problem with RT's Tomatometer: 0% just means, in this case, that no reviewer out of the 12 consulted considered the film passable, i.e. 5/10 or better. That can still mean the movie isn't the worst thing ever filmed. The average rating gives a better sense of it: 3.3, which implies most reviewers gave it 3 or 4 out of 10. Meanwhile, 59% of 1300 moviegoers told RT they liked it. That suggests it's a pretty ordinary family film that young kids will probably like well enough. If my son had insisted on going, I would have survived.
posted by rory at 4:10 AM on November 26, 2014 [2 favorites]
Meanwhile, Paddington, which got a lot of bad Internet buzz in the summer, looks like a critical hit.
posted by rory at 4:13 AM on November 26, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by rory at 4:13 AM on November 26, 2014 [1 favorite]
So basically his argument is that his crappy low rent film should have been treated gently because there are real, ordinary people behind it and given the conditions they couldn't be expected to produce anything good. I'm struggling to sympathise. He took the money to turn out a piece of crap, it came out a piece of crap, but for some reason critics shouldn't say 'hey, that's a piece of crap'?
posted by biffa at 4:23 AM on November 26, 2014 [2 favorites]
posted by biffa at 4:23 AM on November 26, 2014 [2 favorites]
I hope the guy can rise again - and he probably can, because he's a writer. Even when a film is brilliant nobody in the industry much cares who wrote it.
posted by colie at 4:24 AM on November 26, 2014
posted by colie at 4:24 AM on November 26, 2014
My guess would be that priced right, displayed prominently in supermarkets, and including a good extras package (or even just Pudsey's performances on the original TV show), it will make pretty good money on its pre-xmas DVD release.
Then the writer will be 'hot' again!
posted by colie at 4:28 AM on November 26, 2014
Then the writer will be 'hot' again!
posted by colie at 4:28 AM on November 26, 2014
Why does Paddington Bear need a snuff-sadist dominatrix in it? I love Paddington Bear, and I love cartoonishly wicked women with lethal intentions in objectifying costumes, but I'm at a loss as to why Hollywood felt these two interests intersected in the general movie-going public.
posted by Slap*Happy at 5:05 AM on November 26, 2014
posted by Slap*Happy at 5:05 AM on November 26, 2014
Without being to Defender-ish about it, I honestly don't see Paddington turning out to be a bad children's movie (apart from the fact that they seemed to have believed that the film would be improved by having the plot of 101 Dalmatians, which is actually a very wrong thing). I mean, not the ideal Paddington movie but not necessarily a bad movie. On the other hand, can anyone imagine what the ideal Pudsey movie would look like? Probably not that different from what the film actually is. The closer comparison is probably the Grumpy Cat movie, which has probably cost a bit more than the price of a sandwich to make.
posted by Grangousier at 5:05 AM on November 26, 2014
posted by Grangousier at 5:05 AM on November 26, 2014
Has anyone tried viewing the teletext pages on a high resolution screen (e.g., the iPad Air 2 "retina" screen)? The text seems almost to float on the black background at different levels, depending on the colour. Is this some strange artefact of the design of the screen/pixels, or is it my imagination?
posted by hankmajor at 5:08 AM on November 26, 2014
posted by hankmajor at 5:08 AM on November 26, 2014
Hankmajor, do you wear glasses? That may just be an artifact of chromatic aberration through the lenses.
posted by DoctorFedora at 5:27 AM on November 26, 2014
posted by DoctorFedora at 5:27 AM on November 26, 2014
It was the Twitter vitriol that surprised me. It's like someone asking me if I like Justin Bieber - nobody cares if I do or not, because I'm a thirty-two year old woman, and he isn't aimed at me.
If you don't watch BGT, don't like dancing dogs, or have no interest in what sounds like an old-fashioned kids film, why would the existence of one fill you with rage? Everyone got paid, the dog probably got the posh dog food on set, and there are other films you can watch instead.
posted by mippy at 5:31 AM on November 26, 2014 [1 favorite]
If you don't watch BGT, don't like dancing dogs, or have no interest in what sounds like an old-fashioned kids film, why would the existence of one fill you with rage? Everyone got paid, the dog probably got the posh dog food on set, and there are other films you can watch instead.
posted by mippy at 5:31 AM on November 26, 2014 [1 favorite]
I've heard good things about Paddington, though what puts me off is that I think of him on screen as he was in the original series.
posted by mippy at 5:32 AM on November 26, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by mippy at 5:32 AM on November 26, 2014 [1 favorite]
why would the existence of one fill you with rage?
Not rage, quite, but scorn.
Because I was subjected to the theatrical trailer without warning. I was in there with a BAFTA feature film editor friend of mine and our kids, and we both couldn't believe the lameness of the trailer. He later found out that one of his friends was involved in either writing or directing, I can't remember.
posted by C.A.S. at 5:38 AM on November 26, 2014
Not rage, quite, but scorn.
Because I was subjected to the theatrical trailer without warning. I was in there with a BAFTA feature film editor friend of mine and our kids, and we both couldn't believe the lameness of the trailer. He later found out that one of his friends was involved in either writing or directing, I can't remember.
posted by C.A.S. at 5:38 AM on November 26, 2014
Maybe I'm inured to that because I watch pretty much every ad for every movie that gets released here. From memory, though, it looked like a harmless teatime caper. Not something I'd pay my time and money to watch, but then neither was Keith Lemon T'Movie.
posted by mippy at 5:48 AM on November 26, 2014
posted by mippy at 5:48 AM on November 26, 2014
DoctorFedora: you are right, I don't see this when I take off my glasses. Interesting.
posted by hankmajor at 5:52 AM on November 26, 2014
posted by hankmajor at 5:52 AM on November 26, 2014
I think a lot of the reaction to the benighted Pudsey was simply Twitter Pile-On Syndrome, whereas people relish the opportunity to justifiably (as they see it) rubbish someone or something along with everyone else. A cheap 'n' cheerful cash-in on the Pudsey phenomenon couldn't be good, so therefore wasn't good, so therefore had to be the worst thing ever, so therefore had to be called out with extreme prejudice.
I suppose we could see it as progress from the days when people went to watch public hangings, though they didn't expect to get to hang the prisoner themselves.
(Without wishing to Paddington-ize the thread excessively - I read the books in the late 60s / early 70s, so the TV series was the agreeable-but-slightly-wrong adaptation for me. In my head it all moved a bit faster. Same problem with the stop-motion Moomin series, but much more so.)
posted by Grangousier at 6:01 AM on November 26, 2014
I suppose we could see it as progress from the days when people went to watch public hangings, though they didn't expect to get to hang the prisoner themselves.
(Without wishing to Paddington-ize the thread excessively - I read the books in the late 60s / early 70s, so the TV series was the agreeable-but-slightly-wrong adaptation for me. In my head it all moved a bit faster. Same problem with the stop-motion Moomin series, but much more so.)
posted by Grangousier at 6:01 AM on November 26, 2014
Digitiser was one of the five funniest things on UK TV at the time, even if it was Teletext.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 6:11 AM on November 26, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by GallonOfAlan at 6:11 AM on November 26, 2014 [1 favorite]
So basically his argument is that his crappy low rent film should have been treated gently because there are real, ordinary people behind it and given the conditions they couldn't be expected to produce anything good. I'm struggling to sympathise. He took the money to turn out a piece of crap, it came out a piece of crap, but for some reason critics shouldn't say 'hey, that's a piece of crap'?
I don't think he's really making an argument, or saying what people should or shouldn't do. He's just saying "Hi. Yeah I'm the guy who wrote Pudsy. Remember how much you enjoyed hating on this movie? It was pretty bad, huh?"
posted by General Tonic at 7:32 AM on November 26, 2014
I don't think he's really making an argument, or saying what people should or shouldn't do. He's just saying "Hi. Yeah I'm the guy who wrote Pudsy. Remember how much you enjoyed hating on this movie? It was pretty bad, huh?"
posted by General Tonic at 7:32 AM on November 26, 2014
It's an entertaining post, but underlines the problem with RT's Tomatometer: 0% just means, in this case, that no reviewer out of the 12 consulted considered the film passable, i.e. 5/10 or better. That can still mean the movie isn't the worst thing ever filmed.
Maybe true, but scrolling down and reading the reviews from The Guardian, The Independent and Irish Times paint a really unflattering picture:
"This is a British film so depressingly bad that cinemas should play the adagietto from Mahler's Fifth over a loudspeaker as audiences file out grimly into the foyer afterwards, silently asking themselves if life has any value." *
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 8:55 AM on November 26, 2014
Maybe true, but scrolling down and reading the reviews from The Guardian, The Independent and Irish Times paint a really unflattering picture:
"This is a British film so depressingly bad that cinemas should play the adagietto from Mahler's Fifth over a loudspeaker as audiences file out grimly into the foyer afterwards, silently asking themselves if life has any value." *
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 8:55 AM on November 26, 2014
(And in fairness, I haven't seen Britain's Got Talent or this movie. Also, I enjoyed Freaked, so my taste in movies is no quality barometer anyway.)
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 8:59 AM on November 26, 2014
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 8:59 AM on November 26, 2014
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