To be sure, it’s pretty standard for a movie’s recommended rating on RottenTomatoes to decrease over time. But I can’t remember another time I’ve seen what happened with The Last Stand this past week, where a movie went from 100 percent after 13 reviews (wow, this movie must be really good!) down to the sixties and then to the fifties over the course of a few days (I didn’t start noticing the rapid decline until after I’d already missed the chance to screen cap the 100 and 90-something percent scores). How did it happen? Well, Lionsgate threw a big junket party outside of LA before the release a couple weeks ago and invited a bunch of film writers down to watch Arnold Schwarzenegger crush some cars with a tank. My guess is, a lot of LA area critics saw the film earlier, presumably after the fun-ass junket, and the early reviews skewed positive. Then the numbers started to fall when hacks all over the country started to see it divorced from the fun environment.

Now, don’t get me wrong, if I could’ve gone to see Arnold Schwarzenegger crush some cars with a tank, I definitely would have. I mean, we’re writing about movies here, not the Watergate break in. I just think it’s interesting to see how much context affects your opinion of the same movie. We like to pretend our opinions are all our own, but anyone who’s been to enough stand-up comedy shows has seen how differently the energy of an audience can affect the show even when the guy onstage is telling the exact same jokes. It’s crazy that the same holds true for movies, where the show is literally exactly the same. Likewise, I’m dying to know the back story behind Indiana Jones & The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull‘s 78 percent fresh rating. I can’t imagine four out of five people liking that movie, unless Spielberg was walking through the auditorium giving actual handjobs.

"This reviewer is teh gay! Tits or GTFO! Rabble rabble rabble!"

Strap in your retainers, folks, it’s about to insular. (*big puff on inhaler*) So, The Dark Knight Rises opens this Thursday, and reviews have been pouring in since the weekend. While the reviews have been overwhelmingly positive, a few jerks couldn’t help dropping dooks in the punch bowl (and no one likes dook punch, except maybe your mom). While the average positive review garnered 15 comments or less, the negative ones shot into triple digits almost instantly. Marshall Fine’s early pan, comparing TDKR unfavorably to Transformers, earned 831 comments before commenting was closed and RottenTomatoes had to remove the link to keep from crashing his site. Death threats abounded, which seems like a perfectly reasonable response to a person who didn’t like a movie you haven’t seen yet.

Enter Eric Snider from Film.com, who thought it’d be funny to post a fake review snippet, saying “The Dark Knight Rises is easily the most disappointing Batman film so far – and I’m including Schumacher’s Batman & Robin in that statement.” It was a good prank and probably spiked his web traffic for the day. Downside is, Rotten Tomatoes didn’t think it was funny and subesequently banned him. But as a wise man once said, “You’ve got to pay the troll toll, to get into this boy’s hole.”

From a personal response by RT Editor in Chief Matt Atchity:

Which leads me to Eric D. Snider. He thought it would be funny to post a negative review link on Rotten Tomatoes that links to his own site. He misrepresented his review link. (In case you didn’t know, some critics post their own reviews, and my staff posts some — it’s about 50/50). By attributing the link to Film.com, he misrepresented that organization. This is not the first time he’s done this, nor is it the first time his journalistic ethics have been brought into question. In our opinion, by knowingly posting a link that isn’t a review (and he hadn’t seen the movie), Snider has abused our trust, and therefore, his reviews will no longer apply to the Tomatometer. [RT]

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Up until this weekend, the title of 2012’s top turd in the tank belonged to Katherine Heigl’s pitiful One for the Money, which is currently running at 2% on Rotten Tomatoes to make it one of the year’s worst films. But 39 terrible reviews and a pathetic $6.4 million opening weekend later, Eddie Murphy’s A Thousand Words is in the driver’s seat with a Bucky Larsonian 0% rating.

Sure, it’s still early in the year and the film’s box office run – and lord knows Armond White still needs to chime in – but enough critics have ripped this movie apart, that there’s a good chance that it could be declared… *cues dramatic music* the worst movie of all-time.

A Thousand Words is by no means the only film to receive a zero rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Other no-marks include the Adam Sandler-scripted sex comedy Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star, the ham-fisted Pinocchio film by Roberto Benigni, and the disastrous adaptation of the Nicci French novel Killing Me Softly with Joseph Fiennes. A Thousand Words is unique, however, in having a significant amount of critics (30+) agree on the poor quality of a vehicle for a high-profile Hollywood star. (Via The Guardian)

It’s hard to put a finger on when exactly it happened, but at some point after Boomerang and The Distinguished Gentleman in 1992, someone let the air out of Murphy’s balloon and he just ran around Hollywood making a long farting noise. Hell, some people would even point to Harlem Nights in 1989 as the first tumble.

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Much like Bucky Larson, Katherine Heigl’s One for the Money was abruptly Trojan-horsed into theaters without being screened for critics this past weekend. But unlike Bucky Larson (still 0% after 35 reviews), One for the Money was able to win one fan (sort of!), bumping its recommended rating up to a whopping 3%. I’ve compiled here the ten most glowing quotes from Scott from MovieBuff‘s beaming two-and-a-half-star review. I also added exclamation points, because although they weren’t in the original review, I felt they captured the spirit of the review.

I think my favorite was “She never quite pulls off the Jersey persona but she comes close enough!”

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Remember

Best Actor: Daniel Auteuil. With an average film score of 86 percent, Auteuil has appeared in the most consistently high-quality films of the last few decades. The French star, best known for his role in Jean de Florette (1986), may benefit from the critical soft spot for foreign films. If you prefer to count only red-blooded Americans, the top honor goes to John Ratzenberger (76.1 percent average), who has voiced a character in every Pixar movie to date. [Slate]

Oh right, Pixar.  Meanwhile, if you throw out his voice work, he’s got scores of 0% (House II: The Second Story, starring Bill Maher, among others), 13% (for That Darn Cat, with Doug E. Doug), and who could forget the 2007 Jamie Kennedy vehicle, Kickin’ It Old Skool, which rated 2%.  The lone positive review came from Caroline Kepnes of E, who wrote, “This is the kind of movie in which a fat guy in a bra gets felt up by three guys at once,” which, to be fair, does make it sound pretty good. Meanwhile, worst actor honors go to Chuck Norris (20) and Jennifer Love Hewitt (18.9). Now, it was at this point in writing this post that I realized that this Slate article is from a few weeks ago, but I’ve included a few notable career graphs below, because God knows I’m not wasting all this work.
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