Okay, maybe artificially inflating and deflating user ratings for movies is not your classic definition of "evil," but it is still subtly and inaccurately shaping the larger sense of truth in our world, and I do think that that can be construed as evil.
You never hear of groups of liberals teaming up to upvote a movie on a website like IMDB, or shout down a movie that might be putting bad things into the world. Only right-wingers do that, and usually, the movies they shout down are actually putting good things into the world -- just not things they think are good. (They're wrong, of course.)
My latest is not an example of something they're making seem shitty that isn't shitty, and fortunately, the prominent examples of this in the past are not jumping immediately to mind. (For some reason I thought of Emilia Perez, but it's possible that film's 5.3 rating on IMDB is as much a product of upset progressives as upset conservatives, and then there were probably others unaffiliated with either, who had a beef with it just on the level of its production.)
No, it's an example of them making something a bit fringy and definitely right wing seem like it might be a new classic.
I mentioned in yesterday's post that one of the films I reviewed this week was Young Washington, a film released a month ago in the U.S. and only yesterday in Australia. I knew right from seeing Kelsey Grammer's name in the credits that there might be something fishy about this movie, since Grammer only seems to work these days if he's pushing his right-wing agenda. None of the other cast were people I could identify as conservatives, but I was pretty sure the movie was still coming from that place.
And sure enough, I found later that it was produced by Angel Studios, which specializes in "values-based entertainment," according to their own promotional materials. There are a bunch of standard faith-based type movies in the list of their movies on Wikipedia, though to be fair to them, a movie they made last year called Sketch was one I really liked -- and I didn't get a whiff of Christian propaganda from it. (Though now that I know this, I sort of want to go back and check.)
Anyway, I don't hate Young Washington at all. I gave it a 5/10. It's competent, but it feels pretty mid. And to be fair again, it is not overtly right wing. But in my review I referred to it as "dog whistle conservatism," meaning you could hear it if you were looking for it but might miss it if you weren't. Grammer was the tip-off for me, but if you are looking at just the subject matter, it celebrates a great white man from history and puts that man's origins (and therefore the origins of the whole country) on a pedestal, making it pretty Trumpy indeed.
I could understand some people, even some people who don't share its values, liking it more than I did. There are some good battles and the whole thing looks decent.
But if some people liked it better than I did, some people would also like it worse. An IMDB rating about 6.0 would be pretty generous for it.
Young Washington's actual rating? 7.4.
Come on.
It's really telling to click into the rating and see the breakdown by country.
In the U.S., a full 44.9% of those who rated it rated it a 10 out of 10. That's patently absurd. We might expect it to be better appreciated in the U.S. than elsewhere around the world, but nearly half of the people giving it the highest rating? Total bullshit.
And you can pretty much tell it's grade inflation because even a more measured rating of 8 or 9 is down to 15% apiece, with 7s at 10.6%. Every other grade accounts for under 5% of the total vote.
So I guess the way we look at this is, only people who already have some bias in this area even see Young Washington, probably, and among those, most like it, or at least pretend they like it. Some are willing to be honest about how much they like it, some not. Few really dislike it, and among those are probably people like me, who aren't bringing in a pro-conservative bias.
The contrast is really significant as soon as you leave the country.
Canadians? They drop down a little bit to 6.7 overall, and they still have 10 as the highest percentage with just over 21%. Eight comes next at almost 20, but then the third highest percent is those who rated it only 1 out of 10, which accounts for more than 17% overall.
Switch to England and you see just how much a totally disinterested group of people dislikes it. (Or maybe they're still bitter about the Revolutionary War. Who's to say.) The overall rating drops all the way down to 4.3/10, with more users (29%) giving a 1 than any other ratings. Interestingly, though, the second most is still 10.
Sri Lanka and India are the only two other countries. The top rating is over 50% in India and in Sri Lanka, it's 93%! Then again they are weirdly worshipful of light skin colors in that part of the world.
Okay this may not be definitive within IMDB itself, but let's compare IMDB to formats that include only critics, who are, in theory, free from these pesky political biases, though I suppose it's possible that they lean progressive.
On Rotten Tomatoes, Young Washington has a score of 60, so still positive, but not as positive. In fact, that aligns exactly with the 6.0 I thought it should have on IMDB. Even there, though, the top review is from something called AARP Movies for Grownups, which is pretty suss.
Metacritic is actually my preferred port of call, even though it doesn't have RT's name recognition. This is the most similar to my own assessment, with a score of 49, which would basically be 0.1 lower than my 5/10. And some of the snippets I glanced at seem to lay into it pretty heavily.
So are the right-wing trolls really gaming the system on IMDB for Young Washington?
I don't know. Maybe. Or maybe they're just overflowing with patriotism in the year celebrating America's 250th, and this nourished those instincts without them having to fake it, just to make it seem like the world is full of people who think like they do.
No comments:
Post a Comment