The website Rotten Tomatoes is a site that rates movies by percentages. To get a 100% rating is quite difficult to do as it takes the average of all the reviews submitted on a certain film. In the history of movies, only about 100 have gotten a 100% rating. One of those being Citizen Kane, the American Film Institutes Greatest film of all time (I personally thought it was kind of boring but who am I to judge) which comes at a lousy 15. Another factor that determines the "best" movie on Rotten Tomatoes is how many reviews it gets with a 100% rating. Man on Wire is #1 on Rotten Tomatoes. It has a 100% rating and has gotten that rating by 141 reviewers. The next highest is 130.
Now, having said all that, I'll go on a limb here and go out of order and give my review first and say it wasn't THAT good. Don't get me wrong as far as documentaries go, it was one of the most entertaining I've ever seen. It's actually intense, like sitting on the edge of your seat intense. I would definitely give it something in the 90% ish range. And honestly, an A is an A right?
Man on Wire is about a French tight rope walker named Phillipe Petit who tight roped across the World Trade Towers in 1974. Which has been called the most artistic crime in history. The documentary chronicles his early years as a tight roper, his previous tight roping "crimes" and difficulty in planning the elaborate tight roping between the Twin Towers. The film combines old film footage from the 70s of Petit and his "gang," with photos of the planning, with reenactments. The film builds up to a climax like a fictional movie rather than just expose something or give straight facts like many documentaries do. It is quite intoxicating, if not a bit annoying to see Petit's enthusiasm for his art.
As I said before, this is an awesome movie, not to mention an amazing documentary. If you have a bizarrely strong and crippling fear of heights, I'd prepare myself or avoid it all together. For every other person without a crippling phobias, I suggest this be your next rental.
The critics on Rotten Tomatoes do not give the movie an overall "score" between 1-100. The site merely tracks what percentage of reviews are positive and what percentage are negative. So a 100% rating only means that every critc gave the movie a positive review, not that each critic scored the movie a 100 out of 100. For example, even though you "only" gave the movie a 90/100, it would count as a positive review on Rotten Tomatoes.
ReplyDeleteOf course, as a critic, your entire focus should be on the film itself and not what "score" other critics assigned to it. This is a truly breathtaking film and one of the best documentaries of all time. I wish you could have enjoyed it as such instead of worrying about whether it deserved that 100 rating.
Cheers,
Geronimo Doom