Let me just say a few words about reviews. I used to love the “Star” system the newspaper used. 1 through 4…4 being the best, 1 being the worst. And my philosophy about seeing movies at the theatre, spending money on them that is, went accordingly:

• We don’t go see 1 star movies: Total waste of our time and money. No matter how badly you wanted to see the film when the trailer for it came out–you resist that urge! Movies are too damned expensive to bother going to the big screen for something that was universally panned by every critic in the nation. Trust me on this, you can wait for the dvd.
• You had about a 50/50 chance with 4 star movies: These are the movies that every critic loved and that most of us are simply not smart enough to understand. They are the movies that get nominated for everything and win nothing. Sometimes they are spectacular pieces of cinematic artwork, pieces that are so good you will be talking about it for years to come. Other times they are the kind of movie that is so complex you feel as though you should be analyzing it in a college class. The movie In The Bedroom was like this for me. I to this day have no frigging clue what that movie was about and I don’t care. I was not only bored out of my mind but I left the theatre feeling dumb and trying to figure out to get those lost two hours of my life back.
• 3 star movies were guaranteed: You could never go wrong with 3 stars. They might be award winners, they might not. Didn’t matter. They were always well-reviewed and always entertaining.
• And the best movies? 2 star movies. This is where the bulk of all movie goers hang…in the 2 star and 2 and a half star range. Think about your top five movies…the kind you will watch over and over again even if its just background to whatever you happen to be doing in your living room that day. The movies you have memorized completely, the ones you no longer have to even pay attention to when they are on. In all likelihood these are 2 star movies. 2 star movies don’t win awards and they always get frustratingly mixed reviews but they are the ones that usually gets the biggest audiences and have the most success. Incidentally,  the first X-Men movie got 2 and a half stars.

Nowadays the star system is gone and I have to rely on a website called Rotten Tomatoes. I have the app on my phone so I can instantly be aware of how badly my movies are doing.. But lately I have started to question my trust in this movie review website.

The problem is this: Rotten Tomatoes takes a review, decides if it is positive or negative, and gives it either a shiny red tomato or a gross green splat accordingly. It then piles all the reviews together and your movie is assigned a percentage based on the amount of good reviews it receives. For example: The current X-men movie is standing strong at 91% while the newest Adam Sandler waste of my time Blended is hovering at 14%. Makes sense right?

Here is where we get into trouble. Anything below 60% gets an automatic splat. And that means I instantly do not want to go. No matter how much I was looking forward to the movie, a big green splat makes me rethink my abilities to spot a good flick and I stick my nose in the air like the movie snob I am and refuse to spend my $11. But if I go back and read the reviews I am always mystified as to how Rotten Tomatoes came up with their system. Most reviews are mixed–so how do you decide if they are overwhelmingly negative or positive?

Maleficent is currently standing at 49% (a 3 percent improvement from yesterday) But the reviews are all over the place. Every single one has something negative and also something positive to say.

So here is my new philosophy. The best I can do without my trusty old star system. Follow it if you like. Any film averaging below 25% is probably not worth your money and any movie flying high above 90% is most likely academy award winning material. (unless its the X-Men…we all know that’s not going to win any awards cause super-hero movies just don’t:) Anything else in between is fair game.

Maleficent is a 2 star movie, 2 and a half at the most. There is not one single award it deserves to be nominated for. It has some serious flaws both in story and special effects, narration, costumes and definitely accents. I don’t care. I did not go to see this film so I could talk about it and analyze it later. I didn’t go see it so I would be somehow moved and shed a tear. I didn’t even go to see something visually stunning. I went because Maleficent is the most bad-ass Disney villain of all time, the only one to ever actually utter a curse in Disney animated history. I went because when I was 10 I had all of her lines memorized, hoping I would grow to 6 feet tall so I could one day play her in a Disney theme park. And I went because I thought it would be fun to see a live action version of her on the big screen. And it was.

Maleficent is not a great film, it may not even be good. But it is not bad. And it certainly does not deserve a splat.