Culturebox: Slate's Hollywood Career-O-Matic

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culturebox Slate's Hollywood Career-O-Matic What Rotten Tomatoes data tell us about the best, worst, and most bizarre Hollywood trajectories. By Christopher Beam and Jeremy Singer-Vine Updated Monday, June 6, 2011, at 7:04 AM ET When M. Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender came out in July 2010, critics competed to see who could muster the most scorn. Shyamalan's seventh film was "dull, boring, poorly acted, limply written, and thoroughly unappealing" (San Francisco Chronicle), and "[s]tiff, fuzzy-looking, cloddish and disastrous in nearly every way" (Detroit News). In the Wall Street Journal, Joe Morgenstern called it "a form of Chinese water torture in which tin-ear line-readings take the place of drips." "The current national priorities should be as follows," wrote Cliff Doerksen in the Chicago Reader. "Reduce carbon emissions and stop funding the films of M. Night Shyamalan." Perhaps the most devastating critique--of not just the movie but of Shyamalan himself--was a simple graph plotting the Rotten Tomatoes scores of the director's movies over time, posted by Alex Tabarrok at the economics blog Marginal Revolution: To continue reading, click here. Christopher Beam is a staff writer for Slate. Follow him on Twitter. You can e-mail him at jcbeam@gmail.com. Jeremy Singer-Vine is an assistant editor for Slate. Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum What did you think of this article? POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES Also In Slate If GOP Candidates Aren't Sure How To Tackle Medicare, the Tea Party Has a Few Ideas ... Shafer: Great Kiss-Offs From Journalists to the Bosses Who Fired Them The Railroad Boom Was a Moral and Environmental Catastrophe for America	Advertisement
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