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When movie reviews get lost in the woods and turn all scary

Get Out - the social commentary-meets horror flick - got great reviews, but what does that have to do with how enjoyable a film really is?

Last weekend, I'd gone for dinner to a lesser-known (and, by all accounts, struggling) restaurant in Business Bay. I struck up a rapport with one of the servers (who, it turns out, is from my hometown), and we got chatting about this and that. When I was leaving - after a fairly satisfying meal - he said: "Please give us a good rating on the food aggregator sites (maybe he was referring to zomato.com); a 5/5 will help hike up our scores, and we'll be able to draw in the crowds."
Something in reverse order played out for Get Out director Jordan Peele's debut venture that, apparently, has gripped the imagination of all cine-going audiences. Rotten Tomatoes - the site that spawned the 'tomatometer', "the most trusted measurement of quality for a movie" - had given it a 100 per cent approval rating. Now, that's, reportedly, "very rare". Even The Godfather, usually agreed upon as being the greatest film ever made, has a 99 per cent rating. So, 100 per cent is a big deal.
After riding the cent per cent wave for a good few weeks, Get Out's rating dropped to 99 per cent. Courtesy one Armond White - who's a bit of a black sheep among those who fraternise over films (he was "kicked out of the New York Film Critics Circle" according to mashable.com). Read: he's a contrarian. He doesn't/didn't see what the others did, so took it down a peg. It became such a talking point - the 1-point earthquake-like jolt - that there were reports all over the internet on it.
Personally, I have a problem with Rotten Tomatoes (though I do a sneak in a look at 'freshness ratings' each time I'm about to purchase DVDs of films I haven't heard of). Bollywood's Veer-Zara (that's managed to secure an entry into the hallowed portals), for instance, has a 100 per cent rating. I really like Veer-Zara, and every time I watch it I have a lump in my throat despite Preity Zinta running amok among mustard fields in her stilettos, but, seriously, putting it on par with Citizen Kane (100 per cent certified freshness) is a bit much. Even Asoka, the Santhosh Sivan period drama I watched in an empty hall in New Delhi's Connaught Place, really has no business being in the 100 per cent club. But there it is, sitting pretty. Then, there are other great films - The Other Boleyn Girl for one - that are shown up as being useless in whipping up tomato sauce (The Other Boleyn Girl has a hugely misleading 42 per cent rating).
Get Out's litany of achievements doesn't stop with Rotten Tomatoes' ketchup conundrum. At the time of going to press, it has been declared "the highest grossing debut project for a writer-director with an original screenplay". It was made on a budget of $4.6 million, grossed $34 million in the opening weekend, and is now worth $156 million (and growing) at the box office (making Peele the first African American writer-director to notch up the magic figure of $100 million in a debut film).
When I watched Get Out last Friday, I had a fair bit of idea that I was taking on a Goliath. A few folks at work had pointed out that it had been snagging superlatively positive reviews; one of them complained about its "fall" in stature generated single-handedly by Armond White.
Obviously, I had great expectations.
My bubble of keenly-agog expectancy soon burst 40 minutes into the film when I realised it was riding not just tomatometer's crest, but also the tsunami of post-Trump paranoia. It's fine to have a social commentary on zeitgeist, but the implausibility of it all (medically-orchestrated race-based enslavement coming back in fashion in full force) - after a perfectly plausible (and riveting) 40 minutes - combined with blood/brain-soaked horror was, frankly, too much for me to handle. I lost count of the number of times I said, "Can we Get Out?" - but hung in there hoping for a turnaround (that was not to be).
Happily, I wasn't an aberration. Two ladies who accompanied me were similarly thrown. One gent, however, liked it and gave it a 7/10.
Post-film, we did our own Rotten Tomatoes weigh-in over French fries and tomato ketchup: 7/10, 3/10, 3/10 (that was me), and -2/10.
Overall, Get Out would have managed not more than 30 per cent on our tomatometer.
sushmita@khaleejtimes.com
Sushmita is Editor, wknd. She has a penchant for analysing human foibles