60 out of 97 females rated this at the very bottom? 49 out of 61 females over age 45 rated this at the very bottom? There isn't a chance in hell these ratings are real...either IMDB has been hacked or their software program has some major bugs. Can any of their ratings ever be trusted?
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I sent IMDB a note about this 5 months ago and they wrote back that they have 'safeguards in place' to defeat fraud. With the pattern that you've discovered of older women consistently giving the lowest ratings to previously high rated movies (and even disproportionately voting in unusually huge numbers for their demographic) apparently Nadia (the IMDB responder) is not being 100% truthful.
Here's my email and their response-
Suspicious Ratings Activity
by - [email protected] (20 Dec 2008 01:22:48 AM)
URL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0029192/ratings#reports
A universally admired but hard to obtain film has suddenly received more than
100 new votes since I last checked and all of them are bottom #1 votes. Is this
simply a typographical mistake by IMDB or has your ratings system been hacked?
Hopefully you have the ability to check how these new votes came to be as you need
to fix this miscarriage of justice which places considerable doubt on your
entire ratings system.
Re: Suspicious Ratings Activity
by - IMDb Help Desk (20 Dec 2008 08:19:53 PM)
Greetings from the Internet Movie Database;
Thank you for bringing this to our attention.
Please rest assured that our voting system has several safeguards in place and that this type of behavior is periodically detected and automatically defeated.
We appreciate your assistance and support and will take appropriate steps to handle this abuse.
For more details, please refer to http://www.imdb.com/help/show_leaf?voteaverage
Thanks again for your help!
----
Regards,
Nadia
The IMDb Help Desk
[deleted]
This is NOT an isolated example of this kind of practice, either. Check out the ratings for pretty well any "classic" foreign movie, and you'll observe the same kind of voting pattern on display, with women under 18 and women over 45 voting these movies down to the tune of 60 - 80% of the votes cast being "1" votes.
See, for example, the ratings for pretty well any film by Kurosawa, Clouzot, Godard, Bergman, Truffaut, Fellini, etc. etc.
I have no doubt that it's the SAME group of women going around voting "1" for all these films. The question is why they think all these films by world-renouned directors are "awful."
>>I have no doubt that it's the SAME group of women going around voting "1" for all these films.<<
And I have almost no doubt that it's not a group of women but instead one pathetic sick guy with multiple log on IDs who gets his jollies by influencing the ratings of great but obscure films. What is wrong with the staff at IMDB that they can't see this pattern and take some appropriate action???
Since the ratings are weighted to begin with you would think they could easily figure out a method of filtering excessive bottom votes by a population (over 45 females) that typically rarely even votes on films in large numbers.
The IMDB's user ratings are pretty influential and are cited by thousands of sources when film titles are discussed and it's a shame that the staff doesn't take its responsibilities seriously enough to rectify obvious ratings shenanigans.
I agree this is either the work of a hacker or a software glitch. Getting a bunch of women over 45 to agree on all those movies would be like herding cats.
I also think they wouldn't waste their time doing this.
What I did notice is one guy who raved on and on about Ed Burns as director, actor or writer for everything he did. I thought gee either your ex girlfriend is ga ga over Burns or he rejected you for a role. Because it was obvious this guy had an axe to grind. I think similar voting goes on by other people as well regardless of the merits of an actor, writer, director or whatever.
That's an interesting theory about the "1" votes being cast by a weirdo, savas, and one I hadn't really thought of before, or even considered possible before.
After all, one might assume that imdb would have "safeguards in place," to protect against that kind of thing, eh? And I really can't see this being a computer glitch.
I was thinking it might be women who belong to the "religious right," or a church organization of some kind voting these movies down. A lot of the movies voted down have weak female roles, if they have female characters at all. Clouzot, for instance, was known to be abusive toward female actors, and even his own spouse. I've wondered if that might be part of the explanation about these "1" vote patterns.
I've seen a lot of these foreign movies and often there is a scene or two that I imagine might rub women the wrong way, and I thought that might explain things. I haven't seen Make Way for Tomorrow (yet), so can't say if those things factor in here.
But now that you mention it, you might be onto something with that single-voter theory.
You think older women of the religious right vote down weak female movie characters??
I think it'd be a lot more likely the Hillary Cinton type women in that age range would be the ones to hate movies with anything less than strong women characters!
People are talking about "all these other movies" with a similar voting pattern but I have only seen a few instances of this. And in most cases, I agree with part of what dshortt-1 said - you can usually think of some theme or character that may have been unusually irritating or even offensive to older women (or maybe more accurately, women of a different generation).
I don't find it at all surprising that a significant percentage of older women might have disliked this film, or older people in general, or that females might dislike this film more than males. And if you look at ALL the age/gender breakdowns, that is the general pattern you see - a greater percentage of "1" votes than you would ordinarily see for what seems like a respected film of an unoffensive nature. It's not just the women over 45.
Just think of how women were portrayed in this movie (except the maid) - they can definitely come across to some as largely unsympathetic, weak, selfish, and/or relentlessly put-upon. And while some male characters were negatively portrayed as well, the few characters who were the wise protagonists from introduction to end (the good son, the store proprietor, the hotel owner) were all male. I understand people not finding that one-sided, but if a female viewer found this increasingly annoying as the film wore on, I could understand that frustration too.
I agree that the sheer percentage of older women lambasting this movie with a "1" may seem out-of-kilter, but don't ignore the true sentiment that may be behind some of these votes.
Those "safeguards" aren't worth a damn. Several years ago many classic Jewish films all of a sudden appeared on the Bottom 100. Many users reported it and IMDB got around to eliminating the fake votes that had placed them there. They didn't do anything about the ability of people to conduct the same kind of campaign on other films, though. It's likely that the people who do this sort of thing simply learned their lesson and dumped fake votes onto films enough to lower them, but not enough to plummet them onto the Bottom 100.
A few years back there was a campaign by the Nolan disciples to get Dark Knight to number 1 on the IMDB Top 250. They started blitzing Dark Knight with 10s to raise it and The Godfather (then the number 1 film) with 1s to lower it, but apparently weren't smart enough to also vote 1s for other films because all that happened is that The Shawshank Redemption reclaimed the number 1 spot that fans of The Godfather (who had blitzed it with 10s years earlier) had taken from it.
If you ever want to get a truer picture of what films are really rated then drop all the 1 and 10 votes from them and do the average of what's left.
"My name is Paikea Apirana, and I come from a long line of chiefs stretching all the way back to the Whale Rider."
You mean somebody rated this movie higher than a "1"??? I don't get it. I've never seen a movie with so many miserable characters before. Manipulative, insensitive, overbearing parents...and selfish, ungrateful, boorish children. I'd rather die than have to watch another movie this sorrowful.
shareBootblack-did you watch the whole film?
Maybe you watched it while preoccupied with something else-Your remarks sound like a peripheral view.
I'm sure that the admin has tools to determine whether there's a consistent pattern of extreme votes coming from either the same IP address or a bunch of IP addresses in the same general geographic location. The only question I have is whether they're so swamped w/things to do that it takes them forever to get around to fixing things like that.
It is better to be kind than to be clever or good looking. -- Derek
I can't stand these IMDb plants or anyone who purposes changes the score a film rightfully deserves.
shareThere are a lot more votes now, so these fake votes (3.4%) have less effect. For 45+, there are slightly more male than female 1* votes.
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