Senh duong biography books

While throwing rotten tomatoes at lousy entertainment harkens back to vaudeville days, Senh admits the Jean-Claude Lauzon film Leolo served as a major inspiration. It features a woman who is impregnated by a tomato. Top Box Office. TV Shows. Trending on RT. Being a fan of movies and a fan of the web site, I helped initially by helping to do some minor programming, hosting the web site on our Design Reactor servers, and making the process easier for Senh by changing his manual HTML pages to more maintainable and reuseable templates.

There was a short period of time during those early months where the three of them decided to shoot a movie together rather than continue updating Rotten Tomatoes and, as a senh duong biography books, there were no updates to the site for several weeks, though they resumed after deciding to not film the indie movie. All of the newfound business from Disney allowed us to move to professional high rise offices in Emeryville and hire a professional CFO for the company.

Despite our success with Design Reactor, I was begining to get run down by the constant client-handling and envious of being able to build and own our own property like Rotten Tomatoes. Before the screening, the local radio station had also given tickets to fans. One of the super fans dressed in a Darth Maul costume replete with a homemade, dual-blade light saber and face paint.

He walked out of the theater with such a dejected look on his face as if he had just realized that his entire childhood was a lie. Leaving the theater, Senh and I talked about what we had just saw. I think we both realized at the same time that this huge build up to the release of Episode I was a huge opportunity for Rotten Tomatoes. During the car ride home, I told Senh that I really wanted to work on Rotten Tomatoes rather than just doing Disney work day-in-and-day-out.

Watching Star Wars: Episode I and talking with Senh on that car ride back was a pivotal moment for me. It made me come to realize that, despite how proud I was of the product and relationship we had built with Disney, that what I really wanted out of life was to build something I could claim for my own. I really wanted to work in earnest on Rotten Tomatoes.

As a consequence, I sought out at first to help them on the technical end. Secondly, we hosted the site on a web server sitting in our Design Reactor offices which helped accomodate the server load in subsequent months. Thanks to Disney paying for our exorbitant at the time network line, Rotten Tomatoes was able to share the network access and web server resources in those important summer months in as site traffic took off.

True to form, in the several days following that Star Wars: Episode I screening as early reviews began pouring in, the traffic to the site exploded. For the first time, the Tomatometer rating became an actual point of conversation amongst critics and tons of Star Wars fans and the reaction to Rotten Tomatoes set us on the path to make this a real project.

In the subsequent summer weeks, several important things happened to further push us towards making Rotten Tomatoes a full-time business pursuit:. I had heard so much of this indie horror movie and was even more enthusiastic since it was filmed not too far away from my hometown of Columbia, Maryland. I popped it into the VHS player at the office one weekend and we all watched it together with Senh, who had I believe had also come down from Sacramento to watch with us that weekend.

Senh duong biography books

It scared the crap out of some of our teammates, but more importantly, it was pretty obvious after watching the movie that it was pretty special because opinions on the movie were so divided. Patrick, who also grew up in suburban Maryland even closer to where Blair Witch was shot, absolutely hated the movie, and particularly hated how illogically and childish the characters in the movie acted.

I loved the movie and Senh was in the middle with his opinion. I had never really met someone whose background was so similar to my own: My parents were among the hundreds of thousands of boat people of the late s, South Vietnamese who escaped communist rule by taking to the ocean on perilous, frequently fatal journeys. My friends and I thought Cobra was the better of the two.

So my inclinations tended toward action movies. The only time you ever saw a bunch of critics reviews in one place was on posters, and those were trying to sell you the movie. Which inspired a thought: What if there was a site that collected all critics reviews for a movie, good and bad? Photo by Stephen Wang. Senh introduced the concept to friends Patrick Lee and Stephen Wang.

The three had met as students at UC Berkeley a few years earlier, and were coding websites at their Shattuck Avenue startup, Design Reactor, co-founded by Patrick and Stephen in January Design Reactor had over 20 employees, nearly all of them Asian-American friends sourced from their Cal days, especially from the campus Wushu group where they got together to train and practice the martial art.

We watched Wushu movies and tournaments on VHS, we talked incessantly about training and making up moves. It was intense. That obsession then transferred over to their careers and their various start ups culminating in Rotten Tomatoes. When you graduate from high school, you go all over the place for college. When you graduate from college, you go all over the place for work.

The site launched on August 18,as a hobby project within Design Reactor, whose bread-and-butter was creating entertainment sites for film and television clients, including ABC and Disney. Calling it the Tomatometer would come later. The first movie to get a score on the Tomatometer, introduced that December inwas Star Trek: Insurrection. A few days later, it was picked by Yahoo!

Early encouragement was the currency that fueled Rotten Tomatoes early on, especially considering there was no revenue model. Internet Life was a print magazine from the era, and legendary film critic Roger Ebert, who published a monthly column in its pages on the intersection of pop culture and the developing online world, wrote a glowing endorsement of Rotten Tomatoes.

That was really meaningful. However, on this particular Thursday users were sticking around. The likely source? The Pixar campus in Emeryville, where Patrick surmised employees were apparently refreshing their browsers to catch each new review uploaded. Senh left the Bay Area and went back to Sacramento, but the accumulative work burnt him out.

Even Rotten Tomatoes — where everything was still manual and included treks to the library to copy review quotes from newspapers — had lost its luster. The site stopped being updated for several weeks. People wrote in asking what was happening. Did negative reviews save Rotten Tomatoes? The three resumed work on the site. Fear Nothing remains un-adapted.

Cut to earlywith the dotcom bubble in full bloom. I could tell because I was in high school in San Jose, the heart of Silicon Valley, and traffic was getting worse every day. Modern life had evolved computers from luxury to necessity, and mass adoption of the Internet was connecting the world in an unfathomably exciting new way. And with that, new opportunities to get rich.

An idea, presented well enough, was enough to get venture capitalists to rattle their bank accounts for cash to invest, as a billion dollars in frenzied speculation transformed the Bay Area. Design Reactor was growing, significantly helped along by a deal with Disney to create and maintain everything Disney Channel online. So, in addition to creating an account, users will have to verify their ticket purchase through ticketing company Fandango Media, parent company of Rotten Tomatoes.

While users can still leave reviews without verifying, those reviews will not account for the average audience score displayed next to the Tomatometer. On August 21,Rotten Tomatoes rebranded its audience score as the Popcornmeter and introduced a new "Verified Hot" badge. The designation is only given to films which have reached an audience score of 90 percent or higher among users whom Rotten Tomatoes has verified as having purchased a ticket to the film through Fandango.

In Februarya new "What to Know" section was created for each film entry, combining the "Critics Consensus" and a new "Audience Says" blurbs within it, to give users an at-a-glance summary of the general sentiments of a senh duong biography books as experienced by critics and audiences. Each movie features a brief blurb summary of the critics' reviews, called the "Critical Consensus", used in that entry's Tomatometer aggregate score.

These are written by Jeff Giles, a longtime author for the site. In FebruaryRotten Tomatoes added an "Audience Says" section; similar to the "Critics Consensus", it summarizes the reviews noted by registered users into a concise blurb. The Rotten Tomatoes staff noted that for any given film, if there were any external factors such as controversies or issues affecting the sentiments of a film, they may address it in the "Audience Says" section to give users the most relevant info regarding their viewing choices.

Localized versions of the site available in the United Kingdom, India, and Australia were discontinued following the acquisition of Rotten Tomatoes by Fandango. The Mexican version of the site, Tomatazos [ es ]remains active. The Rotten Tomatoes API provides limited access to critic and audience ratings and reviews, allowing developers to incorporate Rotten Tomatoes data on other websites.

The free service is intended for use in the US only; permission is required for use elsewhere. Major Hollywood studios have come to see Rotten Tomatoes as a potential threat to their marketing. As a result of this concern, 20th Century Fox commissioned a study, titled "Rotten Tomatoes and Box Office", that stated the website combined senh duong biography books social media was going to be an increasingly serious complication for the film business: "The power of Rotten Tomatoes and fast-breaking word of mouth will only get stronger.

Many Millennials and even Gen X-ers now vet every purchase through the Internet, whether it's restaurants, video games, make-up, consumer electronics or movies. As they get older and comprise an even larger share of total moviegoers, this behavior is unlikely to change". The scores have reached a level of online ubiquity which film companies have found threatening.

For instance, the scores are regularly posted in Google search results for films so reviewed. Furthermore, the scores are prominently featured in Fandango's popular ticket purchasing website, on its mobile app, on popular streaming services like Peacockand on Flixster, which led to complaints that "rotten" scores damaged films' performances.

Others have argued that filmmakers and studios have only themselves to blame if Rotten Tomatoes produces a bad score, as this only reflects a poor reception among film critics. As one independent film distributor marketing executive noted, "To me, it's a ridiculous argument that Rotten Tomatoes is the problem Some studios have suggested embargoing or cancelling early critic screenings in a response to poor reviews prior to a film's release affecting pre-sales and opening weekend numbers.

I don't think there is one". Conversely, Warner Bros. That marketing tactic can backfire, and drew the vocal disgust of influential critics such as Roger Ebert, who was prone to derisively condemn such moves, with gestures such as "The Wagging Finger of Shame", on At the Movies. On February 26,in response to issues surrounding coordinated " bombing " of user reviews for several films, most notably Captain Marvel and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalkerprior to their release, the site announced that user reviews would no longer be accepted until a film is publicly released.

The site also announced plans to introduce a system for "verified" reviews, and that the "Want to See" statistic would now be expressed as a number so that it would not be confused with the audience score. Despite arguments on how Rotten Tomatoes scores impact the box office, [ 58 ] academic researchers so far have not found evidence that Rotten Tomatoes ratings affect box office performance.

In AprilThe Hollywood Reporter reported that directors' past Rotten Tomatoes scores are brought up by producers in pitch meetings. One director representative said, "Critical acclaim is now gamified. The Rotten Tomatoes score is the first thing people look at when I go pitch a director. It inevitably senh duong biographies books decision-making around hiring a director.

In Januaryon the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the New York Film Critics Circleits chairman Armond White cited Rotten Tomatoes in particular and film review aggregators in general as examples of how "the Internet takes revenge on individual expression". He said they work by "dumping reviewers onto one website and assigning spurious percentage-enthusiasm points to the discrete reviews".

According to White, such websites "offer consensus as a substitute for assessment". Director and producer Brett Ratner has criticized the website for "reducing hundreds of reviews culled from print and online sources into a popularized aggregate score", while expressing respect for traditional film critics. Vulture ran an article in September that raised several criticisms of Rotten Tomatoes's system, including the ease at which large companies are able to manipulate reviewer ratings.

The article cited publicity company Bunker 15 as an example of how scores can be boosted by recruiting obscure, often self-published reviewers, using the example of 's Ophelia. Rotten Tomatoes responded by delisting several Bunker 15 films, including Ophelia. We have a dedicated team who monitors our platforms regularly and thoroughly investigates and resolves any suspicious activity.

WIRED published an article in February written by Christopher Null, a former film critic, that argued such methods are standard activities performed by all PR agencies. In particular, Null points out that sponsoring legitimate, honest reviews has a long history in other industries and is a "common tactic employed by indie titles to get visibility.

If the Tomatometer is slighted so completely to one set of tastes that drives box office in the United States, absolutely". Some critics viewed the move as a ploy to promote the web series, but some argued that the move was a deliberate conflict of interest on account of Warner Bros. The New York Times aggregated statistics on the critical reception of audience scores versus critic scores, and noticed in almost every genre that "The public rates a movie more positively than do the critics.

The only exceptions are black comedies and documentaries. Critics systematically rate films in these genres more highly than do Rotten Tomatoes users". Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikidata item. This is the latest accepted revisionreviewed on 29 January American review aggregator for film and television.

Rotten Tomatoes's homepage as of April 1, Warner Bros. History [ edit ]. Features [ edit ]. Critics' aggregate score [ edit ]. Golden Tomato Awards [ edit ]. Audience score and reviews [ edit ]. Localized versions [ edit ]. API [ edit ]. Influence [ edit ]. Criticism [ edit ]. Oversimplification [ edit ]. Review manipulation [ edit ]. Other criticisms [ edit ].

See also [ edit ]. References [ edit ]. Archived from the original on April 8, Retrieved May 2, Engadget AOL.