Movieline

The Great Lorax/John Carter Hypocrisy

Stephanie Zacharek already kind of addressed this phenomenon in her review, but as John Carter postmortems go, yeesh: "[W]hat's really sad is when you look at the Rotten Tomatoes pages for The Lorax and John Carter. Among 'top critics,' The Lorax has a 48 percent fresh rating, and most of the reviews I've seen have been pretty respectful. (Except for the New Yorker, which says 'The badness of the picture is a shock,' and the New York Times, which called it 'a noisy, useless piece of junk.') And critics pretty much piled onto John Carter — among 'top critics,' it's at 35 percent fresh, with people outright gloating about how expensive it was and how much it falls short. It's like there's a collective agreement that The Lorax is too big and too much of a mainstream juggernaut to call out — but the herd decided it was okay to feed on John Carter." [io9]