Over the past week, we have received quite a bit of flack in response to our review of Finding Nemo. According to Rotten Tomatoes ours was the only bad review in the country. We have been accused of everything from manipulating the system in order to bring business to the site to simply being idiots and being wrong about this movie.

I won’t go into whether Steven Snyder is right about Finding Nemo. You can decide this for yourself – both mine and his reviews are posted.

I do wish to respond to the charge that Zertinet has used this review in order to further its own interests. In light of the recent events in journalism and news coverage in general, it’s important that your readers and viewers do not feel that you are pushing an agenda. Zertinet Movies is a completely independently run web site. There is no ‘corporation’ behind the site to make any money. Throughout it’s entire existence Zertinet has taken in less than $10. This is not our purpose. We put Zertinet up in order to encourage discussion and promote good film – and the appreciation of these films. We seek to expose our readers to good films and also along the way expose them to bad film.

Zertinet Movies will also not apologize for its review. Many people pointed out to us that since everyone else liked the movie, Steve must be wrong. I won’t accept this logic. Even classic films like Citizen Kane (regarded by many today as the best movie ever) received bad reviews by some when they opened. Being the odd man out doesn’t make you wrong. People have given wonderful reviews to movies I’ve hated. I’ve read a whole series of reviews by well known critics that I thought were wrong. The academy has given three academy awards for best picture to movies that I refuse to sit through.

In the case of Finding Nemo, I was amazed that there were not more bad reviews. It is not an absolutely amazing movie. Even looking at the reviews, it is not receiving four star ratings from many critics – and mostly these claims are unsupported. There will always be differing opinions about movies, we encourage these.

In regards to weather Steve’s review was actually a ‘rotten’ review or a ‘fresh’ review I find this kind of argument difficult. This was actually assigned by Rotten Tomatoes independent from our input, however, I didn’t disagree with that rating. Steve said it himself (words that have been thrown back at me repeatedly), “None of this is to say that “Nemo” is a bad film.” Yes, that’s right, Nemo is not a bad film. It also isn’t a good film. Trying to put movies into an either up or down, or fresh or rotten rating is futile. These are all relative ratings. Personally, I wouldn’t give a film a fresh rating unless I gave it at least 3 ½ stars. As far as I’m concerned that is a fresh movie. Especially today there are so many films that simply exist. They are neither bad nor good.

I do thank those of you that wrote in. It was nice to read from some of our readings and I was sure to forward most of the comments on to Steven Snyder. I must admit reading some emails I found myself laughing out loud. I find it amazing that some people still think we’d be either embarrassed or feel stupid for being outside the mainstream. (FYI: Slant Magazine also gave the movie 2 ½ Stars).

Keep coming back to the site and feel free to offer commentary in the future, this has been a great week for us and an interesting one to see how this situation has played out.