Rotten Tomatoes: the closest thing our fractured, post-gatekeeper culture has to an arbiter of good taste. This is a really interesting article about a site I use all the time:: Tim Ryan is an excitable 42-year-old film savant with a mop of reddish hair. In his early twenties, he worked as a news­paper reporter in Rhode Island and spent his downtime bingeing the classics. “Like Godard, and Russian propaganda films,” he says. Eventually he moved to the Bay Area, where the fledgling movie-rating website Rotten Tomatoes was then based. In his quest to devour the entire canon, Ryan had become a Rotten Tomatoes obsessive. When a job opened up at the site in 2004, it felt like a life-changing opportunity. He landed it, and now Ryan compares himself to the Mark Wahlberg character in the critically panned movie Rock Star. He went from “being the biggest fan to being the lead singer.”

Ryan is the site's longest-tenured employee, and he recently committed himself to an ambitious project he'd been chipping away at for a while. When I visited the Rotten Tomatoes offices—now in Beverly Hills—in October, he put it this way: “One thing I've been thinking about is, what if Rotten Tomatoes always existed?” Ryan was going to rate every movie ever made. Or, more precisely, every review of every movie ever made.

The world's first feature film, called The Story of the Kelly Gang, is an hour-plus romp about a band of outlaw Australian bushrangers. Events depicted include cattle theft, bank robbery, and attempted train derailment. It premiered on December 26, 1906, in Melbourne's Athenaeum Hall, to general delirium. A day later came the world's first proper feature-film review, which Ryan tracked down in a digitized version of the Melbourne paper The Age. From the review:

“A conscientious and, on the whole, a cred­itable, effort has been made to reproduce the tragedies as they occurred, and if there were any imperfections in detail probably few in the hall had memories long enough to detect them.”

The movie played for five sold-out weeks at the Athenaeum, before migrating to a ­theater in Sydney. So Ryan checked out Sydney's Daily Telegraph, where he found world movie review number two.

“The films are clear and distinct, the chief actors concerned in the bush drama are fairly recognizable, the photographs are taken in “Kelly country” and after due allowance is made for certain acknowledged liberties taken, the illustrated record is probably as satisfactory as anything of the kind procurable at this distant date.”

Then, 112 years after they were first published and immediately forgotten, the reviews were uploaded to Rotten Tomatoes. Ryan interpreted the first review as “Fresh,” and the second one “Rotten.” Until further notice, and possibly until the end of time, the internet's authoritative appraisal of The Story of the Kelly Gang will feature one glistening red tomato and one fetid green splat.