What happened next? Less so. After spending a year recutting the film with the help of reshoots, Super Troopers<\/em> hit theaters in February 2002 and went on to gross $23 million with glowing audience reviews (and $80 million on home video, per the filmmaker). Reviewers were not as enthusiastic. \u201cThe paper I read every morning, the New York Times<\/em>, didn\u2019t love the movie, which is totally fine. It is what\u2019s expected when you have highfalutin reviewers writing about R-rated comedies. Reviewers often tee off on comedy and horror because they can, and they get more notice and likes when they are mean.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Many were mean to Super Troopers<\/em>, proven by the film\u2019s 36% rotten score on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. But Chandrasekhar isn\u2019t here to rail on reviewers. \u201cTo be 100% clear, I have no problem with reviewers, and there is a value to them,\u201d he notes. \u201cBut I remember thinking at the time, \u2018Who is a reviewer?\u2019 Oftentimes, they are great writers with immense power at newspapers who get to watch movies for a living and recommend them to their readers. But, at the end of the day, they\u2019re strangers. When was the last time you walked up to a stranger on the street and asked them what movie you should see?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s why the value, for him, came as an inspiration to create a new kind of platform that put the power of recommending films back into the hands of the people. \u201cAbout three years ago, I started outlining what I hoped would be my revenge app to supplant the way Rotten Tomatoes influences the film business,\u201d details Chandrasekhar. \u201cI came up with the idea, met with two app developers, and probably had 10 meetings over Zoom. I was about to write a check to them to help me build the app, and then they told me that they had been harboring similar views about reviews on Yelp and Amazon, asking, \u2018Who are these people writing reviews?\u2019 So, we combined forces and built this machine.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n They call it Vouch Vault. The goal is simple: \u201cTake recommendation power from anonymous strangers and give it to the people whose tastes you know and trust.\u201d It\u2019s a social media platform on which users share just about anything they love \u2014 movies, TV shows, books, podcasts, hotels, restaurants, cars, products, museums, services, etc. \u2014 in any city.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Chandrasekhar personally vouches for his Tesla, Osteria La Buca restaurant in L.A., Randolph Beer in Brooklyn, and the sound experts at King Soundworks for postproduction services.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt\u2019s the Instagram of recommendations,\u201d he says. \u201cYou follow friends and famous people and see what they like and recommend. The real purity of this will come from friends and finding out what your friends like so you can check it out.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The app has a special feature called a \u201cTry Vault,\u201d where users can bookmark recommendations that they want to try at a later date, and Chandrasekhar says searching hashtags can be a user-friendly way to find recommendations in other cities. Want to find the best burger in Paris, search a hashtag. But beyond burgers, Chandrasekhar also sees it as a \u201cmemory machine\u201d of sorts that will allow users to store a digital record of everything they like for friends and family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI\u2019m hoping this will obviously be a success but also offer another way to have a collective memory bank of all the great pop culture pieces that you might want to share with your kids someday,\u201d explains the filmmaker, whose [newest] film, Easter Sunday<\/em>, starring stand-up superstar Jo Koy, came out Aug. 5.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Speaking of success, Chandrasekhar has invested some of his own money to make it work, along with investments from his fellow developers, some family members, and friends. The app could be monetized through advertising and affiliate links, and though it\u2019s still in the early stages, he has big plans to expand with the possible addition of video features. He even hopes to get talents like Quentin Tarantino or Willie Nelson (a longtime friend he met while directing 2005\u2019s The Dukes of Hazzard<\/em>) to offer their Vaults. (About Nelson: \u201cHe\u2019s a valuable fountain of information that will not always be there.\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Asked to sum up his ultimate hopes for the venture, Chandrasekhar throws a curveball and gets political in closing. \u201cI really believe Vouch Vault can have a unifying effect. If you see Republicans and Democrats all liking the same films, we need that. We need unity in our culture.\u201d That goes for reviewers, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2014 Reprinted from the Hollywood Reporter, article by Chris Gardner<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Jay Chandrasekhar \u201990 launched a new app called Vouch Vault, to put the power of reviews in the hands of the people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1263,"featured_media":11385,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[711,652,58,406,1391,114],"coauthors":[1392],"class_list":["post-11384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-endeavor","tag-app","tag-comedy","tag-film","tag-social-media","tag-sundance","tag-tech"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/palXSH-2XC","amp_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2023\/01\/Jay.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11384","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1263"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11384"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11384\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11631,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11384\/revisions\/11631"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11384"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=11384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2023\/01\/Revenge_App.jpg\")
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n