The other day I was looking for a good movie to watch. I'm unsure how to go about finding a good movie as I think there is a sliding scale - ranging from crappy to epic. This, however, becomes the problem. I've been subjected to several movie rating systems all of which are similar, different, confusing, unrealistic, irrelevant, and frustrating.
Movies are rated in a variety of ways. Seskel and Ebert devised a simple binary system of "thumbs up or thumbs down." This is perhaps the most solid and definitive version of ranking ever. Don't trifle with a sliding scale. This is a see it/don't see it scale. Cut and dried. Straight forward. Aweful.
Rotten Tomatoes uses two "% like" scales - one for critics and one for the community of participants. This one is good, but I find myself placing a threshold on it because it is too vast. So, a 67% liked movie is OK, but a 66%er is right out!
The most common ratings for movies is the star method. 5 stars=10 ratings. Why? Half stars. Why not just have 10 whole stars instead of having to mutilate and sever stars or worse, display stars and then a 1/2 next to it. Its biggest problem in my way of thinking is that it seems non-committal. Is it 2 stars or 3? Oh, 2 1/2 stars? Well, in that case...and I once again set a threshold. Must be more than 2.5 stars for me to enjoy it.
The problem with ANY ranking system is that there is subjectivity and temporal issues. To combat this, I think I'll have to find reviews of a dozen movies or so by a number of critics and see if I agree with them. Once I've vetted my synchro-critic then I can rely on his reviews. And reviews on recent movies should be stamped with an expiration date. Review from 1977: "The special effects in Star Wars are extraordianry." Revised 2011: "The special effects in Star Wars look like paper models were cut out of construction paper and colored with crayon."
I think Dr. Doolittle III is so bad it actually owes me a star.
3 comments:
Welcome back, missing blogger-man.
You should know by now that when you need to know what movie you should see, you just call me and I will tell you. Easy. No rating systems, no websites. You could even text!
I echo those sentiments, sentiments, sentiments, sentiments... Let's start a crusade to ban the half-star. This may have originated from Hollywood-types only comfortable quantifying up through one hand. And you can always bend one finger. But if you go to two hands, then you have to put something down, and it's just not worth all that trouble for them. This is a theory, mind you, as it's not proven yet whether they can even count as high as five, but I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt for the sake of argument and for all intents and purposes, so that's giving them a boatload of leeway.
At any rate, it's silly-and-a-half to have a rating system that starts at 5 choices (1, 2, 3, 4, 5 stars), and then realizing what should've been obvious before that five different levels of quantifying the cinematic experience are insufficient, so they decided they needed ten levels, but rather than extend it to 10 stars, they kept the 5-star maximum, and then just inserted imaginary partial stars into the equation. I almost wonder if they didn't want to have to go back and adjust their previous ratings, which only went up to 5. Because if they had Casablanca at a 5 before, and suddenly new pictures like the Transformers octogology started getting 7 and 8 stars with regularity, it wouldn't reflect well on Bogey.
The half-star has always bugged me to the nth degree. A rating should never have to involve anything less than whole numbers. It's antithetical to try to squeeze in fractions into a singular rating system. I have a friend who rates all his movies 0-5, with increments of .5, and the whole thing is curious to me.
And the other salient point you alluded to is that stars don't cut in half that easily. A star has five points, so now we're attempting to reduce it to 2½ points. Anyone have any clue what a ½ point in geographical terms is?
In the end, stars in any amount sound too grade schoolish to me. We used to get gold stars in the 1st grade for certain achievements, and we thought stars were special, telling us we were special too. And apparently that sentiment stayed with a lot of us until we're applying stars everywhere. Is it a good hotel? I don't know, but it's a 4-star hotel, so it's only missing 1 star, so I suppose that must be good. The thing about hotels is that I think they went up to 4 stars, and then that wasn't good enough, so they added another star. This is known as star inflation. If you need to spend more stars, just create another level of star.
Myself, I can do without them, and have subsisted quite nicely since matriculating into elementary school. There, we use real-life symbols, icons, clip art, and paraphernalia. Heck with those old shiny stars. They're so 1969s.
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