My (Now Obsolete) Ratings… “System(s)”

No more ratings.  No more numbers, or thumbs, or stars, or whatever.  It’s dumb.  It puts an unnecessary stamp on opinion, which just renders it moot.

But, I used to do it, so, here’s how it used to be (first the “thumbs” method in 2012, then the “numbers game” for pre-2012):

As stated in my most recent review of Mars, I have become uncomfortable with assigning numbers to this stuff.  I was already against giving “.5’s” to movies (see below somewhere), and after looking back over my number grades from last year, I’ve decided to nix them altogether.  Why?  Well, 26 out of the 46 movies I reviewed got either a 7 or an 8.  Now, that’s not to say I don’t think they deserved it, it’s just… well, Attack The Block, Rango, and Dragon Tattoo all got “8’s,” and they’re wildly different movies that I feel completely different about, and assigning that same number, even though I certainly dug all of them about as much as each other, just seems… wrong.  And sort of OCD.

Also, opinions evolve over time (and subsequent viewings).  However, I’m not much of a revisionist-historian like George Lucas, so I’d likely never go back and change a rating or a review if I suddenly hated something I used to like, or vice-versa.*  But assigning a number seems so FINAL.  Like I’m not allowed to keep my views open-ended.  For a more in-depth explanation of this, CLICK HERE and skip to the first few paragraphs just past the movie list.

So, for now at least, I’ll likely adopt a much simpler “thumbs up/thumbs down”-type thing (like Roger Ebert used to do before he became an internet troll), with qualifiers (e.g. “A Somewhat Unenthusiastic Thumbs-Up”).

But if you delve into the “archives” here (movies released before 2012), this is what the rating system looked like:

The Ratings System

10 – Classic

9 – Awesome

8 – “I’d buy that for a dollar!”

7 – Great

6 – Good

5 – Average**

4 – Not So Much

3 – “You tried your best and you failed, miserably.  The lesson is: never try.”

2 – Crap

1 – Twilight

I don’t give 0’s.  If a movie gets made, it gets a score. 0 is not a score.

“Nothin’ from nothin’ leaves nothin’/You gotta have somethin’/If you wanna be with me.”

–Billy Preston

I don’t do fractions.  If I started giving .5’s to stuff then in reality it would be a scale of 1-19 (think about it.  With math).  If I started giving .25’s to stuff then it would actually be a scale of 1 to… 37?  Something like that.

“You can’t travel in space, you can’t go out into space, you know, without, like, you know, uh, with fractions, okay? What are you going to land on – one-quarter, three-eighths? What are you going to do when you go from here to Venus or something?”

–Dennis Hopper

*Except… that’s exactly what I have now done with my reviews of both John Carter of Mars and Wrath Of The Titans.  Mostly because I’m silly.

** I realize that in a scale of 1-10 (with no 0’s), “Average” would actually fall someplace in-between 5 & 6.  See above for why I don’t care.

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