My God, it’s full of stars…
Over at the Anvil & Sprocket, we rate movies as “Keepers,” “Renters,” and “Bombs.” Ebert & Roeper use their thumbs. Everybody else who works solo (including Ebert’s solo column) uses stars or a similar symbol – except for “Entertainment Weekly,” who prefers to treat the films (and their readers) as if they were still in grade school.
I like our system. Stars and grade-school report cards always seemed arbitrary at best (especially when I was in grade school). And apparently I’m not the only one who thinks so, as evidenced by Roger Ebert’s review of Slither.
There are better movies opening this weekend. There are better movies opening every weekend. But “Slither” has a competence to it, an ability to manipulate obligatory horror scenes in a way that works. Given my theory of the star rating system, which suggests movies should be rated by their genres, “Slither” gets two if “28 Days Later” gets three. On the other hand, “Basic Instinct 2” also opens today, and in the genre of slick and classy big-star thrillers, if “Fatal Attraction” gets 2-1/2 stars, then “Basic Instinct 2” gets 1-1/2. On the third hand, a lot of people would probably enjoy “Basic Instinct 2” more than “Slither.” One of these days, I’m going to have to take that star rating system and feed it to a meat-eating slime-slug.
March 31st, 2006 at 1:12 pm
I like your system, too. The Onion recently started included grade-school-esque ratings along with the reviews, and I worry that I’m sometimes just skipping ahead to that instead of reading the review.
I used to write brief write-ups myself of the movies I watched, but I haven’t done that in months. I keep meaning to get back into it, but it’s difficult finding intelligent things to say about the films. (Everybody thinks they’re a critic; only a select few are really good at it.)
At the time, I used a star system. As I wrote then, it wasn’t an exact science, but I do think they’re useful. Maybe more for the reader than the reviewer, but still, they have their place. Basically, I broke it down like this:
Four stars: For one reason or another, I think it’s brilliant.
Three and a half stars: It approaches brilliance, but doesn’t quite reach it.
Three stars: It’s a very good or enjoyable film.
Two and a half stars: I liked it, but I was more than a little disappointed for some reason.
Two stars: I liked parts of it, but not all or even most of it.
One and a half stars: It’s a pretty bad movie, but there were moments that suggested it could have been better.
One star: It’s a bad movie.
No stars: Avoid at all cost.
What exactly made a movie 4 stars instead of 3 and a half, or 2 and a half instead of 2—well, yeah, there it could seem a little arbitrary. But the starring often helped me understand what I was trying to say by giving me a frame of reference. I knew x was better than y but not as good as z.
Ebert, whose reviews I read each week, seems to view the rankings as a necessary evil. But he’s not saying below that films shouldn’t be ranked—just that rankings have different meanings in different genres, or for moviegoers with different expectations.