Pocket Universe

Back in 1998 or so, there was a website called MovieCritic.com. (Don’t bother going there; the URL redirects you to Adobe now.) The site contained a database of movie ratings from countless people across the internet, and used proprietary LikeMinds software to would recommend movies that it thought you would enjoy, based on your ratings and the ratings of others with similar (or dissimilar) tastes. I was a big fan of the system, and used it for a while to choose new movies to watch. Sadly, it went under a few years later, never to be heard from again. (One of the comments on this blog entry seems to have a good timeline about what happened to the site.) And while other sites have tried to emulate its system, I have yet to find one that works as well, or at least seems to.

So what does this have to do with my movie rating scale? Very simple: When rating movies on Movie Critic, they used a 13-point scale that seems to work well. Ratings range from Hated It at the bottom, to Tolerated It, Liked It, Really Liked It, and Loved It, with two notches in between each. It seems to offer a bit more granularity than a traditional five-star scale, but doesn’t have the unbalanced A-to-F curve of a 10-point scale, where people presume that anything below a 6 is a failing grade. By having two notches between each movie, it seems (at least to me) easy to think of a movie that falls maybe one notch short of Really Liked It, or something that has something extra special that pushes it a notch above. Pirates of the Caribbean, for example, ranks one notch below Loved It: It has plenty of spectacle, interesting visuals, and several clever plot twists, but it lacks that extra emotional pull of a movie like The Iron Giant. (If you didn’t cry at the end of that movie, you may be a robot yourself.) You can get your gut-feeling reaction to a movie, then figure out if it has any elements that raise or lower it in relation to that score.

The other thing I like about the Movie Critic scale is that it is unabashedly subjective. It’s not trying to be a scale of the Best Movies of All Time; in fact, the Movie Critic personnel always advised the user to rate movies based on personal feelings, not on how they thought the should feel about the movie. It lets the reviewer be more honest with himself and say, “Hey, I understand that this may not be the greatest movie ever made, but I loved it.” I remember on IMDb, when Return of the King came out, it got tons of 10/10 ratings, and then a bunch of 1/10 ratings. The 1/10 people were trying to balance out the 10s, saying, “How can you give this movie a 10? Are you really saying it’s the greatest movie ever made?” They were confusing an objective system with a subjective one, when no rating scale can really be objective. So maybe 10/10 says to people, “This is one of the finest films ever to grace the cinema,” but “Loved It” just says, “I loved it!”

So that’s the whole explanation. For most movies, I could give you my gut feeling about it, and then tell you what specific examples nudged the movie up or down on the scale. Plus, it allows you to use the whole scale: You might be hard pressed to name the worst or best movies ever made, but every can name at least one movie that they have loved or hated. (And if you can’t, rent Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone in 3D and get back to me.) The next time you see a movie, try assigning it a score on this scale. It may force you to articulate what you really liked or disliked about the movie.