Rating the movies

[Original Post 1/31/07]

As an introduction:

I keep track of things. Not all things. I'm not that compulsive. But some things.

I keep track of

the DVDs I own. In fact, I keep track of when we've seen them most recently (though, again, I'm not compulsive -- I know I miss tracking some viewings.)
And I keep track of the movies I've seen. I have a Word document that has the movies I've seen since June 14, 2000.
I keep track of them in a table, like this:

Title	Rating	Type	Date	Actors	Notes
Akeelah and the Bee	86	D	1/25/07	Laurence Fishburne Angela Bassett Keke Palmer	OK, so it was somewhat predictable, and some of the conflict relied on a too-detached single mom, but the acting was very good, and the emotional payoff was great. And “Javier” was priceless.
Click	59	C	1/25/07	Adam Sandler Christopher Walken Kate Bekinsale	If only Sandler weren’t so enamored with the crude humor, I could have liked this enough to recommend it. Honestly, how funny is it seeing a dog humping a stuffed animal? Again. And Again?
Monty Python's Life of Brian	82	C	1/26/07	Graham Chapman John Cleese Eric Idle Michael Palin Terry Jones Terry Gilliam	Still funny after all these years. The humorous takes on the infighting are some of the best parts. But the very best part is the ending song!

As you can see, I rate each movie with a number. The scale is 0 - 100. In general, a movie needs to get above a 70 before I would recommend it, and generally movies in the 70-80 range would carry conditional recommendations -- I'd recommend it if I knew a particular person liked something that the movie provided.

I try to make a small comment -- a micro-review -- about most of them.

The hardest part of the whole process is assigning a number, and the examples above demonstrate the difficulty. Do I really think "Akeelah and the Bee" is better than "Monty Python's Life of Brian?" Well, it's hard to say. "Brian" means more to me, and on my own, I'd watch "Brian" more often. But for the general viewer, "Akeelah" is going to be more enjoyable. Still, one of the things I try to do is rate the film very soon after I saw it. "Akeelah" got its rating this way -- it's a very emotionally satisfying film, and I may have rated it slightly higher because of the "high" I was on. "Brian," on the other hand, I first saw many years ago, but just recently saw it on DVD. It aged much better than some films from my youth, but I'm clearly ranking it with many years to come down from the initial "high" it engendered.

Nevertheless, I'll keep doing this. It's fun to go back and think about movies I've seen. It's fun to rate them, even if I do have to think "Is 'Brian' better or worse than 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail?'"

Now the stage is set. I could post these micro-reviews in the future, and I have already introduced the "why and how."

Enjoy, if you can.