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When we launched our site in 2001, we really didn't give a lot of thought to how to rate the movies (aside from designing a goofy little bloody severed thumb logo). We figured a range of zero to five seemed reasonable, and just took off from there.
As we went along, however, it started to feel more and more uncomfortable. The more movies we reviewed, the harder it got to assign a rating. Once we decided on a number, seeing it a list with other movies given the same number frequently led to second-guessing and endless comparisons of which is better, this one or that one. And it got much worse once we started receiving emails from directors wanting to send us their DVDs. These movies weren't canned studio product, they were made by real people who'd worked hard on them, people who would be reading our review. We feel an obligation to provide honest, serious feedback, and we came to the conclusion that forcing ourselves to whittle down all our (highly subjective) reactions and thoughts about a movie to an arbitrary number was simply too narrow.
Of course, given the proliferation of VH1-style "Top 100 Blah" lists, rankings obviously hold some appeal, probably because they provide fanboys a golden opportunity to complain about all the ways the reviewer got the list totally wrong. We've participated in similar discussions ourselves, and we certainly don't want to deny anyone the opportunity to inform us how wrong we are. While they can be fun, it seems to us that rankings like that are mostly intended simply to incite controversy. To take an example from the world of music reviews (another frequently ranked art form), how is it meaningful to proclaim that Led Zeppelin is the greatest rock band in history? By what standards? What, exactly, are you comparing? And then if someone else comes along and says no, The Beatles are the greatest, it's just silly to pretend that there's some kind of cosmic rock band yardstick you can use to quantify and compare the amount of awesomeness. Eventually, it's going to come down to personal preference; some people prefer one, some people prefer the other. There is no one right answer, and that's exactly the problem we were having. Assigning a number meant we were trying to quantify an experience which is entirely subjective.
This doesn't mean that we think all movies are equivalent, or that we're going to stop giving the painfully awful ones the drubbing they deserve. We're just going to let our reviews cover what we liked and didn't like, and limit the ranking to whether we think it's worth your time to see. Of course, on some level all the movies we watch are worth seeing to us, anyway; otherwise we'd find something else to do with our free time. Since not everyone has the level of interest that we do, we rate our movies "see it" only if we would recommend it a friend. The question we ask ourselves in determining the rating is, "Is this worth adding to a Netflix queue?" We hope that this will a better system both for us and for our readers.
Barbara May
May 9, 2007
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