TV/Movies Megathread

[Grey Fox]

As usual, Ide is wrong.

[frunk]

A while back I had a realization on the important difference between rating and ranking for subjective assessment.

A rating is a qualitative measure which ideally should have a relatively course system. 1-5 stars, A,B,C,D,F, thumbs up or down.  It tells the consumer how much attention the item being judged is worth giving.  Finer gradations aren't particularly useful since the finer the distinction the fewer people will agree with the assessment.

A ranking is stacking the items in an ascending order of quality.  It relies on fine distinctions specific to the person creating the ranking and would most likely not match any other person on the planet.  The utility of such lists is in the reasons for specific ranking ("Magnificent 7 is better than 7 Samurai because I like cowboy hats") and reveals a great deal about the ranker and in a well executed ranking the items being ranked as well.

Aggregate rankings from a pool of rankers aren't rankings in any real sense, and are better off considered as ratings.  The reason for the fine distinctions are completely lost and the utility is strictly in saying "these items are generally liked, these other ones less so, these others even less".

[Ideologue]

As usual, Ide is wrong.

I'm pretty sure I'm not.  Most people's favorite movies aren't the "best made" movies, let alone the most "important" movies.

[Ideologue]

A while back I had a realization on the important difference between rating and ranking for subjective assessment.

A rating is a qualitative measure which ideally should have a relatively course system. 1-5 stars, A,B,C,D,F, thumbs up or down.  It tells the consumer how much attention the item being judged is worth giving.  Finer gradations aren't particularly useful since the finer the distinction the fewer people will agree with the assessment.

A ranking is stacking the items in an ascending order of quality.  It relies on fine distinctions specific to the person creating the ranking and would most likely not match any other person on the planet.  The utility of such lists is in the reasons for specific ranking ("Magnificent 7 is better than 7 Samurai because I like cowboy hats") and reveals a great deal about the ranker and in a well executed ranking the items being ranked as well.

I dunno.  For the most part, I conceive of film reviews and ratings primarily as a form of entertainment, with a secondary purpose of pointing out obscurer but interesting films I might not have heard of, and the notion that I should watch movies recommended by Richard Roeper or whoever only a tertiary concern, though with the right pitch you can sell anything.

Rankings serve the same purposes.

Aggregate rankings from a pool of rankers aren't rankings in any real sense, and are better off considered as ratings.  The reason for the fine distinctions are completely lost and the utility is strictly in saying "these items are generally liked, these other ones less so, these others even less".

Yep.  And since most people have short memories, it's disproportionately weighted to moves that have come out in the past decade (or in some cases, the past two or three years).  It's also direly susceptible to fanboyism.

[frunk]

Yep.  And since most people have short memories, it's disproportionately weighted to moves that have come out in the past decade (or in some cases, the past two or three years).  It's also direly susceptible to fanboyism.

That's specific to this list, but any given aggregate ranking, even if you pooled well respected critics with long term memories, would still be a rating rather than a ranking.

[Eddie Teach]

As usual, Ide is wrong.

I'm pretty sure I'm not.  Most people's favorite movies aren't the "best made" movies, let alone the most "important" movies.

You're wrong if you think a large group of people trying to objectively pick the "best-made" movies would include Rope in their top 10.

[Valmy]

Seriously, The Breakfast Club at 38?  ^infinity

I love the Empire Strikes Back but having it on a top movies of all time list, especially as #1 ( ) sort of disqualifies anything else it could say.

[Ideologue]

As usual, Ide is wrong.

I'm pretty sure I'm not.  Most people's favorite movies aren't the "best made" movies, let alone the most "important" movies.

You're wrong if you think a large group of people trying to objectively pick the "best-made" movies would include Rope in their top 10.

Now, I don't know.  About the only close to objective criterion would be "difficulty."  Rope was pretty difficult to shoot (actually probably not as difficult as I intuit, since it's ultimately not too different from a filmed stage play, but there is a lot of intricate camera, set, and actor movement, and expert timing was involved).  Russian Ark was notoriously difficult; iirc, they almost ran out of money trying to get the single take to work.

There'd possibly also be a lot of stunt-heavy movies on that list.  Road Warrior, Death Proof, Steamboat Bill, Jr., Safety Last!, that sort of thing.

[Ideologue]

Apropos of nothing, but welcome news: John McTiernan's out of prison!

[Sheilbh]

I watched Meet the Police Commissioner which I initially thought was an Office style comedy with lines like 'and these are the different kinds of policing priorities, in terms of priority'. About half-way through I had the horrifying realisation that it was an actual documentary

[Sheilbh]

Also started watching The Americans.

There are just not enough programs with Cap Weinberger nowadays

[mongers]

I watched Meet the Police Commissioner which I initially thought was an Office style comedy with lines like 'and these are the different kinds of policing priorities, in terms of priority'. About half-way through I had the horrifying realisation that it was an actual documentary

Welcome to The Land of Bullshit. 

[Josquius]

Even assuming a reader's choice poll isn't a complete waste of time already, lists like that really need to disqualify movies from the past ten years.  The Dark Knight Rises?  Star Trek?  Star Trek Into Darkness?  Are you fucking kidding me?

True to an extent, flavours of the month are always totally over-represented .
However, I think there is an at least sub conscious awareness of this these days, which can lead to the opposite phenomena- people over-rating old films as because they are old they have to be good.
I greatly question any lists that include a lot of silent films for instance. Sound is a key part of what makes a film good or bad. Advancing technology does, in theory at least, allow for better films to be made.

[11B4V]

Even assuming a reader's choice poll isn't a complete waste of time already, lists like that really need to disqualify movies from the past ten years.  The Dark Knight Rises?  Star Trek?  Star Trek Into Darkness?  Are you fucking kidding me?

I greatly question any lists that include a lot of silent films for instance. Sound is a key part of what makes a film good or bad. Advancing technology does, in theory at least, allow for better films to be made.

Ditto

[Ideologue]

I'm not sure where I stand on silent pictures.  Obviously, some are great, and would be worse without sound; one of my very favorite movies, The General, is silent, and needs to be silent.  Phantom of the Opera, maybe somewhat ironically, would also be a very different thing, and probably a lesser thing, with diagetic sound.  For whatever reason, I've found that silence works really well for comedies, possibly because silent acting tends to be broad and physical gags are a lot easier to do without real dialogue than it is to generate emotion.

I agree that when a silent movie is bad or boring, being silent does make it actively worse.  Silence has a distancing effect; it's artificial to the hearing person, especially one who's been raised with talkies.  Even the shittiest sound picture almost invariably demands some kind of engagement because our brains are trained to recognize it as something that's happening.  Silent pictures don't: especially if you watch 99 (or 999) talkies for every silent, they can easily come off as some kind of art installation.  If it appeals to you, you may wind up loving it, but if it doesn't interest you, it is easy for it to become truly repulsive.  I've not watched nearly as many silents as Sav, nor as many as I should, but it's clear already that they fall into a bimodal distribution, with two clusters around A and C, rather than forming a bell curve with a peak around B as talkies do.  I think I've only given one silent a B, Thief of Bagdad, because it's difficult to reconcile its really, really funny, extremely active first thirty minutes, and the one-of-a-kind awesome production design throughout, with the fact that it's at least forty-five minutes too long and ultimately so repetitive and pointless I fell asleep in the middle of it.*

I recognize this as a bias, though.

*Then again, I fell asleep in the middle of Fantasia, an easy A+; there needs to be developed a theory of an entirely new quasi-genre of movies that are better considered "hypnotic" rather than "boring."  I suggest calling them "easy-going entertainment."  It would be a nice umbrella for narrative-poor yet still-interesting movies that one tends to be lulled into a trance by, such as Sleeping Beauty, Koyaanisqatsi, Leviathan, and maybe 2001: A Space Odyssey, depending on your temperament.