Rating films is hell

Same (well, Letterboxd is relatively new for me, and I'm only rating moving forward, not going through and rating stuff I watched before).

But for me, writing reviews is as important as rating. Reviews help me have conversations about films if it's been a while since I watched them. Ratings are honestly most useful when I'm asked to recommend something, as it's so easy to sort on IMDb.

The review is there for in depth thoughts or further discussion. The rating is just to give a very basic estimate, really.

Rating are, in a way, useless. Cause a 4/5 is not just a 4/5. There’s so many factors. So many criterias - which also changes with genre etc.

But I like to still rate all movies because again, it’s a good estimate to quickly see how I felt about it.

But I struggle pretty much every time to rate a film. Some days more than others. But yeah, I try my best not to overthink it.

I never skip a rating. If I can't rate something, I probably won't watch it. And the reason is very simple. I want to archive everything I've seen and give a rating to every one of those films. I want to create a sort of hierarchy, but also to remember whatever I saw. If I couldn't log the stuff I watched online, my last resort would be to have a notebook with my ratings. I like to get back to whatever I saw from time to time, and I have "hide seen" on Letterboxd set at all times, too, so I can filter out the stuff I've already seen from lists and somebody's ratings.

Nobody ain't got time for this shit if you watch 5+ movies a day.

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Look, I'm not judging you - after all, I'm posting here myself, but maybe, just maybe, if you spent less time here and more time watching films, maybe, and I stress, maybe your taste would be of some value. Just a thought, ya know.

"and what happens if you skip rating a movie now and then?"

Nothing; the world will go on. It's essential in this business (ratings of any kind) to realize that something like a movie rating is fundamentally subjective. Somebody says Shawshank Redemption is great, but to me, it's pretty good.

When it comes to ratings, two factors count, reliability and validity. Validity is weak at best because it's just your opinion. It's not like measuring the height of Niagara Falls; there's nothing inherently measurable about a movie rating. Reliability is weak because people change and/or don't apply the same standards from one time to the next. I liked Shawshank a lot more than then now so my ratings change.

If you're going to claim any "science" to this, you need standards and benchmarks that other readers can buy into. You probably do not have those.

If this stuff were simple, movie ratings would mean something, but, every movie is great to its promoters and awful to its distractors. It's not science. It's promotion, publicity, attitudes of viewers (I don't like any westerns, e.g.), the mood of the day and the phases of the moon.

The best thing you can do is to state what you like and don't like along with some rationale.

The popularly perceived quality of a movie's filmmaking never factors into my rating. Something can be really well-shot and/or well-acted, but if the story or the characters don't speak to me I'll still be bored to tears. Meanwhile another movie makes no attempt whatsoever to be cinematic art, but if I find myself having a really good time I'll rate it higher than the one that is "objectively" better made. The key factor to any piece of media engaging you is interest. No matter how pretty something looks it means nothing if it doesn't provoke any sort of investment.

Case in point: I gave Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo a higher rating than Mad Max: Fury Road and feel no regrets whatsoever. That's what I felt and I'm sticking with it.

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Rating is hell because it assumes that all the qualities of a work of art can be reduced to a single quantity, a utile referred to as "stars" or "points," but the idea is to compress everything that makes it unique into a subjective average. Bentham reduces everything good in life into a singularity (hedonism as a monism). The result will be a single number to compare to the number produced by some other artwork. Thus we compare apples, oranges, porcupines, and neutrinos by squishing everything into the hydraulic press of starbellied-utility machine--everything comes out covered in stars and we act as if we've been subtle, clever, insightful, and fair.

Yep. That happens in lots of places, not just movies. Humans need something simple that they can understand without thinking too much.....hence, looking at a publication and selecting one movie over the other because one's a 5 and the other a 4. We do the same thing with restaurants, music, whatever. Pick the 5 over the 4. Why? Because an "expert" says so. Movie reviewers are experts.

In addition to that, humans also like simplicity. If someone designed a movie rating scale with multiple factors like plot+imagery+sound+continuity+star power = quality, it might be a good scheme, but it would lose people.

I saw my movie last night because everything else was a 3 and the one I saw was a 4. That's all. No need to know HOW it got to 4.

"Need" is a curious word. Go to any fast food restaurant and you will find large patrons announcing to a clerk, "I need a double-cheeseburger." Most of these patrons do not need a double-cheeseburger, and would, in fact, be better off skipping them entirely. Ditto for our "energy needs." 99.9% of human history occurred without use of electricity. Today, however, we speak of our insatiable (exponentially growing) appetite for electricity as our "energy needs." Perhaps what the planet needs is less energy production. Last time I checked, we need the planet, so it would appear we might need the opposite too.

Humans want many things. We want fast, fun, cheap, simple, easy, and good. Alas, this combination is elusive. One of the many things we desire are desire are "simple" measures of quality. Such measures tend to come up short in the "good" department.

J.S. Mill would reject Bentham's reduction of hedonic calculus to a single measure, offering a qualitative test by which to measure higher and lower pleasures. Today, modern analysts have offered "multi-criterial analysis" as a way out. Critics tend to follow their nose, resulting in heaps of words pointing us at a thicket of ideas. This is not necessarily what we want, but what we want does not always admit of an easy reduction to a number.

EDIT: For those keeping score, that's only three paragraphs dedicated to a single word.

Are they? What school accredits them? What guild assures their quality? What government agency oversees them? So many "experts" are in the hip pocket of the studios that the Tomatometer is basically broken with viewer opinion frequently leaning in the opposite direction of critical opinion.

Our insistence on simple, convenient, and fast has gutted what little expertise we used to have in criticism. As the meme goes, "this is why we can't have nice things." We can't have, by and large, expert criticism because we want simple criticism. Once more through the star-bellied rating machine.
Well, if you don't need to know HOW it was selected, then you might as well use any arbitrary method. Flip a coin, roll a die, pick the DVD that slides farthest down the stairs. I'd wager that you would have better adventures if you strayed from the flock. In my own time as a film reviewer I was exposed to films (sometimes with little to no outside materials) that I would have never watched otherwise (dumb-sounding title, not my genre, hate that actor, etc.) and I was much better for this than for using the weak well-witching method of the aggregate unitary mathematical measure of the enjoyment of others (7 monkeys out of 9!).

Ratings are merely your assurance that you will get a cheeseburger. If you're familiar with your raters (individual or collective) and they give you a mushy number "4" signaling adequate quality, you know nothing more than that the film should be "OK." Odds are it mildly appeals to conventional taste.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with a cheeseburger and cinema is a veritable Burger King (i.e., have it your way). However, I suspect that the annoying "want" of impatient people to have simple numbers does harm when it becomes a fetish, the way, the measure, the number. The tyranny of mediocrity.

I love that Minio unironically loves Starcrash. I love it not only because it is a hilarious choice, but because it shows that Minio stands apart from the pack. I hope we all find a film that we can passionately argue for as much as Minio, but if we stick with the herd we will never find our own Starcrash.

Movie reviewers are experts.
Are they? What school accredits them?

Having done some of that in the past, I know that they don't need accreditation. All they need is to say, "I can do movie reviews". Same thing for TV reviewers. The main talent is a turn of phrase. The writing has to be somewhat entertaining, especially with witty criticism.

The trick is finding a critic that fits you. I think the best critic is like an older relative who not only knows what you'll like, but who will also encourage you to grow into new tastes. Most of today's film journalism is done by internet bloggers who offer hot-takes and/or shill for big budget products (e.g., the sort that RLM lampoon in "The Nerd Crew") and heaven spare me those socially progressive critics who criticize almost exclusively in terms of "The Message" (e.g., Lindsay Ellis who was so pious as to cancel herself when Eye of Sauron turned on her -- no new YouTube essays from her in two years) The closest thing I can think of today is someone like Kermode? Now, I am more likely to see a film because someone here told me to than I would because "the critics" loved it or I read some contemporary review. I've lost faith in the "critics."

Ironically, when it comes to movie night, I check the list for tonight, and do what's referred to as MQ in government circles, "Minimum Qualifications" (a good review somewhere, appealing content) for what's showing tonight, see where it's playing and make a choice. Two thirds of the venue choice comes down to somewhere I want to go tonight. I prefer one of my downtown venues with nearby food. If it's going to be a cineplex in the 'burbs, then I grind my teeth about whether I want to see this or that movie and it only happens if I really want to see it.

My favorite venue is right next to the train station, seeing AMTRAK trains coming and going next to the theater, so actually, the train schedule is one of my decision factors.

Yep. No matter how "objective" a reviewer claims to be, at least 50% is whether you relate to the characters or plot line. Attempts at something more systematic are never more than partly successful.

I'm dubious about claims to be "objective", whatever that means. Objective evaluation seems to end at whether the presentation quality is adequate or the film damaged, but whether the reviewer likes the characters or plot gets way down into the weeds of personal preference.

I, for one, don't think I can sit through another iteration of the Star Wars universe. No matter how "good" that is, I'm going to be rolling my eyes right from the beginning.