I’ve been a member of IMDB since 2011, and have been taking an active approach to rating what I watch. My number of ratings has been steadily climbing, and was in the high 200s until this last week. I found this helped when looking for new productions to see, as my memory isn’t photographic and I would sometimes watch something and quickly realise I’d seen it before. Using my ratings as a quick reference would remind me if I’d seen a film before, and whether it was ‘worthy’ of watching again.
After a discussion on one of the boards with a like-minded fan, I decided to look at their own viewing habits. It was a surprise to me to see that theirs was very like mine, as was their ratings, but they’d rated some orders of magnitude more than I had. I went through their ratings and gave my own, without regard to theirs, on each film that I had also watched. I repeated this with a few other people who’d rated a lot of films and now I’ve seen and rated 1,418!
Of course I won’t remember, in detail, each and every one of those so I based my ratings on a ‘gut feel’. This is quite a fluid and subjective process, but I can define it as thus:
1 - Thoroughly disappointing, probably offensive
2 - Thoroughly disappointing
3 - Not worthy of discussion
4 - A poor effort, lacklustre, inoffensive
5 - Easily could’ve been improved upon
6 - Not completely unobjectionable but also has plenty of merit in some way/s
7 - Easily remembered, but not for any bad reasons, and probably worthy of a second viewing
8 - Fondly remembered, well-acted, very watchable
9 - An exquisite production, flawless, needs at least two viewings
10 - Mind blowing script, original, excellent production and acting, to be re-watched several times
I expect this would be a similar ‘process’ others go by, but is it?
That’s pretty close to how I would rate them. I think a 7 is reliably watchable, maybe not great but decent entertainment. Above that is incrementally better. Maybe 6 is “under the right circumstances.” Less than that is progressively weaker. I don’t rate many 5s and below because I just don’t bother watching them.
I also just use a gut feel. Sometimes I find a movie I think I haven’t rated. I go to give it a rating and it turns out I have previously rated it. The rating will usually be the number I am thinking of giving it. This often happens with things like Black Mass. I go to rate it and then think have I rated all of** Peter Sarsgaard**'s movies? There were several of his older movies I wasn’t certain that I had rated, but in fact had.
I think I used something closer to a uniform distribution e.g., “1” means the bottom 10% of movies and “10” means the top 10% of movies. I’m definitely not in the camp that believes that giving a movie a 10/10 is something holy or precious.
However…a while ago I looked back on the movies that I’d rated on IMDb and it surprised me. I have several movies there that I gave relatively good ratings to that I don’t even remember.
My bell curve is certainly skewed to the high end, peaking at 7. I was wondering if I was being ‘fair’ but realised I usually only watch films after I’ve read a review or two, plus they’re unlikely to garner my/the public’s/reviewers’ attention unless they’ve been marketed well, which means money, which means they’re probably decent quality.
2% (27) I’ve rated a ten, 32% (449) a seven, with quite a balanced, steep slope down either side (although obviously the lower ratings’ side has a longer tail).