Tedious Minutia

The Ratings

So why the change to the 1-100 scale? Well, all the cool kids are doing it, but, really, two reasons:

I wanted an easy way to list films in preferential order on the films ranked by grade and the master film list by date pages. About a year ago, I moved my film entries onto a database, which allowed me to update all the pertinent listing pages by typing in film and viewing info only once. (Before the database I had been updating information on 3-6 separate HTML pages for each film I saw.) The one problem with this was that in order to list films in preferential order on a page I had to either list all films alphabetically within their letter grade or employ very nasty set of order numbers on the database for each film, to be adjusted accordingly when a new film was thrust into the center of a list. With the 1-100 scale, I'm still listing movies alphabetically within their rating, but, needless to say, there are far fewer 74's than there are B's.

But I also did want a way to differentiate all those B's and B-minuses. I see a lot of films in the B range because I will generally only see a film if I think there's a good chance I'll like it. I'm not paid to watch things like Scooby Doo or Daredevil or Attack of the Clones, so I don't. Actually, the 1-100 scale is in a way shrinking down my rating scale, since I have been listing all films in preferential order for their year of eligibility and their copyright year (essentially ranking the 112 films I saw from 2001, for example, on a 1-112 scale).

I don't know what a particular number "means", except in relation to the old letter grades, a crutch I'm trying to do away with eventually. Right now I assign numbers by looking at big lists of stuff I've already seen and placing the film among its peers. I don't deny at all that one day's 63 might later look like a 58, but in general I think the 1-100 scale gives you a better idea of the difference between, say City of God, at 71 (a B) and Stuck on You at 57 (a B-).

Oh, and I've foolishly gone ahead and given every film I've listed, some of which I haven't seen for 10 years or more, a hastily considered numeric rating. Needless to say, these ratings must be taken with a huge grain of salt.

Eligibility

A film is eligible for a given year's top ten list if it has been screened commercially in New York City for the first time that year and is no more than three years old. This rule, and the official NYC release list I use is, where else, here.

Note that this says nothing about when I see a movie, or when it comes to Austin. If a movie opens a commercial run in New York City on December 31, 2003 (like, for example Millennium Mambo) and doesn't make it to Austin until late March 2004, it's still only eligible for 2003. Also, a movie's IMDb date (which is the date I use for my Master Film List) is irrelevant for top ten lists, except that films over three years old are excluded.