Critic's Notebook
Star wars
A movie critic’s conflicted, if not disdainful, feelings toward rating films
By Ty Burr
Globe Staff / May 25, 2010
Whenever I get a reader gripe about the number of stars I have (or haven’t) given a movie, I think of that old Zen saw about how the hand pointing at the moon simply ain’t the moon. Then I send them to Movie Review Intelligence, a website (www.moviereviewintelligence.com) that is to movie ratings what Sabermetrics are to baseball batting averages: glorious, statistics-crazy overkill.
There are other rating-aggregate sites out there: Rotten Tomatoes is the one everyone knows about (www.rottentomatoes.com). It remulches each print and online critic’s rating (stars, grades, whatever) into a purely on/off proposition: red tomato good, splatty green tomato bad. I prefer another site, Metacritic.com (www.metacritic.com), for a number of reasons: The 1 to 100 scale is literally 50 times finer-grained than at Rotten Tomatoes, and the editors stick with the major newspaper/magazine/online reviewers.
Movie Review Intelligence, though, busts the entire rating-ology concept wide open. The brainchild of media researcher David Gross, the site collects all the major reviews and ratings for a movie and slices them into infinite pieces of pie. MRI’s page for “Robin Hood,’’ for instance, assigns an aggregate rating (55.1 percent out of 100 possible points overall), then breaks that number down among Broad National Press (56.2 percent), Local Newspapers (60.7 percent), Alternative/Indie (63.9 percent), Highbrow Press (35.0 percent), Movie Industry (43.5 percent), and major, semi-major, and mini-major urban markets.
The approach has its flaws (because Peter Travers in Rolling Stone hasn’t been “alternative’’ in at least two decades, he skews the average for that category) but also yields the kind of wonky, borderline useless insights stat-freaks love. The “review mixture’’ scattergram — a scattergram! — for “Clash of the Titans’’ indicates that critics in smaller cities were more positive than those in mid-size cities. The “review timing’’ bar graph for “Date Night’’ shows that reviews that came out on the film’s opening day were more positive than those that ran earlier.
What does this mean? To quote Pee-wee Herman, “I don’t KNOW!’’ But I’m really glad someone’s doing it and that he’s got an iPhone app to boot. For one thing, it takes the pressure off me when people complain that I gave “Robin Hood’’ three stars rather than two and a half. (Sue me, it was two and three-quarters; I like to grade up.) But that’s only part of it.
I understand the reasons people like visual ratings on movie reviews. Really, I do. We’re all pressed for time and unless you’re a movie fanatic or a member of our immediate families, you’re not going to slog through all six to 10 of the Globe’s Friday movie reviews from top to bottom. We’re a goal-oriented society, and we crave knowing what’s worth it and what’s not. The weekend box office is perceived as a competitive race with clear-cut winners and losers, and star ratings are the Olympic judges holding up numbers. Is it two stars or three and a half? Should I pay attention or move on? But that’s still putting more weight on the ratings than the critics often do themselves. As cultural filters go, the stars are absurdly blunt instruments. They have nothing of value to say about which audience a movie might be best for and in fact assume that all movies want to appeal to all audiences.
But they don’t. A few months ago I met a lovely elderly couple who assured me they only went to movies to which I’d given three and a half or four stars. Needless to say, this had blown up in their faces more than a few times: “Borat,’’ for one; “I’m Not There’’ for another. Whereas other, less starry movies might have spoken to them more clearly and meaningfully than they did to me, a point I often try to make in the body of a review but which by default can’t be reflected in a two or three star rating. They might have preferred “Cheri,’’ say, or “The Duchess,’’ or, who knows, “Shortbus.’’
Another flaw in the star ratings is that they can’t signal when a movie has parts that work and parts that don’t. I recently gave the Annette Bening/Naomi Watts drama “Mother and Child’’ two and a half stars, not because I felt lukewarm about the movie but because what cruises along beautifully for 80 minutes falls prey to overwriting in the last act— too many coincidences until you have to cry uncle. Or I did; as always, your mileage may vary. But the rating won’t tell you that, since it’s a nine-point scale (if you count halves and zeroes) that most readers interpret as binary: yes or no, good or bad. You very well might love “Mother and Child’’ — I wanted to. But first you have to consider it as more than a rating.
A further case in point: “The Art of the Steal,’’ the documentary about Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation that is woefully partisan yet great for starting arguments about who owns art and what their duty to the public might be. As a work of persuasion it’s flawed; as provocation, it’s inspired. Two and a half from me and that didn’t keep it from running for weeks at the Coolidge, which is just as it should be.
In general, though, does colleague Wesley Morris’s or my giving less than three and a half stars doom a movie — specifically, the kind of off-studio nonblockbuster that depends on reviews for survival? More than I’d care to admit, and the fault lies in part with you, dear readers, as you perform pop triage and try to figure out what to see and what not to see on a Friday night. This drives at least one studio executive I know absolutely crazy, and after a three-and-a-half star review runs he has been known to e-mail me to sarcastically ask if I “couldn’t squeeze another half-star’’ out of my pen.
I understand where he’s coming from, even as I’m helpless to do otherwise. (Do you really want me giving more stars to a movie I didn’t much like just because I think it should be seen by one audience or another?) With fewer and fewer arthouses still standing and with all the movies that get pushed through that narrowing window, it’s pretty much four stars or death. Because anything less is unimportant to you, anything less is useless to the studio executive who wants to sell his movie, to which I have to say “tough’’ but also “sorry, the people you want to talk to are over there skimming the paper online.’’
I sometimes wonder: What would happen if we just trash-canned the things and went the way of The New York Times and Wall Street Journal? Would you read more of the review or none of it? Do you really need the star ratings, and, if so, why? I get it: To request nuanced attention of a reader — regularly, five times every Friday — is almost an affront when we spend most of our days wading thigh-deep through e-mails and pop-up ads. But what happens if by skipping a two-and-a-half star rating you miss the movie that changes your life?
The Movie Review Intelligence website takes the exact opposite approach: It fans the stars out into an infinitude of statistical slices and hopes for meaning and guidance to emerge. It’s a fascinating place to surf through, but I suspect it still misses the point. What draws an audience to any piece of culture, pop or otherwise, isn’t dingbats but words: words of enthusiasm or sometimes even just words of qualified recommendation. If you rest your intake solely on what the ratings say is the best, you risk missing far too much of what’s simply good.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.
http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2010/05/25/movie_critic_struggles_with_rating_films/
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