When I first started doing this I thought one of the primary things I would be posting would be reviews of movies. It never really happened, I'm not sure why. I guess maybe politics has been more fun to write about. But here I am, many, many years later and I am still thinking about posting about movies. Really I thought it would be movies and TV and books. But for the moment lets focus on movies.
If I am going to write about movies I will need some kind of rating system. I could go with thumbs up or thumbs down, but my experience tells me that my opinions are not often that clear. Pretty much everything would wind up thumbs up. I could do stars: 4 stars, 2.5 stars etc. I think that again could really say more about the film than it does. Really, any ranking system be it stars or 1-10, or ABCD is just making an effort to rank one film against other films and I don't think that tells all the story it could.
More than hierarchical rankings imply I think there is a dimension of movie choice that hadn't been part of public discourse that nowadays is really significant. We watch movies in different modes and have many more opportunities to watch; and those things should figure into a contemporary rating system.
Our top end movie experience these days, at least here at casa TANBI, is to go out to the theatre, see the film in IMAX on a full size IMAX screen. There's only one theatre within a reasonable drive that fits that description. It's a full size traditional IMAX screen with a steep house and stadium seating. The bottom line for that is that to get a decent seat you really have to arrive pretty early. So to be worth the drive and the price and the process a film needs to be something special. Lets call that our top rating "IMAX Worthy."
"Top Rating" implies a hierarchy, and I guess that's ok, but would be the same a "4 stars" or "10/10." The next ratings wouldn't work that way though. After a film that is so special to merit the big theatre experience, the next choice is whether to see the movie in a theatre at all. The difference here is that just because a movie doesn't call out for a theatre it doesn't mean it isn't a good movie. So the next two ratings could be "Date Night" for films that are worth seeing and worth seeing in a theatre and "Home Theatre" which means the movie is worth seeing and will be good at home - and is worth appointment viewing on your best screen. Although different those ratings aren't necessarily better or worse than each other.
The next rating would be "streamer." That would be a movie that is ok to watch and it doesn't really matter how you watch - no big screen, no surround sound required. Sometimes now we stream movies on the computers or the tablets. The viewing experience isn't really the same but it's ok for what it is. Finally, I think the last rating would be "Pawn Stars" which means you could watch it if it's on, but you could also watch Pawn Stars (or Dual Survival or Love It or List It or whatever).
So we're set for the TANBI movie rating system. It goes like this:
Make sense? Now I just need to see some movies.
1 comment:
Proceed!
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