The Modern Movie Review

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I’ve always had a problem with the typical scale of reviewing a movie.

1-10 is a good baseline, but it doesn’t tell you anything about what you saw. What about a bad movie that’s funny because of how much it sucks? How am I supposed to rank Casablanca and Who Framed Roger Rabbit in the same scale? Both are probably a 9/10 in my eyes, but for entirely different reasons.

After working tirelessly with a team of doctors, engineers, and dudes who wear black jeans and only listen to vinyl, I’ve determined the best way to rank a film- in four distinct but equally important parts.

I’ll be accompanying my explanations with a handy computer drawn chart.

PART ONE: GOOD MOVIES

Good movies are good movies. Did I have to write that one down for you?

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Scott Pilgrim VS. The World are two of my favorite movies- both are fundamentally good.

PART TWO: BAD MOVIES

Bad movies are… bad movies. If you can’t grasp that, I at least hope the glue you’re eating tastes good.

The worst movie I’ve ever seen is The Star Wars Holiday Special.

This is as simple as things get. I considered leaving the scale like this- but just calling a movie good or bad is too simple.

PART THREE: IRONICALLY GOOD MOVIES

These are definitely bad movies… but so bad they’re good.

Tommy Wiseau’s *The Room* is maybe the best example of a bad movie that’s fun to watch.

PART FOUR: GRAND MOVIES

Scorsese’s type of monumental epic tale.

The kind of movie that an NYU student would call “revolutionary”.

And that’s my scale.

The top half of the graph contains all the movies you would say are good, and the bottom half are bad movies. The right half is movies that would be fun to watch at a party. You may love Citizen Kane, but if you’d never watch it casually. No one just throws on Rocky (unless you’re in Philly). The baseline is, if it might kill the energy of a room, you put it on the left side.

So by my new-and-improved scale, a movie can have 1 of 40 different rankings, organized by category. Each quadrant is still ranked 1-10, but now has a prefixed adjective to best convey how the film makes you feel. A ranking of 10 still means the movie is rated strongest in it’s category- though being the strongest bad movie just means you made an utterly terrible movie.

A movie you like could have a score of a “Good 6”, for example. A movie you like because it’s so bad it’s funny might score an “Ironic 8”. If you rewatch Lawrence of Arabia (a movie that’s definitely good, but would be terrible to play at a party), you’d be likely to give it a “Grand 10”. Finally, if you watch a movie that just isn’t good and isn’t enjoyable, it would be fitting to give it a “Bad 4”.

I’ve not included “guilty pleasure” movies, because that’s only a coward’s way of being too ashamed to admit they like a movie. For all intents and purposes, they would typically fall under “good movies”.

The long hours have paid off. I’ve now personally redefined how movies will be critiqued forever. I fully expect this to catch on, and when it does, all I’ll have to say to the public is… you’re welcome.

Get on my level, Roger Ebert.

The Modern Movie Review.

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