Film General : Rating Tool in Development

I always wonder what does a rating really say about a movie.

Some find an ok movie a 5 some say it's a 7.

I developed a little tool (this is no spam, it has no ads or anything), that can help you rate a movie based on just 4 questions and how important they were to that movie.

For instance in a 3D animation or Marvel movie, the visuals can be more important than the acting.

The link is:
http://www.jdx.nl/movierate.php

I wonder if you rate a few movies, if you are satisfied with the answer.

PS. it's not needed to add the title of the movie.

Example:

Kubo and the Two Strings

Story -> Very Good -> Important (to me)
Acting -> Good (Neutral) -> Not (so) Important
Visuals -> Very Good -> Important (especially with this movie
Soundtrack -> Good -> Neutral

Outcome rating: 8.43

I tried it with L'Avventura, which I rated a 10/10, and it gave me 9.71, so that's pretty close.

And I also tried with Sully, which I rated 6/10, and it gave me 6.75, which also isn't too far off.

So, overall, I think it's an interesting tool to help people think about their ratings, and it seems to pretty much get you in the ballpark in terms of where you naturally think a film rates. I'm not sure if I would assign too much importance to its results, but it's an interesting experiment, just as an alternative reference point.

I wonder if you could make it a bit more complex. Perhaps add a few more categories to the equation, since the 4 included are pretty broad and vague. Maybe "Visuals" could be split into "Cinematography" and "Visual Effects," for example. And maybe "Story" could be split into "Narrative" and "Themes."




A voice made of ink and rage.

I believe you and I are on the same page Fed.

I don't know if more 'complex' is the word but more relevant is for certain.

I'm not sure about the 'importance' category.

Important to the execution of the film or important to me.

Soundtrack is vague and in many films not even very relevant.

Overall, thumbs up and I do appreciate the values of good or not good vs a scale of 1 to 10 as the OP indicates as a quandary.



"Every time I walk into my office I walk past 5 Lombardi Trophies not 5 rushing titles" .

I like the importance scale. It's a way of controlling for various types of films, rather than attempting to rate all films against some sort of "objective" standard. For example, when I was rating L'Avventura, I rated the acting "very good" (one step below "excellent") and set the importance to "neutral," because to me the acting isn't really what makes that film great. The performances are good enough to get the job done, but no one in the film really has a truly outstanding performance, and that doesn't really detract from the film in any way. And there are other sorts of films where the acting is essential to the film's success or failure. So the importance scale helps control for that.

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Soundtrack is vague and in many films not even very relevant.

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Again, that's where the importance scale comes into play. If a film has very little music, or the music isn't all that essential to the film, you can control for that, rather than having it count as a "flaw" to quite an extreme degree. If a film's music isn't a very important aspect of that particular film, it shouldn't really be downgraded quite as much for not having great music. See what I mean?




A voice made of ink and rage.

Yes, that's why I added the importance exactly, for a musical the music can be very important, for a comedy it doesn't make a difference.

One other thing I was thinking about is that a comedy mostly has a low rating on IMDb, also with this tool, it will be a low score.

But the goal of a comedy is to make you enjoy it, make you laugh. In my tool a comedy or simple action movie can get a 4.5, but that's not fair.

It should have something like, what genre was it:

Comedy -> Did you laugh?
Action -> Did you enjoy it?

But no idea how to implement that, not every movie can be put in a genre.

Sounds like a waste of time.

Forgive me, Father, for I have eaten my cast mate.

Thanks for your input, I worked a while on the "algorithm" and it's nice to see that for me, some friends and here, the rating comes close.

I am also not sure if to leave the importance part, it's hard to say if it is important.

Also I don't know if I should make it too complex with a lot of questions, maybe things like soundtrack could be standard not pulling on the rating so much, but in a musical it could be important.

For now it's just a hobby project/experiment.