I often struggle with how to accurately score movies. This topic is part of a series dealing with voting-related problems, challenges, phenomenons and paradoxes — all as part of a quest whose end-goal is to correctly reflect my appreciation of movies when rating them:
- • On what basis do you rate films ?
- • The rock/paper/scissors paradox: ranking A>B and B>C but C>A ?
- • Do you change your ratings ?
- • How to deal with our changing taste over time ?
- • How do you rate movies seen long ago ?
- • How do you rate movies you have abandoned halfway through ?
- • How granular are your ratings?
- • Do you rate ridiculously bad movies 0 or >0 ?
- • RULES that help you decide how to vote
- •
How do you account for the novelty factor and the chronological order in which you watched your movies ?
- • How do you handle the observer effect ?
Question: In your ratings, how do you account for the fact that first experiences generally have a greater impact on us than later experiences of the same kind (novelty factor)?
As far as movies are concerned, this is the main reason, why most of the time (with notable exceptions of course), sequels are generally lower rated than the first part.
Let's say you watched Jurassic Parc 1 for the first time as a kid in 1993 and are very impressed, because it's the first time you see these big and nicely animated dinosaurs on the big screen. By the time you saw Jurassic Parc 5 25 years later, you were of course less impressed. It's in the nature of things.
That JP5 might be actually worse than JP1 is not my point.
My point is that if you had watched the JP series in reverse-chronological order (JP5, JP4, JP3, JP2, JP1), then chances are that you'll rank JP5 higher than JP1. Or even if - in absolute numbers - JP1 still outranks JP5, then chances are that you'll rank JP5 higher than you would have and JP1 lower than you would have if you had watched the series in chronological order.
So my point is: chronology matters.
And this problem is not only limited to films of the same series/franchise, but also potentially concerns entire genres (e.g. superhero films), camera work (e.g. found footage films), subject matters (e.g. drugs), or actors whose unchanging shtick you grow tired off (Jim Carrey, Eddie Murphy, etc.):
Movies can become a personal reference point of comparative value for other movies to come ... as well as for the movies seen beforehand (which may require revisiting their scores):chmul_cr0n @ viewtopic.php?f=6&t=7818#p67077 wrote:Another reason might the accounting for novelty factors such as a director's style or something. Sometimes I'm really impressed by some auteur's movie, but 5 years later the things that blew me away I find to be somewhat common. They just weren't common to me, because I hadn't seen very many movies.
chmul_cr0n @ viewtopic.php?f=6&t=5506&p=68845#p67076 wrote:Of course you always have to take into acount that you're much more knowledgeable now than you were at that time. Maybe your current favorite movie is one you saw when you were 16, and it blew your mind and completely redefined what a movie was or could be to you. So now you have new context.
So the bottom line question is:
How do you deal with the phenomenon that the chronology in which we see our movies changes our experience and thus - some might argue injustly - influences our vote ?