To the people who actually rate out of 100

[ShogunRua]

I don't mean ranking movies you watched a long time ago, I don't do that either. I'm saying when you compare to movies you did rank a long time ago, how can you remember what those movies were like?

My memory is excellent. Occasionally, I rewatch those older films that I feel unsure about. Occasionally, if I first watched the movie as a kid, my rating will be much lower. However, if I watched it when I was 13+, it's very rare for my rating to change more than a point or two. There are exceptions, but not many.

[Anomaly]

I'm saying when you compare to movies you did rank a long time ago, how can you remember what those movies were like? How can you remember the experience of 1000+ movies to try and find a spot?

Previous ratings often don't factor in to choosing a new rating for a film. I trust that my previous ratings are accurate (until I rewatch them) and I trust my gut to pick the right number. I usually don't compare films to each other while rating new ones, simple as that.

Now that I've been using this site for a while I've started to notice that I've taken to the out of 100 rankings, while finding other ratings systems on other sites annoying sometimes. For instance, Netflix uses a 5 star rating system, which is deceptively simple for rating: 100 can just be divided up into 5 blocks of 20 numbers on here for rating on Netflix. However, soon I found that movies that tended to fall close to the divides between multiples of 20 on here tend to make me unsure of what to rate them on Netflix, and my ratings are skewed towards higher numbers so a blind translation wouldn't really effectively capture my feelings. Now, I just tend to rate them according to different criteria over there as opposed to here - while a 4/5 and an 80/100 are the same numerically, they have different meanings because of the range (or lack there of) of the rating scale. Although generally everything with around an 80 on here gets a 4/5 on Netflix, something that's a 70/100, for instance, could go to 4/5 or 3/5 depending on how I feel.

This also happens sometimes when rating on IMDb, especially with ratings that fall somewhere inbetween multiples of 10 (95, 85, 75, etc.), but to a much lesser degree due to the larger scale used on IMDb, so literal translation happens almost all the time with that.

[MmzHrrdb]

I'm saying when you compare to movies you did rank a long time ago, how can you remember what those movies were like? How can you remember the experience of 1000+ movies to try and find a spot?

Previous ratings often don't factor in to choosing a new rating for a film. I trust that my previous ratings are accurate (until I rewatch them) and I trust my gut to pick the right number. I usually don't compare films to each other while rating new ones, simple as that.

Same here. I really try to avoid rating by comparison (although it does occasionally factor in, especially within a particular director's ouevre).

[Stewball]

I only use divisions on the 10s with an extra cut at 95 so I can put a really good film in there but fall short of calling it a masterpiece. Dividing them up more than that would be arbitrary, for me anyway. The lower a film gets, usually because I screwed up and went to and sat through a real piece of garbage, the sparser the population--unless I really want to zap it and give it a zero, like MacGruber.

Edit for grammar spelling

[JohnnyDavid]

Okay so the people who use their 'gut' tell me, what is the difference between a 62 and a 63? If you don't compare, then what is it?

[PeaceAnarchy]

I use my gut too, basically I have general benchmarks every 5 points and the in between scores are for how close I feel it is to either benchmark. So for that specific example 65 is a watchable film I had some issues with but nothing major and will probably forget about, while 60 is a slightly mediocre film with some redeeming qualities that made it watchable. So the difference between 63 and 62 is that while both were watchable but nothing special the 62 film was a bit more actively annoying. Of course there is some error especially when I have mixed feelings about aspects of a film but it's good enough to be reasonably accurate.

I find the main advantage of using the whole range is not that the individual scores are more precise, but that the imprecision is more visible. If I rated by 5's a 63 and a 67 would have the same rating, whereas this way I know I felt the 63 was a little below and might go as low as 60 whereas the 67 was a little above and may go as high as 70.

[Neonman]

I'll admit to using other film's ratings to determine a film's score. Say my gut reaction to "Film Y" is to give it a 63, but then I see that I have rated "Film X" a 62, and I know that there is now way that "Film Y" was better than "Film X", then I'd have to give "Film Y" a rating of 62 (or maybe even lower). I always rate movie's out of 100 based on a "gut" estimation, but it's only accurate to the nearest 10; I have to work the rest out by using comparisons.

And a 62 is very much different to a 63; even though I enjoyed films of 63 slightly more than the ones of 62, maybe 62 had better acting. Maybe 62 was even better than 63, but let down greatly by a terrible ending. Of course, these numbers can't say these things.

[jeff_v]

I use the Criticker tool to customize the colors and quips associated with my scores to divide the 0-100 scale into sub-categories:

89 - Masterpiece (212 Rankings)
83 - Great (273 Rankings)
76 - Very Good (687 Rankings)
68 - Good (1264 Rankings)
63 - Mixed-plus (700 Rankings)
58 - Indifferent (509 Rankings)
52 - Mixed-Minus (292 Rankings)
38 - Disliked (428 Rankings)
23 - Bad (226 Rankings)
0 - Abysmal (182 Rankings)

I should probably adjust this and tweak it a little more so that 'Great' is a little larger relative to 'Very Good' and 'Mixed-Minus' should encompass more 'Indifferent' and 'Disliked' ratings. That said, once I decide whether a movie is 'Good' or 'Very Good', for example, then it's just a matter of where it falls on the scale of 'Good' (68-75), so it feels like I'm only dealing with 8 possible scores, rather than 101.

[mistersplice]

I was using a 10-point scale (4=40) and then reorganizing movies by adding a point or two or three to make sure that films lined up in the correct order.
movie A might be 4 and movie B is also 4, but I liked B better so I give it 43 instead of 42, for example. And then maybe movie C would come along and I like it better than A, but not as much as B, so I would change B to 44 and squeeze C in as 43.

I've rated about 400 movies using this method and ultimately decided that I don't like the way things break down on a larger scale, so I'm thinking about going back and changing all of my ratings to 5, 10, 15, 20, etc.


...now what I really need is for Criticker to develop an easy way to mass-edit.

[Anomaly]

Okay so the people who use their 'gut' tell me, what is the difference between a 62 and a 63? If you don't compare, then what is it?

There isn't necessarily any difference other than I like the ones rated 63 slightly better than the ones I like rated 62. Whats the difference between a 2 and a 3 for you? It's all ultimately simplifying the complexities of human taste down to a few numbers, I just use a bigger scale than you do because I feel it simplifies it less so.