How do you rate movies you have abandonned halfway through ?

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livelove
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Re: How do you rate movies you have abandonned halfway throu

Post by livelove »

Bobbles wrote: There are, however, films where a plot summary and a brief clip are enough to make it perfectly clear to me that I would never, ever want it watch them for any reason whatsoever (Final Destination part whatsit, for instance). In that case, I have no complaints about rating them a zero.


wow, are you saying that you rate movies you have not seen (let alone from start to finish) ??

I'm starting wondering, how much of the voting here (or on imdb for that matter) is based on real, personal viewing of a film, and how much is actually just based upon what people hear from their friends, other reviewers or "a plot summary and a brief clip" ...
And I am also wondering what rating those movies would be getting if their votes would not be tarnished by their bad reputation.

It's a bit sad, because it makes the voting system all the more unreliable.

PedroPT wrote: but i guess the right thing to do is not to rate it. but i often think how can someone rate a movie 1/10 and was able to see it till the end?

that's a very good point! although I must admit that sometimes I couldn't stop a suspenseful movie, e.g. horror flick, but when the film and the suspense is over, I am left quite empty and realize that I didn't enjoy the movie at all (apart from the suspense), warranting a bad rating.

It's kind of how you think you feel for someone who you have sex with, when afterwards you realize that you don't have any connection to that person at all, and all that connected you was your sexual arousal, which, when gone, may leave you just as empty as the abovementioned movie, once you realize that kinship, friendship or love were all missing.

livelove
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Re: How do you rate movies you have abandonned halfway throu

Post by livelove »

@movieboy:
I'm a bit torn, because part of me understands you, but on the other hand, you cannot rate something you have not seen. And to appreciate a movie (or any artwork) you must have seen it completely. It's like looking just at the bottom left (empty) corner of a Picasso and saying it's bad. You literally don't get the full picture.

I didn't realize how many of you rank films they have seen only partly -- or not at all, as it turns out. That's disappointing to me because the votes are more random and make the voting system less reliable.
Last edited by livelove on Sat Sep 26, 2015 12:09 pm, edited 2 times in total.

VinegarBob
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Re: How do you rate movies you have abandonned halfway throu

Post by VinegarBob »

livelove wrote:
1) If you rate it, you may distort your criticker profile (especially if you do that often), given that your final score (if you had watched the film to its end) could be considerably better or worse.


Very doubtful imo. Like I said before most films don't tend to morph into something completely different halfway through. There will be exceptions I'm sure, but those would be extremely rare, and therefore would have a negligible effect on your profile.

livelove wrote:2) Most of us want to have more films rated than they currently have (to have more films in common with others), so not rating a film is a missed opportunity in that regard.


If it bothers you that much the simple solution is to get to the end of each film come what may.

livelove wrote:[b]3) And if I find the film boring or outright bad, I don't want to waste time of my life finishing it, because in 90% of cases the rest of the movie is just as boring or bad.


I think that's true so I generally don't. Life's too short. Having said that I will give something with some originality much more leeway than some generic, cliched movie that's not only really bad, but that, metaphorically, I've seen a thousand times already.

livelove wrote:I am confronted with the same problem, when rating a film I have last seen 10-20 years ago.


This I find more interesting. Do I rate films I saw from my childhood by the standards I had at the time? Or do I rate them from the perspective of my current standards and taste, having matured, experienced more and know much more about films, filmmaking and the world in general? If I rated say Police Academy back when I saw it originally (when I was 13) it would be a tier 10 film for sure. I feel confident however that if I re-watched Police Academy today I'd hate it. Yet I have seen it, and I did enjoy it at the time. An interesting quandary, especially when you consider that something like The Blues Brothers - which I saw at around the same time as Police Academy is still a tier 10 film for me.

The conclusion I came to (as much as it matters, which again - it totally doesn't) is that I'll rate it through todays eyes after the fact. If one assumes that the purpose of rating films is to let others know what you're opinion of the film is rather than used to be then this seems like the most reliable way, given the less than ideal circumstances. I'm not going to re-watch Police Academy in order to more accurately rate the film today. Instead I'll rate it according to what I remember about it (I usually remember films very well, even many years after having seen them), coupled with how it lines up with my current tastes. Maybe not perfect, but it does the job imo.

However, this also brings up another interesting aspect of film watching; expanding your cinematic horizons. Some films require more of the viewer than just the time it takes to watch it, and may reward more than one viewing to appreciate all it has to offer. If you had asked me to rate Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker immediately after I'd first watched it it would have received a pretty poor rating from me. It's now in my top 10 films of all time.

Which is a roundabout way of saying; things change - and your rating's should change accordingly. They're not set in stone.

Good luck in your cinematic journey. :)
Last edited by VinegarBob on Sat Sep 26, 2015 4:13 am, edited 2 times in total.

ShogunRua
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Re: How do you rate movies you have abandonned halfway throu

Post by ShogunRua »

movieboy wrote:All movies which I abandoned before the end have all ended up with a rating under 40. My Tier 1 is all movies I couldn't stop watching.

The score between 0-40 mostly depends on when I switched off. It's nearer 0 if I switched off right in the beginning. Nearer 40 if I went more than halfway.

If a movie is bad enough that it could not hold your attention enough to make you finish watching - it has failed in its job badly.


Not a bad system. Personally, if a movie is so putrid that I abandon it halfway through, the highest score I can give it is a 20.

livelove wrote:I'm a bit torn, because part of me understands you, but on the other hand, you cannot rate something you have not seen.


Sure you can. It's very simple, in fact!

You think it's sub-optimal? I disagree (if a movie is so horrendous it causes me to turn it off, then I wish to convey that in my ratings, and I should not have a high TCL with those that loved it), but there are many ways people arrive at their ratings that I would probably disagree with, too. So what?

rklenseth
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Re: How do you rate movies you have abandonned halfway throu

Post by rklenseth »

My rule is that if I don't finish it I don't rate it. There have been a few movies I was not able to get through to the end for various reason (ex. I'm not in the mood, I have fallen asleep through a portion of it because I was tired). Most of the time, I'll try to watch what I have left of it the next day or I'll try watching the full movie again somewhere down the line usually years later. I do this as there are some examples of movies that just start badly or slowly but by the climax point and/or end have found their footing. If I give a bad score to something that I would probably have given a better score to if I had seen it fully then I feel I had cheated myself.

paulofilmo
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Re: How do you rate movies you have abandonned halfway throu

Post by paulofilmo »

livelove wrote:Can someone give me some sort of advice ?


Add the unfinished films to a (Private, Hidden) Collection. Then you can always change your mind.

livelove wrote:1) If you rate it, you may distort your criticker profile (especially if you do that often), given that your final score (if you had watched the film to its end) could be considerably better or worse. I have often seen films which are quite fascinating in the beginning, but then fall flat later on. Conversely a film might have a slow (boring) start, but intrigues you over time, or a somewhat convoluted plot starts to make sense as the movie progresses, etc. So you essentially risk giving the film a completely undeserved rating if you don't watch from start to finish, thus messing with your TCIs and PSIs every time you do that.


(if you had watched the film to its end)

But you didn't; or couldn't. If you couldn't bare to look at any more than a corner of a Picasso painting, I wouldn't recommend any more Picasso paintings. This is information about taste. Clarity, not distortion.

MmzHrrdb
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Re: How do you rate movies you have abandonned halfway throu

Post by MmzHrrdb »

@livelove , did you just compared rating a movie to making Love? :p

There´s always another way...maybe a bit better then stop watching in the middle and rate it. you can always "skip" some parts of the movie that you know are not important to what´s happening.

but well, maybe this is why i only have 1 movie rated 1 in more then 3000 movies and very few rated bellow 3. i tend not to rate movies i really hated and didnt finish them.

lisa-
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Re: How do you rate movies you have abandonned halfway throu

Post by lisa- »

criticker = fucking

anyway just rate it whatever you feel like and try and get past that annoying feeling that you're cheating somehow. because it's not like there's a rulebook or whatever.

MmzHrrdb
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Re: How do you rate movies you have abandonned halfway throu

Post by MmzHrrdb »

i love rating movies, but i like fucking a bit more.

anyway, i was going to go trough all my movie rating to make top lists, this made me want to remove some movies.

livelove
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Re: How do you rate movies you have abandonned halfway throu

Post by livelove »

PedroPT wrote: maybe a bit better then stop watching in the middle and rate it. you can always "skip" some parts of the movie that you know are not important to what´s happening.


I used to do that, but stopped doing that, because it also gives you a very wrong impression and completely distorts the movie experience:
  • • you may skip over rich details or even crucial revelations, that hemper your understanding of the movie
  • • you do not have time to think (e.g. when a person is shown in a desperate situation for an extended time, the viewer has time to identify him/herself with that person/situation ... which you won't if you skip over it), just imagine what films like lost in translation, Kubrick's 2001, Memento or Mulholland Drive would be like if you watched it in a fast-forward manner. Maybe other examples come to your mind.
  • • you do not get into the mood of the film
  • • you destroy the film's suspense (e.g. fast forward all parts in Alien(s), where people are just walking around before an impending attack
  • • you miss subtleties in peoples' relations, which will prevent you from understanding their subsequent actions or decisions concerning each other
  • • I could go on and on and on ...


lisa- wrote: just rate it whatever you feel like and try and get past that annoying feeling that you're cheating somehow. because it's not like there's a rulebook or whatever.


Well, imagine you are a teacher giving a bad mark to a pupil's essay, which you either did not read at all or of which you only read the beginning. This is very unfair (you could even get fired for that). It's the same for a movie.

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