How do you rate movies you have abandonned halfway through ?

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

Post by ribcage »

Your examples are all of generally highly praised films. I have no problem fastforwarding a very cliche movie during overlong "seen it all before" bits or parts that are just awful and practically irrelevant.

My example would be the psychologist scenes of Zombie's Halloween 2. He already established a broken main character but kept beating us over the head with it. And the acting and the script were pathetic. Scenes like that don't add anything because I've seen enough films to know precisely where its going...so if its not taking me there in a competent manner i can freely skip. Halloween 2 is a good example of a movie i would have turned off but kept on because 1. I like slashers and a bit of violence so i wanted to see the kills and 2. It was so monumentally awful i just had to see how far it went-- i was fascinated by the butchery both literally and artistically.

In any case were not professionals determining someone else's future. We know what we like and don't like and we've all seen enough movies that 30 minutes will typically be enough to know where a movie will stand with us. And if we think its bad, so bad we have to turn it off, that movie is a failure and we should absolutely rate it accordingly. Im sure if i had more half-watched 0s under my belt my psis on future films would start skewing low enough to avoid in the first place.

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

Post by MmzHrrdb »

livelove wrote:
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.


i see what you mean and in the end .. yes you are right. These days the time is not much, and i tend to see a lot of tv shows per week and try to keep up with movies, so my main idea now is simple, if the movie doesn't appeal to me in the 1st 20 min, i just give and , forget it, don´t rate it... move on. gives me more time i guess. also doing the same with tv show pilots. i don´t care if it can improve over time, if the pilot suck, for me its the end.

my movie count can go to 2900 maybe, if i remove ratings from movie i didnt saw till the end. not really sure, the tv shows are messing with the movie count here , i just noticed that... :S

hellboy76
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Re: How do you rate movies you have abandonned halfway throu

Post by hellboy76 »

I also rate my fucking on whether I stopped halfway through as well.

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

Post by livelove »

hellboy76 wrote:I also rate my fucking on whether I stopped halfway through as well.


The same principle applies:
You should not rate something you have never seen … or done. :D

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

Post by lisa- »

livelove wrote:
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.


a teacher is in a position of power to at least slightly direct the future of a child's entire life.

you're just watching a movie.

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

Post by livelove »

lisa- wrote:a teacher is in a position of power to at least slightly direct the future of a child's entire life.
you're just watching a movie.


If watching movies hadn't any importance or value, we wouldn't be here.
And doing it badly just because it doesn't ruin anybody's entire life is a very poor argument, because it would justify ANY behaviour here on criticker.

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

Post by MmzHrrdb »

livelove wrote:
lisa- wrote:a teacher is in a position of power to at least slightly direct the future of a child's entire life.
you're just watching a movie.


If watching movies hadn't any importance or value, we wouldn't be here.
And doing it badly just because it doesn't ruin anybody's entire life is a very poor argument, because it would justify ANY behaviour here on criticker.


did you watch your tier 1 movies from the beginning until the end ?

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

Post by livelove »

Psylunne wrote:
livelove wrote:
lisa- wrote:a teacher is in a position of power to at least slightly direct the future of a child's entire life.
you're just watching a movie.


If watching movies hadn't any importance or value, we wouldn't be here.
And doing it badly just because it doesn't ruin anybody's entire life is a very poor argument, because it would justify ANY behaviour here on criticker.


did you watch your tier 1 movies from the beginning until the end ?


I only wrote this in response to the inadequate argument above according to which it's ok because it doesn't ruin a child's entire life.
It's the sort of argument I really hate ... like saying "it won't kill you". Yes, there are 1000 things that won't kill me. Like drinking 2 mouthfuls of motor oil. That won't kill me, but will certainly make me seriously sick. So just because it doesn't kill me, doesn't mean it's a good thing to drink motor oil. And it doesn't mean something is good, just because it doesn't ruin a child's entire life.

Anyway, back to your question.

I have watched a couple of hundreds of movies and scored them on an Excel spreadsheet just for myself. At a rough estimate, I have watched 90-95% from start to finish. The reasons for not finishing them are countless and some of them are not even related to the film's quality, e.g. saw it on TV, girlfriend got bored halfway through and we abandonned :-) Or I had to leave for sports training.

There are even films I watched till the end, which received a lower score than some I abandonned.
Example:
A bad film is gripping enough (e.g. horror film) to make me want to know what happens next, or how it ends, but when the suspense is gone I sometimes realize how empty and unrewarding the film actually was (aside from the suspense). This combined with a very bad ending that reduces the whole film to the point of absurdity can lead to scores between 0-20. On the other hand, there are some films I stopped watching which were not THAT abysmal, but mediocre (scoring around 30) and outright boring and I felt that the film would lead nowhere truly interesting. So whether or not I stopped watching a film and at which point doesn't automatically translate to a directly related score.

Anyway, whenever I have not watched 100% of the movie (for whatever reason), I have put my score in parentheses, meaning that the score is not reliable.

That was always good enough for me.

But I really would like to import all my rankings to criticker, and as there is no such thing as a score in parentheses, I am leaning towards not ranking them here at all, because it would otherwise distort the voting here (especially if everyone is doing that) and also my personal voting profile (thus distorting my TCIs and PSIs).

And yes, when I watched only 50% of the movie, there were some cases, where I decided later on to finish it and more frequently than one would think, the final score was significantly off.

livelove wrote: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.


It often happens that filmmakers have a quite interesting new idea, which makes for a quite inspiring first half of a movie, but then they apparently didn't know where to go with it or how to come full circle and the good concept is somehow unfinished, unsatisfying, etc. ... inventing a good 2nd half and especially a good final phase is the most difficult.

And then again, sometimes it happens, that you have to get the hang of a movie as it progresses. And yes, there are some movies which have a very slow start but then the pace catches up later on, when many viewers have already tuned out.

I am not saying that it's always the case, but if it's only 35% of the time, or even only 15% of the time, that's more than enough reason for me to have a bad feeling when rating something I have not truly seen. And I am really horrified by people who - as I have learned in this thread - score movies just on the basis of the trailer(!) and the wikipedia plot(!). :o That's entirely beyond me. Such behaviour should actually lead to a ban (as unfeasible as that certainly is) since it undermindes the very purpose criticker was built upon.

My problem is that I would like to have these not-finished-films in my criticker profile WITH a score (at least a tentative one like the parentheses in my spreadsheet, but that wouldn't make any sense here on criticker), yet for most of those films I do not want to waste the time of my life finishing them. So I am in a double bind.

I was hoping that some of you who have years of experience have developped a strategy for how to deal with this kind of situation, but apparently there is no good solution. Or is there ?

Absent a better solution, I will refrain from giving my partially watched films a criticker score, as unsatisfying as that is for me, but scoring by guessing is an even worse alternative in my view.

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

Post by VinegarBob »

livelove wrote:I was hoping that some of you who have years of experience have developped a strategy for how to deal with this kind of situation, but apparently there is no good solution. Or is there ?


It's become clear to me reading your interactions with various people here that for you there is no solution. You seem to disapprove of anyone rating a film unless they've seen the whole thing, and have dismissed any opinion that deviates from that position. The only 'advice' that would seem to be acceptable in this situation is:

You should absolutely never rate any film here on Criticker unless you have seen every second of it from the opening titles to the closing credits.

As an aside it seems like Criticker may not be a good fit for you, as it's clear that there are many more people than you first imagined that rate films in a way that you disagree with and feel to be unreliable, therefore negating its purpose.

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

Post by livelove »

No, you misunderstand me. I was not seeing a good solution, but that doesn't mean there isn't any (just because I am unable to see it). I was (and still would be) looking forward to hearing a good strategy, because - as I have stressed repeatedly - I am unsatisfied with everything I have come up with by myself so far (including not rating the films, as I have also underligned multiple times, but apparently you didn't read all my posts from start to finish either :D ).

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