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 ?
Hi everyone.
Do you change your ratings? Ever?
I guess, if someone rewatches a film and likes it more/less than the first time around, he/she will (obviously?) change the voting accordingly. So my question is rather:
Do you change your ratings without rewatching the film?
Example given: Let's say you have scored "film X" 70/100. Some days or weeks later you look at the score and somehow remember it to be worse than the score you have given it. So would you downgrade your vote?
argument in favour of changing one's vote:
Sometimes it takes a while to get a real sense of the feelings one has for a film. Also, sometimes you see that there is not much left of the film (in terms of depth, content and storyline) once the direct emotional impact (suspense, shock, thrill) has worn off. So changing the voter later takes account of how much someone truly liked a film on a long-term basis (not just the first few hours).
argument against changing one's vote:
The human mind always forgets information, and normally this occurs incrementally over time. When someone downgrades a film 4 weeks later (kind of engaging in historical revisionism), this might take place because the person doesn't actively recall some of the stuff that made the film great in his/her eyes in the first place (even if passively remembering those scenes when asked about or reading about them). 4 weeks later you don't have the beautiful music in your ears, you don't see the superb lighting, you don't necessarily feel the film's mood entirely given that much has taken place in your life in the meantime, thereby affecting your current mood at the moment of changing your vote. The problem is that, by definition, one doesn't know, what one forgot. So if you gave the film a score of 70 and 4 weeks later you downgrade your vote to 60 or 65, chances are that you don't actively recall the stuff contributing to the 5 or 10 point difference.