Lately there has been a lot of argument amongst my near and dear about movies, and their relative values and merits. Frankly, it's been getting a bit crazy, and I've been keeping my head low so as not to be caught in any crossfires.

But it's got me thinking about movies in general, and how hard it is to tell if a movie is going to be any good before you empty out your bank account to go see it. Until it's been out for a while, almost the only resort is to trust to movie reviews. Reviewers have generally seen a lot of movies (the idea being they thus know what they are talking about), and get to see it before you do.

But can you trust them? There are always rumours about big guys like Ebert being paid off to rate a movie higher. The little guys tend to be extra critical or pseudo-intellectual, in an effort to come off more cerebral and edgy.

Add to that these incomprehensible ratings. What the heck is a 'star' or 'sun' or whatever really worth? Consider that Ebert gave four stars to both 'Chocolat' and 'Babe: Pig in the City'. You'll note that these two movies can hardly be farther apart in terms of plot, message or target audience. So if you go simply on basis of it's rating you don't have any idea what you are getting into.

Even a quick plot synopsis doesn't give you enough to on. If I described a movie as, "An ex-military officer comes out of retirement to stop a group of terrorists", would you have any idea which particular right-wing action movie I meant?

Okay. What we need then is a better method of rapidly determining the attributes of a film, both qualitatively and quantitatively. People need some method of identifying their potential movie matches. Something that assigns each movie it's own astrological sign or IQ rating, if you will.

Let's look at some of the possible systems.

The standard star rating:

This is every movie critic's fallback position. Whether it's in actual stars, little dollar signs, letter grades, whatever, it's the simplest and easiest. For the critic, that is.

Five stars means the critic liked it. He may disguise it in some rhetoric about production values or depth of character or whatever, but it breaks down to, 'I liked it,' or 'They let me forage at the craft services table during filming.'

This type of rating is only of real value if you have the exact same likes and dislikes as the reviewer, which, given the varied dictates of genetic heritage and cultural rearing, is patently impossible. No to mention kind of disturbing.

For example, here's three movies off the top of my head, and the ratings I would assign them myself:

Raiders of the Lost Ark - 3.5

K-PAX - 5

Grease - 4

I'm sure you would have your own feelings about these particular films. I'm probably rating Grease higher than most of you, but I have a thing for greasers singing disco. And Stockard Channing.

So. We need to break down these stars into some component parts.

The two-point system:

Anyone who managed to stay awake through fourth-grade mathematics knows how to plot numbers on a graph, and read the same when presented back to them. This makes the two-point system quite accessible to the average homebody.

The question is: how do we break this down? What categories do we break all movies into? How about production value VS content? Content being the message of the film, the acting, etc., while production is the quality of the effort put into putting it on film. I'd say a chart of our above films would look something like this:

Okay. Better. It is still arbitrary, being that I just kind of made my own numbers for each category. A comparison of this chart to the single star ratings shows that while Grease's rating is an average of the above two points, my ratings of K-PAX and Raiders of the Lost Ark rely more heavily on the content in the former and the production in the latter.

Thus the two-point system moves away from my gut reaction of the movie to a discussion of its merits and flaws.

But we can do more.

The three-point system:

This time we'll rate our movies on three different points, and graph it accordingly. This begins to move beyond your basic elementary mathematics, but it's pretty, which does count for a lot.

For our purposes here, let's say our categories are material, performance and production. Material is the quality of the script, the message of the movie, performance is how well the actors and directors brought that message to life, and production is the skill and magic of the technicians that bring it all together.

Let's do it again:

I know I could have done this in another bar graph, but this is much neater. Plus this raises a new prospect of rating movies: the total area of the triangle. You can see that K-PAX totally encompasses Grease. Therefore, it's potentially a better movie. Duh.

We can, of course, extend this concept further. The crazy guys at the ChildCare Action Project rate every movie from a ultra-Christian viewpoint on Wanton Crime/Violence (W), Impudence/Hate (I), Sex/Homosexuality (S), Drugs/Alcohol (D), Offense to God (O), and Murder/Suicide (M). The higher the rating in each category, the better. Their graph for K-PAX looks like this:

Of course, there is such a thing as taking an idea too far.

On Survivor: I missed it, but apparantly Jeff hinted that there may not be a merger. Is he hinting at the future, or just screwing with their heads? We'll know more tomorrow.

On Buffy: The musical episode rocked.

Mom Rating: 3 out of 5. Mom will think this is kind of funny, but will wonder why I wasted so much time on it.

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