Monday, July 8, 2019

Movie Rankings: The Concept and Pitch


The idea for this upcoming series of articles arose a few weeks/months back when I picked up Waterworld: The Ulysses Cut, which then forced me to rearrange the movies on the bookcases as well as something else that got me thinking about the movies I've bought over the years and how they have been received by society at large.

So the idea is that I have a list of all of the movies we have on DVD/Blu-Ray, specifically movies and not taking into account documentaries, TV Shows, TV Movies, or live concerts.  I could have also included VHS, but I think those are still in cold storage somewhere.  Presumably I have these movies because I like them enough to either spend my own money on them, or have asked other people to spend their money to buy them for me.  I know that not all of the movies I have are class acts, or universally regarded as good, but that's all about personal taste.  I have these films because they bring happiness in my soul on some level.  Sure, I'm not going to sit down and watch Requiem for a Dream every weekend, but I think it is a damn good film and the special features (especially the commentary) are well produced.  And so I bought it.  I also bought Reefer Madness because I think it is a hilarious movie in that the moral of the movie is so genuinely believed by the creators that it borders on parody.

Now, once I got down to putting all of our movies in list format via Google Docs, I then listed what I thought would be my top five movies as well as the bottom five movies.  Again, these are not movies that I think are actually bad and deserve to be in the top/bottom five, but how I think any of the three sites will rate them; in that The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King is my least favorite of the LotR trilogy, but I think it is many other people find it more highly regarded than the first two films.  I also did not take into account different versions of the same movie, as is the case with the Lord of the Rings movies.  I have the extended editions of the film, but not the theatrical release, but often times extended cuts will not be ranked on IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, or Metacritic, so I just went with what was listed; but I do try to point out the difference where applicable.  I also did not give separate top/bottom fives for each site although I wouldn't've been surprised if the top five for IMDb ended up being different from Metacritic.

So I pulled the ratings for all of my movies from IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, and Metacritic, for scoring, but will not be combining scores from all three, rather just tabulating scores from each site, then I sorted by site and will discuss the top and bottom five movies that I own.  To briefly clarify, I will only be listing and talking about the top and bottom five movies that I have as ranked by these sites, so you will not see The Godfather, or From Justin to Kelly because I do not own either of those two.

One really interesting thing I discovered was that there were some Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes scores did not exist for all of the movies that I have.  Rather surprising for titles such as Akira, Dragonheart, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, and Freaks.  There are plenty of other titles that were not listed, but I am not going to list everything, again, because that would be boring for all involved.

Oh, and I will not be putting up my list of all of the movies and ratings because that would be too cumbersome and let's just not go there. 

The upcoming articles will include (again) my top and bottom five as well as the top and bottom five for each site, but for the premier article, let us just start off with what my hypothesized top and bottom five movies will be.

Top 5 Films
  • Aliens (1986)
  • Akira (1988)
  • The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
  • Seven Samurai (1954)
  • Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Upon putting these films together, it seems like I believe that the Internet at large likes older films, seeing as how four of the five are 1988 and earlier, with three of those four in the 80s.  Maybe I am guessing that 80s nostalgia is rather high at the moment?  

Bottom 5 Films
  • Beowulf (2007)
  • The Happening (2008)
  • Jackhammer Massacre (2004)
  • The Postman (1997)
  • Waterworld (1995)
In Friday's article, we will look at what the top and bottom five from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) from the movies that I have and compare that list to my predictions here.  So if this has at all interested you, then you're in for a treat with a look into my brain, what movies entertain me, and what the voting Internet population thinks of the movies that I have purchased over the years.  If this does not interest you at all, well then just hang in there for a couple of weeks and we will return to our regularly scheduled broadcast.



~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

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