Shawn Loves Movies

Doug Benson blocked me on Twitter once, but then he unblocked me at some point, which I thought was super rad of him. I hope it’s okay that I borrowed his unimaginative title.

I stopped giving ratings to things at some point. Initially, my response to the internet was to crawl through websites like IMDb to assign my own personal star ratings to films and TV shows. It was a way of collecting them, marking them as watched (which I now use Trakt.tv for), but it also satisfied something in me that wanted to rank them. I read Roger Ebert, even when I was 13, and he had star ratings. He basically had a 9 point scale — zero stars through four, all halves available. If he ever gave a rating besides this, I’m unaware of it, but I would believe he probably gave a negative score to something at some point. I used the system available to me, ten points on some websites, five on others, to develop my sense of myself as a critic.

But at some point, probably around the time I discovered Rotten Tomatoes, maybe ten years ago, I stopped thinking of ranking movies and instead reduced the process to a simple question: would I recommend this film to someone else?

That’s basically the point of the Tomatometer score on Rotten Tomatoes — it reduces the reviews to a percentage of the critics who recommend seeing the film. Each critic may or may not have a rating system — stars, popcorns, thumbs — but it boils down to the simple question of whether or not to recommend a film to someone. And at that point it often becomes conditional: you would like this film IF you have kids or you would like this film IF you are not bothered by grotesque violence or you would like this film IF you can still stand Johnny Depp in eye makeup.

The RT score starts getting a bit untrustworthy when you dip into genre territory, especially horror. Most fans of the Paranormal Activity series (probably?) do not think that the first film is the best. But according to RT, it is the “most recommended” of any of them. Honestly, if someone had never seen any of these movies, I would recommend The Marked Ones to almost anyone. It’s a straight up thriller / action / comedy / suspense joy ride. It has almost nothing to do with the rest of the series except for one very important moment at the end — and then that would be the hook for the new viewer to decide whether they wanted to continue with the series or not.

I’m going to continue with the Paranormal Activity example in a minute because I know the franchise very intricately, as has been documented previously.*

I would recommend many movies that I don’t like very much personally, because I still find myself agreeing that the good outweighs the bad in ways that I can’t argue. And I also can’t argue that I’m glad to have seen them, even if I don’t like them. And that’s kind of how I ended up abandoning the ratings and rankings, because it got to the point that I didn’t like The Shining or A Clockwork Orange,** but I think that they are still essential viewing. And I love some truly horribly bad movies†, but I wouldn’t ever rate them high on any objective scale. So it came down to the binary decision of worth the time spent or not.

If someone asked me about the entire Paranormal Activity franchise, I would recommend it. The series as a whole is strong. If they are completionists, I might warn them that there are poor films in the series. I think it’s fair to say that you can get the best out of Paranormal Activity by viewing the first three films and The Marked Ones, and that’s it. Each of those films also has its ups and downs, but they are mostly better than worse.

Paranormal Activity is a rare franchise that benefits from the option to watch it in any order, which is why I floated The Marked Ones as bait for a newcomer. This is not a ranking, mind you, I’m not saying that Marked Ones is the best, it might just be the best entry point to the series. But the question of “the best” really irks me, because I’d always rather just watch them all.