Let's Talk About Letterbox Ratings

Yesterday a friend of the shop stopped in and asked a question about Letterboxd, specifically my Letterboxd. More specifically a review that I wrote in 2019 about the French New Extreme horror movie Martyrs. More specifically about how what I wrote remotely connects to the star rating that I put on it. Essentially the question was make it make sense. How can something that you appreciate only get two and a half stars out of five? In other words bro do you even like movies?

So a little background... In 2018 I created my first Letterboxd account. For a while I worked in overnight shift and - despite the fact that I was in grad school and probably should have been studying a lot more - I had a lot of time that I spent watching movies and during that time specifically 2019 I got really deep into Letterboxd and connecting with the community there. That year was really formative for me in terms of expanding my horizons. I participated in an international film challenge that expanded not just my horizons but my world view a little bit. It opened my eyes to things that I hadn't seen and experienced before. So like Letterboxd was really important to me for a while because of that. And then somewhere in the pandemic I just got burned out on the internet and I was like screw it I'm just gonna go nuclear, wiped my account, deleted it, deleted a whole bunch of stuff on the internet, walked away.

I saved my reviews though because that's an option that you can do there and at some point time later on a year or two years ago I opened a new account and I uploaded the reviews which is why I have very few followers, very few comments, very few likes on all the stuff but it goes back almost a decade. I am just a weird guy who makes weird decisions sometimes. It's who I am. But back to the star ratings.

At the time I wanted to shy away from extremes and make the stars make sense to me at least and I did succeed at least somewhat guided in part by this CS Lewis quote of all people where he said, "Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say 'infinitely' when you mean 'very.' Otherwise you'll have no words left when you want to talk about something really infinite." So I throw out zero out of five ratings because you can't rate something a nothing burger on on Letterboxd. Throw out the five out of five because nothing is completely pristine perfect and otherwise untouchable. So I made 4.5 my pinnacle and use the half star ratings to notch it down from there. But I started with that idea like almost a decade ago and it could probably use an update particularly after our talk yesterday.

It ended up being four of us hanging out by the register just like talking about how we appreciate and watch movies: What we take away from them; what we look for; how that influences our appreciation for a particular work. Just geeks doing geeks stuff. The big takeaway for me was one dude he said the star rating isn't even his thing. He thinks about it more like a letter grade like an A is a good ass movie but he was a C student and you know what these get degrees. And the takeaway for me being that matched up more with my old thinking about what is a one star movie? It still can be a very fine passable movie but it's not without its problems, but it's not terrible. (Though it can be terrible!)

So I'm trying the letter rating system on for size moving forward, as a scale, but it doesn't answer the original question of how do you square that circle of a film - that even at the time might have been considered one of my favorites in one of my favorite genres - with a two and a half star rating. And even after talking I don't know the answer to that yet. I'm still figuring it out but it's been pretty cool to think about that and really question and challenge my my thought process with it. I've struggled to compare something like a slapstick comedy like a Hot Rod or UHF which might be two of my favorite movies of all time. Comparing those to incredibly serious works which rattled me emotionally or delivered brilliant on-screen technical expertise or like unparalleled cinematic storytelling. How do you compare those two things? That sort of question is how I get mixed up with talking about how much I appreciate a movie and giving it what someone might view as a mid rating.

I'm gonna play with this idea some more but I think it was with reassessing if only to check in with myself about like what I enjoy and appreciate about movies or how I view them or digest them and what I enjoy about that process. And if you're on Letterboxd let me know how you rank movies because I'm clearly still figuring it out. How do you compare cinematic apples with cinematic oranges and how do you balance the emotional appeal of something with the technical expertise of another when considering that rating system? Or even what do you do with something like this? A comically terrible movie that you've enjoyed every last second of?