Also, one of my smartest, most sophisticated friends had rated Lindsay Lohan's Mean Girls as highly as he'd rated Woody Allen's Annie Hall.Now, let's take me. I'm reasonably smart and sophisticated. I haven't seen Annie Hall (I know, shoot me, it's in my queue somewhere), but I have seen Mean Girls, and I gave it five stars. Compare to, say, The Godfather, which I gave two stars.
See, the Slate guy gets the whole Netflix stars thing completely wrong. Netflix isn't asking me to make judgments about the cinematic merit of the films. Whatever, The Godfather is quality cinema, I get it. But I didn't *like* it, and that's what Netflix asked me. Mean Girls, on the other hand? Freaking hilarious. I've seen it at least three times.
If I want to know the best movies of all time, I can ask the AFI. (Godfather, #3; Mean Girls, inexplicably, absent.) But for my violent gangsta entertainment, I'll take the Sopranos or City of God any day. And for my bitchy teen movies? Mean Girls all the way.
6 comments:
And also, Saved. If you haven't seen Saved, you must borrow it from me soonest, because it's Mean Girls only with homosexuality, and teen pregnancy, and Mandy Moore throwing a bible ("I am filled with Christlove!!")
In short: It's awesome.
I rate things on a combination of what I think is their merit and how much I actually enjoyed them. Otherwise I think it becomes too arbitrary. For example, if I were high (which I wouldn't be, but just for the sake of argument) I might enjoy Laguna Beach. On the other hand I didn't actually enjoy watching The Pianist, but that's really not the point of The Pianist.
IBYB - oh, don't you worry - I have my own personal copy of Saved!, too. Maybe our copies can get together and play sometime.
I made the mistake of rating things by merit, rather than personal enjoyment at one point. The result was that all of the "If you enjoyed X, you might enjoy Y" things were full of boring, long, tedious, educational movies that I had no interest in seeing....
I employ a two-pronged rating system that is divided into 'film' (artistic merit) and 'movie' (enjoyability). For Netflix, that translates into my rating movies based on how well they compare to other films in the same genre - for example, those of you who are on my Netflix friends list will note that I recently gave the same rating (3 stars) to "A History of Violence" and "Heavyweights" (a mid-90s Disney teen comedy I caught while stuck in bed yesterday). I certainly think that AHoV is a better _film_, but probably enjoyed watching Heavyweights a bit more.
Sophist - does this mean that you're on Netflix, too? Wanna be friends?
Yeah, Sophist, be my Netflix friend!
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