Ratings

Doing this sort of project may or may not help others choose their movies, but it clearly shows your own taste. You'll figure out what I like and dislike if you browse my index for too long.

Remember that all ratings are my own opinion, and that sometimes I will rate sci-fi movies very high. This is partially because of my bias towards good sci-fi, and partially because I need to separate the good sci-fi from the bad (of which there is just too much.)

I'm also very plot-oriented. I know this. I like to hear stories. I can recognize a good character piece and I enjoy them, too, but I love an interesting story.

I'm also a sucker for romances. I know this, and I can't decide if I'm proud of that fact or not.

Rating scale from worst to best

SHOOT ME, PLEASE: Should be seen only with asbestos shielding and a caustic audience.
body part-WRENCHING: You can make it through this one, but only by ripping out named organ/appendage and consuming it.
NIGHTMARE: Should be seen with a caustic audience, but you don't want to die after seeing it.
EVIL: It's clearly very, very bad. Skip it.
MOSTLY HARMLESS: Essentially, it's roughly movie-shaped. There were flashing pictures on a screen. Usually dull, lifeless movies.
FAIR: Best not seen, though its attempts at good work are only mostly lost on the conscious viewer. These are usually movies that aimed high and failed.
NOT BAD: There are parts of this that could be watched for, but not something I really need to see again unless I'm feeling nostalgic.

Anything GOOD or above I recommend watching.
GOOD: Lots of fun. A good show. Occasionally I use this category for movies I know intellectually are even better, but I didn't personally enjoy them.
EXCELLENT: Unarguably well done. Great show.
UNSURPASSED: Wonderful movie; a gem of its kind. I'm actually probably the least able to rate movies I liked this much.

Once you get to NIGHTMARE and below, the movies actually become kind of fun to watch, in a twisted way. I recommend seeing anything GOOD or above. Statistical analysis of the eldest 300 reviews shows that I have a penchant for choosing NOT BAD, with a lean towards GOOD. One could argue that I'm not harsh enough, but I'd like to think this shows I tend to choose movies I like to watch.

Notes on Nazis

You'll note that I have quite a few pre-WWII and WWII Nazi movies. No, I'm not a fascist; I took a film criticism course that centered around Nazi cinema. Though it took me a few tries to get over the central lousiness of the dogma presented, I eventually got so that I could watch them and actually tell which ones were better than others, and some of the filmmaking and narrative structures showed skill, if skill used for largely evil purposes.

But, I added them to my review library and I had to give them ratings.

I rated them from the point of view of someone who pulled such a movie off the shelf in the mood to see an old war movie for pleasure vs. someone who pulled it off the shelf to see an old Nazi war movie for study. Generally, except when I'm examining them carefully for historical purposes, I just can't stand Nazi politics, and I'm betting most viewers can't stand them either. When I was rating these movies, shows like, say, ``Hitler Youth Quex'' didn't hold up very well to movies like, say, ``Star Wars'', and all of the Third Reich films ended up with ratings of EVIL or below.

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