"It's sort of freaking me out."

This has nothing, really, to do with movies, but it made me laugh aloud. Had I been drinking Coke, there would be Coke all over my keyboard etcetera. This Republican Senator from Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum, made some remarks to an AP reporter that essentially equated homosexual acts with bigamy, polygamy, incest, etc. Basically, he treats any sex act that takes place outside of a married, heterosexual relationship as somehow amoral and eligible for regulation by state and local lawmakers. (What was that about the GOP getting big government off our backs? But I digress.)

Anyway, Santorum claimed that the story was misleading — he wasn't misquoted, but he was quoted out of context. So the AP released a more complete transcript, which is even more illuminating of the guy's thinking. It's good reading if you enjoy this kind of stuff, but what makes it really precious to me is the AP reporter's comments toward the very end of the piece, after Santorum starts talking pedophilia and bestiality. As a proud graduate of journalism school, I got a real kick out of imagining this exchange taking place.

And if you come here solely to read stuff related to movies, well, I apologize for wasting your time.

You wouldn't like me when I'm angry, motherfucker.

The new trailer for Ang Lee's The Hulk is pretty exciting. Yes, the CGI looks phony, but CGI always does. What's stunning is the character animation work that seems to have been done on the mean green guy. The guys at ILM are convinced that, however cool Gollum may have been, their work here is an evolutionary leap forward, and what's been seen to date seems to show that they walk it like they talk it. My only complaint at this point is that it looks like The Hulk nails the Marvel Comics atmosphere so well that it may feel like a wee bit of a retread in the shadow of Sam Raimi's terrific Spider-Man. At any rate, Make Mine Marvel!

There's more fun to be had at killbill.jp, where a genuinely gross teaser for QT's new one awaits. Click your mouse 20 times like it asks, then type in "KILL." Sick. In a good way. (Warning: Flash or Shockwave, I forget which, required.)

There's also a new trailer for Pirates of the Caribbean that shows Johnny Depp doing what struck me as a reasonably good impression of Daniel Day-Lewis's Bill the Butcher (though I guess it's unlikely that he had seen Gangs of New York when he shot this one, yes?) and seems to support my suspicion that Gore Verbinski is not the right guy to direct an action movie, even one where the Harryhausen skeletons are the real stars of the show.

(I'm making this a new post, even though it's really just my reaction to discussion of my previous post, because it's my Weblog and I can. So there.)

See, Mike's point about going tabula rasa and not wanting to read or even skim an actual review while making the decision on whether or not to shell out and hit the multiplex is the most compelling one I know of for some kind of rating scale.

Here's another argument in favor of ratings or letter grades: they neatly fulfill the "consumer guide" function of a review for those who are trying to decide whether or not to see a movie. That could, in theory, make it OK to include SPOILERS!!! in the body of a review — which I generally avoid, but which could facilitate more detailed discussion of my reaction to a film.

So here's one of the questions I deal with — are people using these reviews for consumer-guide purposes? Are they using just the letter grades for that purpose? Obviously Mike D. is, and while he could just email me and ask what I thought of The Hunted (I liked it quite a bit, Mike, though I wouldn't call it "terrific" and wouldn't recommend it to you in particular because of what I know about your fondness for, y'know, a decent script, which The Hunted lacks) the Web site is intended to save everyone the trouble.

To be honest, though, I've never thought the consumer-guide component of what I do was really worth writing home about. I don't get email complaining that somebody went to a movie on my recommendation and hated it (though lots of people write in to bitch after they read my review of something they loved). Because my day job keeps me more and more busy later and later into the evening with each passing year, I tend to miss out on the vast majority of press screenings, even when the studio folks deign to invite me, and that means that reviews run days after a film's opening at best — and often it takes me weeks to get something up. Just the way my life is working right now. But the publishing business is rough right now and in three months, who knows, I could have all the free time in the world to dedicate to movie-viewing and reviewing.

Anyway, I digress. I could be wrong about the wrong-ness of "grading" movies, which always seemed vaguely vulgar to me when I was a pretentious undergraduate who thought he understood everything. And certainly the first thing I get asked by friends after the credits roll is "So what grade are you giving it?" (Lately I've been grumbling something about how I don't give grades any more, which seems to throw a soggy blanket over the conversation.) Anyway, I'm having a great time reading and considering the responses to date.

Mike D'Angelo writes:

I can't be the only one curious to know why you've decided
to abandon grades after all these years...

Maybe it's not apparent from my Web site — which first graded on the venerable star system but switched early on to letter grades, which appealed because they felt, I don't know, snottier — but I've always had a philosophical problem with grading movies, or handing out stars or hoisting and lowering thumbs, or dealing out movie tickets, or dispensing whatever virtual tchotchkes it is that those crazy Internet kids are dispensing these days.

The common hardline stance is that film criticism is too serious a business to boil down to a consumer-guide rating. "If you, fickle reader, want to know what I think about a movie, goddamnit, you can read my review, where I'm hoping to communicate something a little more complicated about my experience of the film than just, you know, B+, you shallow bastard." That may or may not be bullshit, depending on what you think of my writing and whether you ever use my letter grades as a kind of consumer guide.

But there are practical considerations, too. For one thing, there's the problem of reconciling the graded list, like a bank statement, at year's end. Once Gangs of New York, say, is listed as an A- and Visitor Q is listed as a B, the creation of, say, a top 10 list becomes a fairly rote exercise in skimming the cream off the top of a list of films ordered by letter grades. And that's an exercise that doesn't reflect the ways that movies can gain power and context as the months fly by.

And there's also the little question of accuracy. When I look at my sorted-by-grade list of 2002 films, it's generally a good reflection of my year at the movies. But on a film by film basis, I have reservations. Should Resident Evil, which features zombies and Milla Jovovich, both of which elements continue to entertain on repeat viewings, get bumped out of its C+ ghetto, where it languishes betwixt and between a workmanlike snoozer like Wendigo and a moralizing snoozer like Auto Focus? Shouldn't Storytelling, which I revisited in part on DVD and consequently have no desire ever to experience again, get docked a notch or two rather than being allowed to pal around with the altogether more sophisticated Undercover Brother?

And how much time should I spend rearranging my list? Should I do it at the end of the year, or revise it every time I return from the local googolplex? Do I owe it to my readers to track the changes over time? Do I owe it to the films to make a point of revisiting them, just in case my original opinions change?

Mike wrote me once (I remember all of Mike's email) to express gratitude that I attached letter grades to my reviews, because he never would have been able to decode from the grudgingly admiring review I gave Topsy Turvy the A- that perched atop it. And you know what? Topsy Turvy is a fine film, and a perfectly admirable film. But it didn't deserve the A- I gave it, which was an indicator of, I guess, my level of respect for the picture rather than my active engagement with and/or enjoyment of it. My review is clearly a B+. Maybe even a B.

Here's another question: what the fuck does "B+" mean, anyway? How I've always seen it is B+ is the cut-off point. When the lights go down, that's my baseline expectation. It's what I'm hoping for. If the lights come up and I feel good and satisfied and glad I invested $10 and two hours (often plus travel time from the suburbs to Manhattan, which can be a bitch) in the film, it's at least a B+, with a higher grade possible depending on the film's ambitions and accomplishments. An A- is a movie that I fairly well love. And an A is something I give out altogether too rarely. It's so hard for me to figure out a way to triangulate that reaction when I'm still close enough to a movie to be writing about it. Kundun, for instance, got the grade because my first viewing of it was so dazzling. I remember stumbling across Broadway to Ollie's Noodle Shop, my chest so tight that I could hardly breathe, when it was over. Magnificent, yes. But it's an experience that can't be duplicated. I still loved the film on a second viewing, but I didn't love the film in the same way. I guess it would be impossible. And on DVD, it is diminished further still. Is it no longer an A? It wouldn't seem fair to retroactively knock the movie down a peg or two because it doesn't provide a similarly overwhelming experience on repeat viewings — in most cases, a movie only has to work once, and besides critics almost always have to write about a film based on that single viewing. Second-guessing your own emotional reactions is no way to spend your time.

But I note that in 1997, the year of Kundun, I also handed out As to The Sweet Hereafter and L.A. Confidential. That seems reasonable to me, although I wonder, if I enjoyed L.A. Confidential so damn much, how come I've never had the urge to slip in the DVD that's been sitting on my shelf for five years? Is it my latent fear of Kim Basinger? (Reading my review today, I notice that I had kind words for her performance and therefore wonder what the fuck I was smoking.) But then is it really true that no movie I saw in 2002 — or 2001 for that matter — deserves a flat-out A grade? Nah. Looking back on 2001, I see that I should have handed out As, flat out, to Audition and Mulholland Dr. at a bare minimum. And what's up with Battle Royale, a movie I love as much as anything I've seen in the last five years, languishing in the Bs?

And here's the thing. I had zero enthusiasm — zip, nichts, nada — for constructing a top 10 list for the year 2001, and again for 2002. Keeping running tabs on my opinions, putting the films in boxes as I saw them, sapped my enthusiasm. I could always mix it up as I order and re-order the pictures at the end of the year — but self-consciously, feeling that, if I pulled one film out of the basement and sent another one tumbling down the stairs, I'd have to justify the repudiation of my original reaction. What I find is it's not what I write about the film that's the problem — some of my old reviews make me wince, but they are consistently true documents showing how I reacted to the films they consider. It's the letter grades that often seem untrustworthy. Misleading, even.

Sure, I could continue to affix letter grades to every film, and then just throw them out at the end of the year when it comes time to select the "best." Further, it might shed some light on my own habits to see which films rise and fall in my estimation before the year's end. But if I'm to make the concession that letter grades are often merely placeholders to indicate a snap judgement on a film before time has its way with me, and with said film, is it fair to place them at all? And is it necessary?

I send out an email when new movie reviews get posted. When I wrote about Irreversible, a film which resisted my efforts to grade it according to my usual criteria, I noted that it seems complex reactions to difficult films are unhelpfully reduced by letter grades: "I've elided a letter grade because I'm toying with the idea of no longer assigning grades to movies, a practice that always seemed a little arbitrary. Also, I don't have any idea what the hell I'd do with [Irreversible] anyway, which gets an A+ for technique and sheer impact, something in the B range for substance, and a failing grade for running around the schoolroom with its wee-wee hanging out of its pants and terrorizing the smaller kids. My remarks here are glib, but the film really is something else — I wrestled with it for three days and came up with the review linked above."

If I feel this ambivalent about letter grades months, even years, after a film is released, you can imagine my reaction when I hear, from md'a, that he knows what grade a movie is going to get as soon as the credits roll. That's an admirable quality, and Mike obviously gets a lot of things right. If you know his work, the grades actually are a pretty helpful metric. I wish I were as good at it as he seems to be.

But there is a tendency on the part of film buffs, especially self-published Web-centric film writers, to spend time creating lists that chronicle and compartmentalize their obsessions into something manageable. Mike's Web site itself has influenced a number of like-minded cinephiles who follow his lead of keeping online screening diaries, and have similarly managed to make something worthwhile out of this dedication. I read them, of course. I tip my hat to 'em. But the granularity with which some of them break down their cinephilia, frankly, frightens me. One mailing list I belong to features a weekly compilation of Variety-style "Crix pix," breaking down the reactions of subscribers along the lines of pro, con, and mixed. When the idea was floated of adding more levels of distinction to the system, essentially allowing for VERY pro and VERY con reactions, I objected meekly. Were it up to me, I'd reduce the available reactions to just pro and con, forcing people off the fence entirely. Of course, the suggestion passed overwhelmingly among the members. (I seem to recall somebody lobbying for breaking mixed up into mixed-verging-on-pro and mixed-leaning-backward.) The system still works very well for encapsulating the reaction of a controlled group of moviewatchers, but I still find myself wishing everyone who voted "mixed" would come down on one side or another. The ambiguity they felt in making that decision could then become the indirect subject of their longform writing on the films themselves.

So when Mike D-to-the-A himself recently changed over from the relatively sane A-F scale to a 100 point grading system, you can imagine, I started to itch. (Plus he gave Dawn of the Dead only a 77, which, I don't know, does he mean that 23 percent of the films ever released are better than Romero's masterpiece or what, exactly?)

Anyway. This is a big to-do about very little, actually. I'm planning to move forward without the agita of letter grades. I'm hoping it will spur me to write about more movies, rather than just slapping them on a "films viewed" page with a grade next to them, but we'll see how that turns out. My full-time job has been keeping me really busy lately, so it's hard to work up the consistent enthusiasm for seeing and writing about movies, but I still do love to see 'em and write about 'em. We'll see how it goes. Go ahead and fill up the comments field below if you feel strongly about any of this one way or another, you poor sucker.

-bf-