1-10 is a bad rating system

Or an early White Lotus Season 3 review?

Rating movies is tough:

Actual ratings from my letterboxd

Once you inevitably compare ratings, you begin to wonder if you’re a philistine without any sense of their own tastes, or maybe even worse… someone with bad taste.

To remedy this feeling, I’ve come up with a system that explains to me why Coco and Horrible Bosses 2 landed as equals.

(Kung Fu Panda is the greatest movie of all time)

Instead of Horrible Bosses 2 = Coco,

Horrible Bosses 2’s entertainment compensates for its lack of craft, and Coco’s craft compensates for its lower entertainment.

What I’m discussing is “first order” entertainment— in other words, your joy attached to watching the movie itself. Consider the question: “How did this movie make me feel?”

Craft zooms out of the movie itself. “How did this movie make me feel that way?”

Craft marinates through reflection. Entertainment remains crystallized as a memory.

Here’s what I gleaned from using this new rating system:

1. Your average “rating line” may reveal how important craft is to you.

Let’s assume these movies are graphed based on an aggregated average of their ratings.

With this very small sample size, you could see my rating line leveling out at ~8— which means that you can predict that I’ll be entertained by just about any movie with a craft of 8.

My tastes here seem standard. But I definitely know some people that would enjoy any movie with a craft of 5.

2. Based on the average ratings of your media— you can identity what kind of movie goer you are:

For movies, music and TV shows, I tend to consume on a high entertainment axis. I’m guilty of having bad taste while also enjoying some good shit. There’s an occasional masterpiece.

Generally, we’re much better at evaluating whether we were entertained or not— so I think most people are around my level in the bad taste area.

For books, I’m 1000% in the pretentious area.

3. You can also predict trends with entertainment = f(craft)

We can also think about entertainment as a function of craft. See it graphed:

There’s likely a reverse bell curve (a parabola if you will) based on craft. Because bad things are funny.

And when you take the derivative, you can see that craft translates to more marginal entertainment at higher levels. So a 8-craft movie going to a 9-craft movie is more impactful for entertainment than a 1-craft movie going to a 2-craft movie.

If you take the integral of the original function, you also find that higher craft translates to higher “net entertainment” or longer lasting entertainment. The craft sticks with you— entertaining you even after the movie is over.

And finally, why I started writing this:

I can’t compare White Lotus’s seasons without talking about both entertainment AND craft.

Despite not remembering it that well, Season 1’s originality made for a novel, entertaining experience

I found Season 2 to be incredibly craftful— particularly in the ways that it scaffolded its characters (e.g. the grandfather, father, and son representing the evolution of misogyny).

And I think Season 3 is on an upward trajectory tilted toward craft. It isn’t as sensational as its predecessors, but it’s patient. We’ll see.

Please drop your “Bad Taste” movies in the chat. And yes, I do actually love Horrible Bosses 2 (and 1).

Thank you for reading my second “graph” post of the month. Cartesian planes are on the brain right now.