January 2003

I men­tioned recently how I’d seen a bunch of movies and gave my rating out of 10 for them. Well, for those who didn’t know, the indis­pens­able Internet Movie Database lets you vote on every film in its data­base, and I’ve been obsess­ively doing just that for at least 2 years now. I now have 255 films in my vote his­tory, and though I’ve prob­ably seen more films than that, this is a pretty good indic­a­tion of how many films I’ve seen in the past two years or so. I find it useful to figure out any gaps in my film his­tory know­ledge, as well as just being a neat way to con­tribute to the col­lective opinion. Here are some neat pieces of trivia (neat for me, anyway!):

• Films from the 1930s: 1
• Films from the 1940s: 11
• Films from the 1950s: 11
• Films from the 1960s: 16
• Films from the 1970s: 20
• Films from the 1980s: 23
• Films from the 1990s: 63
• Films from 2000: 31
• Films from 2001: 44
• Films from 2002: 35

I’ve found that people tend to rate recent films much too highly, and I’m not averse to going back and chan­ging my rating after a few months. My cri­teria are that some­thing that’s well made but not par­tic­u­larly mem­or­able should be no higher than a 6 (ie. most so-called summer block­busters) and that 10 can be given to a film that’s not neces­sarily con­sidered a classic by everyone, but that I find myself watching again and again. If you haven’t yet tried out this neat fea­ture of IMDB, you should check it out. Just click “Vote Here” next to the user rat­ings on any film.

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