Rating System Change

I feel I am obligated to officially announce a slight change in the way I rate movies in reviews. I have always rated movies out of Tommy Ds, ranging from 0 to 4 in quarter-point increments. After much toughness in assigning ratings to films and trying to maintain decent standards of fairness and consistency (I’ve already talked at length about the difficulties of the process), as well as feeling that I didn’t hand out the full 4 Tommy Ds often enough (instead often settling for 3.75 Tommy Ds), I am simplifying the system by only using half-point increments.

Of course, just because two movies have the same rating doesn’t mean they are equal. It just means they can be grouped in a similar “tier,” so to speak. I will soon follow with an incredibly ambitious post where I make changes to all my past ratings that were scored to with a quarter-increment, and I will also make changes to certain films’ ratings based on now having more benchmarks accumulated over time.

While these are important things to bear in mind, I think that the deeper levels of analysis are what matter more (I’ve always wanted the beneath-the-surface-level analysis to be the focal point of this blog); the Tommy D scores are just a way to loosely quantify these thoughts.