Embarking on a Journey - Reviewing Criteria

At the counsel of some close friends, all of whom share the deep passion I have for the cinema, I have decided to begin this movie review blog. Films have always been a way for me to spend my time, engage my senses and outlet my opinions. More recently, I have become more interested in the artform of moviemaking; this is in part thanks to SP. The artform of moviemaking requires an attention to every detail involved in the movie. I will give a brief rundown of my reviewing criteria at the end of this initial blog. 


I give you fair warning that I've never had much of a sense for grammatical correctness, deal with it. My expectations of you as a reader are never those of agreement, instead, I welcome differing opinions on any review or article I may write based on my own thoughts. If you do agree, you're better than the rest. There will always be some sort of bias included in anything I review, quite simply, I am seeing each movie through the lens of my own worldview and therefore find it impossible to strip who I am from what I think of a piece of art.


My intention for each of my reviews is to explain, with as much sensitivity to anyone who hasn't seen the movie, how all of the criteria worked to serve the purpose of the film. I will always take into account things like story, use of genre, characters and other things. I will also give a general explanation of how much I simply liked the film. My final hope is to make conjecture as to whether the general public, this blog's readers or my friends will actually enjoy the movie.


Without further ado here is my scale, and hopefully a satisfactory explanation behind all of the criteria involved.


Level One
My first level of rating is one meant to give the reader a basic answer to the question "Should I see this movie?" I separate movies into these 6 categories:


A - I would recommend it to someone. I would watch it again.
B - I would recommend it to someone. I may/may not watch it again. 
C - I may/may not recommend it to someone. I may/may not watch it
D - I would not recommend it to someone. I would watch it again.
E - I am disappointed that the studio signed off to make this awful movie!
H - It's a horror film, it's hard to judge on this scale. It's also SP's domain.
(Category C is an ambiguous category. I may only watch it again in the right mood, and I would only recommend it to someone I knew would enjoy that type of movie)

Level Two

My second level of rating is meant to go deeper into the inner workings of a movie. As I said before, it's meant to explain how a movie serves its overall purpose. The 5 (6 as of Nov 20/10) criteria I use are as follows (weighting in parentheses):

Story/Plot (10) - Are there plot twists? Is there sensible conflict. Sneakyness. Is it done creatively? Or is it just re-hashing an old tale?

Comedy/Tragedy (10) - This is where I ask how well the movie serves it's genre. This allows movies like the Hangover to compete with much weightier dramas. What purpose do any generic conventions serve the movie?

Characters (5) - How are the characters developed within the movie? What is their level of interaction? Is the story character driven? 

Believability (5) - Sell it to me! Movies (for the most part) are an artform created to represent real life situations so we can all relate. Can we relate? Sometimes a movie may superficially look impossible to relate to, but when we look deeper we see themes of humanity. e.g. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

Filmmaking (10) - How well are cinematic techniques used? Things like cinematography, musical scoring, art direction, costuming, sound mixing/editing and visual effects. Pretty much all things we don't fully understand, but get recognized by prolonging the OSCARS. 


Sheer Enjoyment (10) - When the movie's over, how much do I like it? This is where my biased guilty pleasures may rank higher in any scale. 

At the end of all that a movie will receive a letter rating and a score out or 50. I then divide that score by 10 to arrive at my final grading out of 5 yukes! I reserve the right to change any rating at the end of the year if, when I compile a list of all the movies I've reviewed, I find the list not an accurate list of my favorite movies of the year. Please let me know what you think; agree or disagree. Until next time... you just got Yuked!