On Reviewing and Rating Things

John Fleck as Trent in Dead Mail

Last weekend, my girlfriend and I went to New Orleans for the Overlook Festival, our second horror film festival in the past eight months or so (she's a huge horror fan and film blogger). Saw nine films in four days, which is always fun, and got in a lot of good eating and drinking (despite me having fractured a premolar the day before leaving, whoops).

Highlights included Cuckoo, Dead Mail, and I Saw the TV Glow—each quite different from the others, but with one big strength in common: outstanding vibes. Fantastic sound and music, wonderful evocations of time and place. Moody, beautiful, and all quite moving. Each anchored by fantastic performances, too (Hunter Schafer and Dan Stevens in Cuckoo; Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine in I Saw the TV Glow; pretty much everybody in Dead Mail, although John Fleck really stands out—maybe the best of the whole festival).

At the other end of the scale, after having watched seven variously low-budget indie films, most of them foreign, Abigail was a shock to the system, and not in a good way. It took all of thirty seconds to register that it was going to be a very Hollywood experience, and not much longer than that for me to know that I wasn't going to like it. The film has problems, starting with the fact that its one good twist isn't; the entire marketing campaign has been built around the fact that Abigail is a vampire, something the characters don't learn until halfway through. The pacing isn't good. The kid is more annoying than scary. But there are some strong performances (including Dan Stevens again) and the effects are pretty great. It's not a good movie, but its most serious crime is just being a kind of movie, and particularly a school of character and dialogue writing (the Joss Whedon Marvel Cinematic Universe school, to be precise), that I can't stand.

How do I rate this stuff?

* * *

I got very into Letterboxd last year. I had started back in 2022, but at the beginning of 2023, in a resolute New Year's spirit, I decided that I wanted to write more—more of everything. A poem every day! A novel! Short stories! Essays! Book reviews! Film reviews! Most of this fell by the wayside; I wrote a few poems, made some haphazard progress on a couple different novels I've been drafting forever, and wrote a dozen short book reviews. Mostly I just wrote TTRPG stuff…and silly little movie reviews. Letterboxd stuck. I've written 136 reviews now—every film I've seen since January, 2023. (Most are short, and some just a single line, but a few are proper essays.)

So I've had to think a lot about how to rate films. Or really, I've just rated a lot of films, and of the course of the past fifteen months, I've had plenty of time to try to understand what my ratings meant, rationalize them a bit, try to develop some kind of consistent rubric going forward.

Letterboxd gives us two options: We can just “like” films or not, or we can give them star ratings. And of course we can use the star ratings however we want (only giving between one and three, for instance), but the fact that the vast majority of users employ the full range, from half a star to five, compels me to do the same.

It is interesting to think about the less-granular options, though. Heart or no heart is as simple as it gets. Thumbs up, thumbs down. Liked it, didn't. Add one more option, and we have, perhaps, “loved it, liked it, didn't like it,” or, if we're thinking less about our own simple enjoyment and more as critics of some sort—trying to predict whether others will like the work we're evaluating—we have a traffic light: go ahead, caution, and stop. Of course, “caution” contains multitudes. Is it flawed but enjoyable? Expertly made but soulless? Great only for fans of a particular subject or particular genre?

Maybe we add another option: Good, good but not for everybody, bad but some people might like it, bad. We could probably analyze the hell out of that approach, but we know we're going to end up with a ten-point, five-star system, so let's just jump ahead. Going to five options brings to mind an academic grading scale: A, B, C, D, and F. Excellent, good, average, poor, failure. And the fact that Letterboxd has a ten-point scale (from 0.5 to 5.0) but presents it as a five-point one is interesting. Five points: good. The ability to tweak them up and down a bit: fussy, maybe, but definitely tempting. We can still map them onto letter grades; we just fudge it a bit and say everything is either plus or minus. A+, A-, B+, B-, C+, C-, D+, D-, and two different shades of F: “just missed a D-” at one star and “may God have mercy on your soul” at half a star.

This feels pretty good to me. It does mean that reviews will tend to bunch up in the 3–4 range, but that's fine; thanks to word of mouth and our ability to guess what we're going to like from trailers and by drawing conclusions from directors' and actors' past work, we usually don't see a lot of stuff that we hate. Giving an enjoyable film one or two stars seems brutal. I admire Osita Nwanevu, boldly going out there and slapping three stars on everybody's sacred cows, but I don't think I can do it.

3.5 stars is a good movie. Can't complain. Didn't connect with me on a profound, personal level, but I enjoyed it all the way through. A notch or two below that, 3.0 and 2.5 are the middle of the scale, even if they won't be the middle of anybody's histogram (except Osita's). 3.0 is enjoyable but seriously flawed. Worth watching, on the whole, but missing something, or messed something up. Didn't stick the landing. 2.5 is just on the either side of that razor's edge: has a bunch of good qualities, but has enough flaws, or serious enough flaws, to just not be enjoyable in the end. Two stars was probably doomed from the jump, though it might have some charms: a terrible screenplay, an inept director, a stupid concept. Below two, we're in “I might walk out of the theater” territory (but for the fact that I stubbornly never do).

4.0 is really good. Unambitious but perfectly executed, or ambitious and flawed in fairly minor ways. Add an extra half star, and that's about as good as it gets. A masterpiece. Practically flawless. And then if I watch it again and, at the end of the second viewing, I'm thinking, “Yeah, I'm gonna watch that a third time (and a fourth, and a tenth),” that's our five-star gold standard. I'm trying to limit the number of five-star films, but it turns out I'm a pretty soft touch. I love movies! 4.0 is my most common rating; I've given more 4.5s than 3.0s (although if I go to enough festivals, that's bound to change).

So where did I land on my most recent festival faves? Four stars all around! And Abigail? Fuck it: 1.5 stars, which is probably half a star harsher than my rubric demands, but whatever, I get to call audibles sometimes, and I'm sick to death of “She's right behind me, isn't she?”-ass dialogue.

Back to the Future

The House of Tomorrow in Philco-Ford's "1999 A.D."

When 1999 arrived, I was 14 years old and halfway through my first year of high school. I had a Pentium PC and a 56k modem, and the internet was my oyster. It was the year of Unreal Tournament and Counter-Strike, the year I realized that there was infinitely more content available for my favorite games online than what had come in the box. I played just about every Half-Life map and mod that existed, then played everything I could find for Unreal and Quake II, then worked my way back to the motherlode that was the original Quake's fan community.

At that age, I loved nothing more than computer games, and 1999 was a great year for them. The Longest Journey, Homeworld, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, System Shock 2, Planescape: Torment, and Quake III Arena all came out that year, as did FreeSpace 2, the first game I ever published any content for (I had messed around with Worldcraft, trying to make simple Half-Life maps, but never shared them online). It wasn't much, but it was my first step into the world of modding, the DIY side of the hobby, the social world of games—making them, sharing them, theorizing and bickering about them.

I don't think I started my LiveJournal until a year or two later, but 1999 was also the year LiveJournal was launched, so there's that too: a link to my one previous foray into blogging, which was also the first thing I did on the internet that brought me real, lasting human connections, including two friendships that endure to this day. One of them, it turned out, lived practically around the corner, so we quickly became real-life friends (and dated briefly, a footnote in her romantic history but a landmark in mine); the other lived halfway across the country, and yet we've managed to sustain an almost entirely epistolary relationship that's still going strong more than two decades later.

* * *

So what's "1999 A.D." about? The name is snappy and hopefully distinctive, and it's adjacent to 2000 AD, which is kinda fun, but it also, self-importantly, represents an ethos. The year 1999 was, for me, a time of tremendous optimism, when it seemed like my own creativity, and the world of games I loved, had limitless potential. 1999 stands for a broader societal optimism, too, both because it had been, decades earlier, the horizon on which we could see a sure-to-be-better future society, and because, in retrospect, it was, for all the anxiety about Y2K, one last moment of stability and prosperity (for many Americans, at least) before the 21st century's long slide into the suck began.

Computer games, for me, never really lived up to the promise they held in 1999, which is partly because I was a starry-eyed child then, and partly because the breakneck pace of technological advancement slowed enough, around the turn of the century, that our dreams of synthetic intelligence and infinite artificial worlds had to be deferred for at least a few decades, but also largely because games soon became a huge business and a lot of the creativity, ambition, and wildness were beaten out of them by the invisible hand of the market. 1999 was the crest of the wave, for me; later in high school, I devoted more time to the outdoors, to parties, and to getting high, and (a little) less to games. I got into World of Warcraft a few years later, which monopolized all of my gaming time and game-related social energy for a while. I got out of it, eventually. I got into Destiny 2, Hearthstone, Marvel Snap. I got out of those, too. I play PC games sometimes, still—I'll probably write about them at some point—but I don't love them the way I did. TTRPGs, though? I'm belatedly smitten.

I came to TTRPGs very late, especially for somebody who was such a huge nerd as a teenager; I started during the pandemic, playing long-distance D&D 5e on Zoom with one of my best friends, her partner, and some friends of theirs. To no one's surprise, least of all my own, I loved it. I started thinking about running a campaign, starting looking at other systems, started poking around online, knowing, this time, that there would be infinitely more content available than what had come in the box or the book.

I found Dan D's Throne of Salt sometime early last year. Saw this post and knew I had to run a science-fiction campaign of my own. Found Marcia B.'s Traverse Fantasy. Started listening to Astronomica. Found Skerples' Coins and Scrolls. Started accumulating PDFs: Stars Without Number supplements, Mothership modules, miscellaneous old Traveller stuff, all sorts of zines, Skerples' beautiful book. Started a SWN campaign with my 5e group (and two more friends, including my very best) when our two and half years of fantasy adventure drew to a close. Started filling notebooks and sketch pads with notes and doodles and maps and deck plans. Started itching to share my ideas.

* * *

Since my first forays into Half-Life mapping forums, I've pretty much always been active in some kind of online community somewhere: LiveJournal, punk music bulletin boards, WoW forums, Reddit (RIP r/chapotraphouse), Twitter. My activity has waxed and waned, but there's always something going on. In recent years, that something has tended to be unsatisfying, if not downright alienating. Even before Musk's coup at Twitter, social media wasn't feeling very social. Parasocial, sure. Antisocial, asocial. Howling into the void. The shrieking of the damned.

Around this time last year, I started reviewing every film I watched on Letterboxd—the only one of a number of resolutions I made at the start of 2023 (write a poem every day, write about every book I read, draft a novel) that stuck. I have a few followers; I get a few likes. It's cute, it's fun, but it's not much of a dialogue, not much of a community. Just scratches that old itch, makes me want something more substantial, more real. The grove of avant-garde TTRPG blogs I've started to wander through may be a tiny world, but it's a world of conversation, collaboration, creativity. A living world. It's exciting! It takes me all the way back to 1999.