Why I don’t grade the movie thoughts part II

I don’t give grades to my movie thoughts. Part of it is that I agree with the late critic Roger Ebert that some people get too hung up on grades. Ebert thought grades are relative especially in terms of genre, readers seemed to think grades were not relative. If Ebert gave a comedy three stars and gave a drama two and 1/2 stars, I don’t think he necessarily meant the comedy was better than the drama.

As amateur film critic, I don’t see every major film released. There are films I see previewed and I just think that I am not interested in that or that doesn’t look good. (Sometimes I later watch a film that I skipped in theaters and it was better than I thought it would be.) Since I tend to be selective in seeing movies, if I gave grades I would be probably be giving out a lot of A’s and B’s and maybe the occasional C or D. I might not be the harshest critic, even amateur critic, in the land but if I went to every major release maybe I’d give more D’s and the occasional F’s.

Maybe I could add grades but right now I don’t want to. Sometimes if I review two films on my podcast, I might mention if one is really better than the other. That is sort of grading them, I guess.

Also sometimes I see or listen to a review of a movie and the grade is a C but I what heard or read seems more like a D. (There seemed to be almost nothing to recommend the film.) I cannot think of one such review at the moment but I think I saw one like that in the last four months.




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