How I rate films

Thin Red Line, directed by Terrence Malick

It’s instinctive. I watch a film, I think of what I feel, and I give it a number. That’s it. Jolly good, bye now.

No seriously. How more can one desire from someone else ’rating’ a film? The idea itself is quite outrageous. Typically, films take months, perhaps years to produce. It’s a work of not only the director(s), but the Writer(s), Producer(s), Cinematographer(s), Production Designer(s), Costume Designer(s), Sound Engineer(s), Special Effect artist(s), Film Composer(s) and all the subsequent assistants, ADs, runners, and all of their hard work combined creates a two-hour experience that is so often forgotten in our mind that we just move along with our lives afterward. Does that mean that we should recognise their works and rate them by how many hours of work have been spent on that film? God no! One could spend years creating a horrible-looking sandcastle, while Frank Lloyd Wright draws a sketch of fantastic structure just as he finishes a cuppa. (Take that in, Karl Marx.) This is actually a pretty important aspect when I ’rate’ a film. Films should be rated independent of the making processes. One should not care whether if giant IMAX cameras were strapped to a Spitfire, or whether if a bunch of kids went into a forest with a 16mm camcorder. All that should matter is what’s on the screen, and the speaker. Nothing else.

Sadly, not many people share this perspective. Nowadays, journalists and ’film critics’ are renouncing works of filmmakers who were accused of sexual assaults. From Roman Polanski to Amber Heard, predators that latched onto decades corrupted system of Hollywood are slowly being put down. But as much as I am happy to see them hunted down and let out of a job, I am irked by the atmosphere that reduces their works. As I said, so many people have worked on it, and it’d be damned rude if we just throw their work out and mark it trash. I really hope that we have a chance to look at the work as what it is at the least.

I may not enjoy the film as a ’film.’ But I might look at many other aspects of the film to enjoy the work and time given into it. I may enjoy the acting. The costume design. The production design. The cinematography. Sound mixing. Editing. Visual Effects. So many more that I can’t list them all.

That, I think, is the ultimate difference between the film ’critic’ and ’reviewers’. What’s the difference, you ask? Critics are…people who tend to apply films in a broader sense. Apply it to the broader historical context. Apply it to the broader philosophical context. Analyse them and apply them to different archetypes and figures. I find these…repugnant. Critics tend not to think of films as what they are, but they try and apply it and make it into something ’more’ than what it is on the screen. All the work given into the film is basically a device to perpetrate whatever agenda and angle the critic might have on the film. A satirical black comedy about wokeism and witch hunt? I, and many others, might find joy and fun with bursts of laughter here and there. Critics…find ’In its eagerness not to condemn any political view, its points are so blurry that you have no idea what it’s trying to say. Its meaning, to the degree that it has one, just slides off the screen in a jellied mess’. Actual quote. You can look it up.

That, I think, is further exacerbated by the movement to merge the artist and the work. These critics only see more than what’s on screen. They are so eager to ignore it as it is vitally important to make a case for their argument. Kevin Spacey bad? Of course! Does that make American Beauty a trash film? Not really.

Reviewers on the other hand…just review films. They watch the film as what they are and if they like it, they rate it good, if they don’t, they rate it bad. Simple as that. No need to look up the entire cast and crew to find faults in the roaster. No need to apply the film to philosophical thought and apply deeper denotation in a shadow of a shot. That, in my opinion, is very essential to truly appreciate films.

So, that was a long pretext. How, really, do I rate the film? Obviously, I appreciate all the works given to the craft, but what I find distinctive in certain films and makes me love them so much compare to others…is the tone. The tone is one of the easily findable qualities of a film that you can easily attribute to…a director! Directors set the tone for the crews. Well, if the sets are bigger, directors set the tone for the head of departments, to which they set the tone and mood of the work to their assistants. If the sets are even bigger, then these assistants set the tone. A film can feel different if a department just slightly misses a note given by the director, or the director was a pure idiot and didn’t realise what he was asking wouldn’t fit into the film. That’s why it’s so important. Directors are, essentially, heads of all the departments. And one thing they can make sure of is setting the tone of the work for all the departments.

Another important aspect of a film I think is the cinematography. I don’t know if you realised but my website lists photos as one of the subsections. Yes, I appreciate good photography, and that doesn’t necessarily mean ’pretty’ pictures, but pictures that can tell a story. A film can serve its story with horrible lighting, but I think that would severely disturb my experience and thwart my subjective rating of a film. Remember, it’s subjective!

Equally important to cinematography is editing. God, so many films are horribly edited! (All of my ’films’ are). It really doesn’t matter if it’s shot well, directed well, acted well, etc. If the editing messes it up, it really, really doesn’t matter. Look at how natural the tempo of a scene is, how natural characters react, act, and how not ’busy’ it feels. These are easily noticeable qualities of good editing.

One other thing that’s important is…writing. Well, writing is the bone of all films. Without a good script, directors can’t…visualise it. (Unless they’re the writer/director, which is slightly different). This goes for all the other departments as well, as they all depend on the ’tone’ of the film, and tone is easily determined by…the director. Directors depend on writing. And all the other departments depend on directors. But I find the quality of writing to be less important than the previous two categories. Bad writing can be masked by great direction, cinematography, and editing. I want to list some films with horrible writings, but I’d have to list all the thousands-of-words reasons why it makes a bad script and even lengtheir essays on how direction, cinematography, or editing ’saved’ it.

Sound goes onto the last category that I consider ’important.’ Please, indie filmmakers. Fix your sounds. Invest in sound equipment. Without good sound, I cannot be invested in your story. Please. I beg you. This goes for composing as well. I’m not much of a musician, so I can’t really say, but it’s easily noticeable…at least to me.

But what about the other departments? Art direction, costume, set design…These are important, obviously. But I personally consider these cannot ’carry’ a film into greatness. One does not remember a horrible film with great art direction. But one might remember a great film with horrible art direction. These are categories I consider ’low-level’. Not necessarily only pertaining to their relative importance. They are important, like the bedrocks of a building. But that doesn’t mean that they’re easily noticeable. A building can still look horrible with great bedrock. But once that building lasts long, in this particular analogy, if a film is watched over and over, it easily starts to crack and be a lot more noticeable as time goes by. (Ignore the fact that bedrocks are laid first and that they set the base of a building. Just, you know, the unnoticed part and how it’s hidden.) What combines all of these, as I mentioned, is tone. You can find horrible films with a consistent tone, yes. But you can’t find great films without a consistent tone. But what these 'high-level' qualities entail is a lot more subjective than that. These 'draw' an audience in. These qualities make the audience not only glued to their screen but linger on them for quite a long time. If they're really, really good, then it essentially changes them.

If you look at my watcha profile, which in my opinion is far greater in its quality than letterboxd, you can see that majority of the films I rated are 4/5. Well, more than half of films that are rated are rated higher than that. These are because I am biased. Think about it. Why would I waste time watching films that are bad? But as I try and enjoy the works of all filmmakers, I cannot help myself but watch these 'bad' films from time to time. These are not only an opportunity to find hidden gems (like finding Chivo in that god-awful Cat in a Hat movie...not that his work shines in that film necessarily) but also a learning experience for me as I aspire to become a filmmaker.

But that again, I cannot be entirely free of the blame of liking certain kind of films. I tend to enjoy English spoken films a lot more than others. I also tend to enjoy periodical pieces, typically those involving some sort of murder, whether if it's war, murder mystery, etc. That means I absolutely hate musicals. I absolutely hate rom-coms. I absolutely hate Adam Sandler films other than Uncut Gems.

Oh, and also I have a list of my favourite films. These are ranked from what I consider the best film of all time, Thin Red Line (Malick), and what I consider to be very, very slightly worse than that. As you can see, most of them are war films. What does that say about me? I guess I am more moved with pow pow, boom boom, than ha ha ho ho. What makes one film better than the previous one? I think it’s highly dependent on the initial viewing and how long the film lasts on me. I might forget a long rambling about some radioactive zone in some radioactive city, but I will remember a Tom Cruise stunt where he jumped from a C-130 into a middle of a thunderstorm.

So, that's it, guys. These are how I rate my films. As I say it over and over again, these are entirely subjective. I hope you could appreciate that and share your perspective. Film should be an art that anyone can enjoy. And a simple-minded man like me enjoys films simply. I hope you do too.