Ex Taedio, Hoc

Recently, I've had a strange penchant for thinking up unique ways to classify the quality of various things. No longer are movies rated by arbitrary things like a particular number of stars or by a percentage. Instead, it's based on how much money I would pay to see it in the theater, with full price (about $7 where I'm from) being above average. This is slightly more complicated than other ratings in that the relative value of money isn't constant across the entire population. But all this really does is introduce another instance of subjectivity to an enterprise which is already entirely subjective. The best way to get a real feel for how good a movie is based on a particular reviewer's rating is to know what he said about other movies that you have seen. The advantage of using money as the rating system is that it is far more concrete, and it just eliminates a step that the review reader does anyway. You see that a new movie got two and a half stars from some reviewer, and you assimilate what you know of the reviewer's tastes, the rating he gave it, and the cost of seeing it the theaters into a decision to see it or not. Now, all you have to do is to take what you know of my tastes and the rating I gave it to make the same decision.

Actually I'm just trying to justify being unique and different. But I have done so, and keeping all of this in mind, here are ratings for a few movies that I've seen recently:

Revenge of the Sith: $4.00
Unleashed: $3.50
Hitchhiker's Guide: $5.50
2046: $8.00

Certain films will obviously have their ratings boosted because they are much better to see in the theater. Well, all films are better to see in the theater, but some are better than others.

What all of this has done is left me a perfect opportunity to segue into posting the various film journals that I wrote throughout the semester for my film class. So, look for those in the coming weeks, I suppose.

Oh, and speaking of subjectively rating various media, I've had a slight influx of new music ever since I got on cable internet with no bandwidth restrictions. So, five songs to which everyone ought to listen (in alphabetical order):

Hair by The Cowsills
Half Man Half Machine by Goldie Lookin' Chain
Lawyers, Guns, and Money by Warren Zevon
The Metro by Berlin
Stand Up Tall by Dizzee Rascal

A rather eclectic bunch, I know, but they are all great. Go listen to them.

Until tomorrow...