Oishi!

 Taken at Teppei Japanese Restaurant

IMDB: How do you rate your movies?

I love lists. LOVE LISTS. I once read, "Make a list, you'll feel better" and honestly, it does. This is partially the mini OCD/control freak part of me making the calls, but hey, it's worked for me so far.
Point of the post: I was housekeeping my IMDB lists -- told you I loved them -- Watchlist and Ratings. My Watchlist is somewhat sad looking, considering it's mostly foreign and indie flicks that I don't have access to in Singapore or the random Hollywood movie that's deemed non-commercial therefore distributors in Singapore won't take the risk of screening it. My Ratings list -- spent my morning cleaning that out and reevaluating how I rate movies. The boyf thinks I rate my movies purely by emotion. If an actor completely annoyed the hell out of me, the movie gets a big fat "1" (because there are no zeros on the scale) regardless of whether or not the movie had some decent/acceptable moments.
I struggled with my Ratings list. What makes a movie a 9 instead of a 10? How much do I have to hate a movie to rate it a 1 vs a 2 or 3? I know, I know, it's just a freakin' rating system, why am I wasting my time getting all worked up about it? Because it reflects who I am, that's why! I tried rationalizing that if a movie hits me intellectually and emotionally, it goes into the 10 pile. Within that rationale, it made sense for American History X (I cried for a good 20 minutes while the credits rolled) and Shortbus to be on there but why Gangs of New York, Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Moulin Rouge? So I revised my rationale for the 10s: Story plots are super important to me and so are things like new and never-before-seen ways of telling the story and simply put, artistic sensibility. Which is why movies like Prestige, The Matrix, Hedwig (although Origin of Love will always be one of my top songs of all time) and Sepet are on there.

Then it made me question the movies rated 9 -- what about them did not work for me that it wouldn't be a 10? Sigh. I really liked A Single Man, Old Boy and Tears of the Black Tiger and would recommend this to anyone who would listen -- though, on second thought, not everyone because doubt your average moviegoer would be able to stand the pacing, the subtitles or the melodramatic backdrops.

My resolution:

• My 9 & 10s will be treated somewhat equally. If they were my kids, I would love them all the same. With a few special ones taking having a special place in my heart.
• The 8s are the ones that are good movies that I liked, but just missing that sparkle.
• The 6 & 7s are decent movies - but more of rent a DVD / torrent it rather than you must watch it on the big screen. Together with the 8s, give me a year and I'll probably forget some of the details of the movie.
• The 3, 4 & 5s are really "meh" movies with 3 bordering on the 1 & 2s, the pariah of the family, the "I can't believe I just wasted two hours of my life and $10 on this crap."

I also realize while housekeeping that I don't rate enough movies. According to my list, I've only rated about 88 movies, which is about the number of movies I watch in 10 months, converservatively. Decided to make it a point to rate all movies that I watch from now on, and idealistically, I might just go through all my ticket stubs and start rating the movies I've seen in the past year(s).

What annoys me is that because I've had my IMDB account way before everyone started linking everything to Facebook, I can't seem to figure out how to merge my existing IMDB account with my Facebook, if I were to use Facebook to login to IMDB. So if you do -- share!

So what's tops on your IMDB list?

Doesn't that just scream "rummage!"