So as you may or may not have noticed, you too can now vote on movies here at 5 Minute Movie Guy. I was previously including 5-star polls with the reviews, but I never quite liked how that looked. Now if you go to any movie's home page here on the site, you can vote between 1 and 5 stars on a rating scale below the film's poster (but only if the movie has been released). However, in doing so, I'm able to give a name for each respective star of the scale system. For example, the default choices were:
1 star = Awful
2 stars = Poor
3 stars = Average
4 stars = Good
5 stars = Excellent
1 star = Awful
2 stars = Poor
3 stars = Average
4 stars = Good
5 stars = Excellent
Personally, I had a little bit of an issue with that. I do not define a 3-star film as "average". Maybe it's a matter of having always used a ten-point scale prior to creating this website, but to me, an average film would be a 5 out of 10, which would translate to 2.5 stars. However, as I said in one of my earliest blogs, using half stars defeats the entire purpose of having a 5-star scale. If I do that, I might as well rate things on a scale of 1-10, and I don't want to do that, being 5 Minute Movie Guy and all. Yet if we were to get technical about it, on a ten-point scale, 5.5 would actually be the real average, not 5.0. By that logic, 3 stars should technically be average because it's equally between 1 star and 5 stars, but in terms of rating, I feel that's a pretty harsh system. Essentially only 4 star and 5 star reviews would then be considered favorable, and I don't like that. I'd rather lean towards a more forgiving and positive review scale. So I had to adjust the rating terms a little bit, and that ended up being a lot harder than you might think...
If 2.5 is average, well, then 2 stars must be slightly below average, while 3 stars would be slightly above average. Then it's just a matter of assigning the right word to those definitions. I wouldn't say 3 stars is good, but it's not bad either. Though it's more good than bad, right? So I settled on calling it "okay". Well, what about 2 stars then? I didn't want to continue using the label "poor" because to me, a "poor" movie and an "awful" movie are both movies you clearly shouldn't watch. Instead, I considered "decent", but I feel like "decent" and "okay" are almost synonymous. Maybe "decent" is more akin to "average", but I certainly wouldn't consider it to be below average, would you? Perhaps "decent" is somewhat ambiguous. I suppose it could go either way. Though when attempting to narrowly define something as rudimentary as a star rating, ambiguity is something I want to avoid. Therefore I tried the word "mediocre" instead, which I believe to have a more negative connotation, but if you look it up in a thesaurus it says it's a synonym for "okay". I totally reject that claim. There is no way "mediocre" and "okay" are the same. While similar, they're on slightly opposite ends of the spectrum as far as I'm concerned. So I'm sticking with "mediocre" for my 2-star scale. By the way, if you've gone cross-eyed from reading all of this, I sincerely apologize.
Now that I got the two most difficult stars out of the way, I wanted to keep the other terms fairly simple. "Awful" seemed suitably appropriate for 1-star. It's a simple term that establishes that this is a movie you'll want to avoid watching at all costs. From there, I wanted to continue to use easily identifiable rating terms for the remaining stars, thus I kept 4-stars as "good" and changed 5-stars from "excellent" to simply "great". There's more than enough of a difference between those words to set those scores apart. "Good" being a movie you should probably check out, and "great" being a movie you should definitely watch. So in the end, my final review score system ended up looking like this:
1 star = Awful
2 stars = Mediocre
3 stars = Okay
4 stars = Good
5 stars = Great
I had initially contemplated the idea of doing personalized review terms catered to specific movies (for instance, a Bill and Ted scale might have a 1-star rating of "Most heinous!" while it's 5-star rating would be "Most excellent!"), but given the difficulty in defining these terms, that's totally not going to happen. Plus I'm a big fan of consistency, and I don't want my rating system to be an inconsistent mess, even if those personalized choices would be more fun and entertaining. Instead I'm implementing that fun factor into each movie page's poll, which I'm tailoring to be specific to that particular movie.
Well, now that I've given you a complete breakdown of my review terms and the process of defining them, let me know what you think. Am I obsessing too much over this? While maybe this blog post was a bit excessive, I think finding a good way to define my rating system for everyone to understand is very important, and I hope that with these newly assigned ratings I've accomplished that. In other words, I really just wanted to make sure I didn't leave any fault in my stars! ;) Thanks for reading! Now go out there and vote! You can even use the Disqus box on each movie's main page to let me know what you thought of the movie you rated, or just to talk about that movie or ask questions. Your input is truly appreciated! Thanks!
If 2.5 is average, well, then 2 stars must be slightly below average, while 3 stars would be slightly above average. Then it's just a matter of assigning the right word to those definitions. I wouldn't say 3 stars is good, but it's not bad either. Though it's more good than bad, right? So I settled on calling it "okay". Well, what about 2 stars then? I didn't want to continue using the label "poor" because to me, a "poor" movie and an "awful" movie are both movies you clearly shouldn't watch. Instead, I considered "decent", but I feel like "decent" and "okay" are almost synonymous. Maybe "decent" is more akin to "average", but I certainly wouldn't consider it to be below average, would you? Perhaps "decent" is somewhat ambiguous. I suppose it could go either way. Though when attempting to narrowly define something as rudimentary as a star rating, ambiguity is something I want to avoid. Therefore I tried the word "mediocre" instead, which I believe to have a more negative connotation, but if you look it up in a thesaurus it says it's a synonym for "okay". I totally reject that claim. There is no way "mediocre" and "okay" are the same. While similar, they're on slightly opposite ends of the spectrum as far as I'm concerned. So I'm sticking with "mediocre" for my 2-star scale. By the way, if you've gone cross-eyed from reading all of this, I sincerely apologize.
Now that I got the two most difficult stars out of the way, I wanted to keep the other terms fairly simple. "Awful" seemed suitably appropriate for 1-star. It's a simple term that establishes that this is a movie you'll want to avoid watching at all costs. From there, I wanted to continue to use easily identifiable rating terms for the remaining stars, thus I kept 4-stars as "good" and changed 5-stars from "excellent" to simply "great". There's more than enough of a difference between those words to set those scores apart. "Good" being a movie you should probably check out, and "great" being a movie you should definitely watch. So in the end, my final review score system ended up looking like this:
1 star = Awful
2 stars = Mediocre
3 stars = Okay
4 stars = Good
5 stars = Great
I had initially contemplated the idea of doing personalized review terms catered to specific movies (for instance, a Bill and Ted scale might have a 1-star rating of "Most heinous!" while it's 5-star rating would be "Most excellent!"), but given the difficulty in defining these terms, that's totally not going to happen. Plus I'm a big fan of consistency, and I don't want my rating system to be an inconsistent mess, even if those personalized choices would be more fun and entertaining. Instead I'm implementing that fun factor into each movie page's poll, which I'm tailoring to be specific to that particular movie.
Well, now that I've given you a complete breakdown of my review terms and the process of defining them, let me know what you think. Am I obsessing too much over this? While maybe this blog post was a bit excessive, I think finding a good way to define my rating system for everyone to understand is very important, and I hope that with these newly assigned ratings I've accomplished that. In other words, I really just wanted to make sure I didn't leave any fault in my stars! ;) Thanks for reading! Now go out there and vote! You can even use the Disqus box on each movie's main page to let me know what you thought of the movie you rated, or just to talk about that movie or ask questions. Your input is truly appreciated! Thanks!
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