When I post the breakdown of my movies in my year-end wrap-up -- last year, it was 170 -- by how many got each of the ten available star ratings, it has historically required me to go through Letterboxd making little hash marks for each rating. The numbers look pretty similar each year, with 3.5 stars always having the most, followed by four and three.
The trouble with this approach, though, is that a) it's tedious, and b) it's easy to miss one movie, and realize the numbers don't add up when you get to the end. If that happens, either you count again, which is even more tedious, or you just fudge it by adding one to one of the categories, usually the one with the most, since statistically, that's the one you were most likely to have missed. I believe I have done both things in the past.
This year, I decided to just keep track of it as I go, and save myself an hour of work next January.
So I've got my spreadsheet in which I can add the movies as I go, in a column devoted to their star rating. If I do forget and miss one, it is hypothetically easier to figure out which one I missed if I copy all the existing titles, sort them alphabetically and paste them side-by-side with my rankings, also sorted alphabetically.
The only thing I worry about is that by having a knowledge of how many I've given out in each star rating, I could be biasing myself toward stacking the deck in favor of a particular outcome. If I'm only counting at the end of the year, I have no way of knowing and the end result is sort of a surprise. But if, let's say, four stars has a chance to overtake 3.5 stars for the most in the year -- which I can glean easily enough by a glance at the list -- maybe I'm ten percent more likely to go four stars for my final viewing of the year, when I'm on the fence between that and 3.5. Do I think this is a concern in reality? No, but it did occur to me.
Anyway, I'm telling you all this because it has led to a funny realization with my first seven movies of 2022: They have been given seven different star ratings. And I can tell you for sure that this was not on purpose as an early incarnation of the thing I was worried about in the previous paragraph.
No, I can genuinely say that my first seven films of 2022 break down as follows:
Bigbug (4 stars)
Death on the Nile (3.5 stars)
Hotel Transylvania: Transformania (3 stars)
Gold (2.5 stars)
Uncharted (2 stars)
Home Team (1.5 stars)
The Sky is Everywhere (.5 stars)
Spoiler alert for the relative placement of these films in my year-end list.
Now, if my next three viewings are a 4.5 star, a five-star and a one-star, you'll know there are shenanigans for sure.
This obviously can't continue much longer -- three more viewings at most. And at the moment I'm not sure what my next 2022 viewing will be, so I don't know if it has any realistic shot at 4.5 stars, though I give that out with some regularity (15 times in 2021). Five and one are considerably less likely.
But while it's continuing I'm enjoying it. I might actually be getting the most joy from having given out a .5 star rating, as discussed earlier this week in this post, since it's something I didn't do in all of 2021.
And will I miss the thing where I take a stroll down memory lane at the end of the year, making hash marks on a piece of paper (always a satisfying exercise) as I remember the movies that made up my 2022?
Could be. And hey, if that's the case, I can always ditch this new practice in 2023.
As for Bigbug, the most recent addition to my 2022 list ... Jean-Pierre Jeunet is back! In his first feature since 2013 and the first I've seen since 2009, he crushes it. Well, four stars' worth of crushing it, anyway. Check out my review here.
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