Are there enough moments from How I Met Your Mother over the years to have clips for any given
situation? Maybe. It’s probably not as versatile as, say, The Simpsons, but I’d like to think that
it’ll do in a pinch. Like this
pinch. Via this clip.
…I will do whatever I can to keep the memory of How I Met Your Mother alive. I know it ended and all with a full-on finale
-- which is a luxury not every TV show out there can afford -- but still. I miss it so much. Thank all the gods for reruns.
Anyway, let’s talk about charts. And reviews.
And review scores. And hastily
made JPEGs.
But only after Slapbet.
So if you’ve been reading this blog for any amount
of time -- or at the very least within the last week or two -- you may have
noticed that I toss up this little thing I dubbed a “SmartChart” at the end of
each movie post (or posts). I started
using it to try and unpack my feelings about Prometheus, i.e. a movie that tried to be about big things -- and
ostensibly was about big things -- but couldn’t quite hit the mark. And let’s just leave it at that for now,
because the issues have
long since been noted.
But it seemed like an okay feature to keep around,
so I did. Granted that was partly out of
my need to cling to traditions and keep up needless streaks for completion’s
sake, but there was a hidden benefit.
The idea behind it, on some level, was to create a system that wasn’t as
binary or oversimplified as the review scores you’d see on gaming websites or
YouTube videos. Review scores in general
kind of leave me wary, because even if they have merits -- like a straight
summary on a product’s quality in less than a blink -- I feel like they leave a
lot to be desired. Unless it’s something
you have no interest in or want to skim as you go about your business, you shouldn’t just look at a score, or
letter, or grade and leave it at that (or hold it up as the lord’s gospel). Reading, watching, or listening to a review
is always, always, always going to be crucial.
For my purposes?
I saw the SmartChart as a good alternative because it didn’t pare things
down to TENOUTTATEN or 8.8. Consider
this:
The plan was to judge movies (post-thousands and
thousands of words) on a Cartesian scale instead of the standard stuff. On the X-axis, a measure of quality by
design; on the Y-axis, a measure of quality by execution. The optimal zone is, obviously, the top right
corner. A movie that landed there would
mean that it tried to do more and be more -- have depth and meaning and
thematic heft and all of that good stuff.
Because of that, it would shift further over into the positive range --
as opposed to something like, say, Transformers,
whose design (or creative ambition, if you prefer) was and continues to be so
narrow that you could thread it through a needle.
But being in the negative zone -- on the left side
of the Y-axis -- isn’t a death knell. It
just means that the movie goes for a low-risk, low-reward approach. Well, in a sense; you could argue that by
aiming low on a design aspect it has to
aim high in terms of execution. On that
note, it’s best if a movie stays above the X-axis. That’s the real measure of whether it’s good,
bad, or anything people should take interest in. Again, the sweet spot is the top right
corner, because it means that a movie A) aimed high with its design, and B)
scored just as high with its execution.
It’s a smart movie because it tried to be smart, but proved how smart it was by virtue of
being well-crafted -- primed and fine-tuned to get the most out of every
element. Thus, smart smart, as opposed
to stupid smart, smart stupid, or stupid stupid.
Now here’s where the problems come in. I’ve gotten this sense for a while now, but
that post on Spider-Man: Homecoming really
drives the point home. A good chunk of
the reasoning behind the SmartChart was to prevent assigning an arbitrary score
to a movie. And I avoided that…buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut instead, the chart
ended up assigning an arbitrary position to
a movie. It’s long since stopped
mattering where I put it on some dumb JPEG, largely because they’ve all started
to blend together.
Out of curiosity, I decided to see how Homecoming’s chart stacked up against Doctor Strange and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2. After
the credits for Spidey’s latest started to roll, I was asked whether I thought
it was better than Guardians 2. And said yes, it was -- however
slightly. But in turn, both movies lose
out to Doctor Strange (in my
opinion). You never would have guessed,
given their positions in the charts. So
basically, these movies -- the Marvel movies
in particular -- keep orbiting this general, nebulous area that makes it
pointless to try and rank them via my chart.
On top of that? Trying to compare
the movies via the chart means that I don’t have any ironclad basis to go
by. Because there’s no number,
granulation, or unit of measurement, it makes sorting things out much
worse. The alternative, therefore, means
introducing numbers to try and assign scores to the movies.
You see where the problem lies, don’t you?
So yeah. I
think it’s about time for me to retire the SmartChart. It served its purpose, but at best it’s
nothing more than a redundancy. I tend
to make my posts pretty comprehensive, so those that want a full
picture of whether or not a movie works would do well to read the posts instead
of scurrying to the bottom of the page to gawk at some JPEG I’ve been tweaking
since 2012. Even if this blog in general
is the definition of arbitrary, I don’t see much of a reason to keep up with
something that’s becoming increasingly superfluous as time goes boy.
With that in mind, I kind of wonder if there’s a
better alternative. I don’t like review
scores (especially since nothing I write even qualifies as a review…though the
line does blur from time to time). I’d
rather do without them if I can possibly help it, because it’s hard to quantify
how good or how bad individual elements of a product are. But I know that there are those that do like review scores. So is there a happy medium? No doubt.
Can I find that medium for the purposes of this blog? That’s not so obvious.
I guess if I was going to adopt any sort of
scoring system, it’d
be akin to Eurogamer’s. A little
graphic and a line or two of text to sum it all up; it’s a simple solution, but
sometimes simplicity is what you need.
There are a couple of alternate systems I toyed around with, but those
seem more complicated than necessary and might make the problem worse instead
of better. So for the time being? If you want to know if a movie’s good or bad,
read the post(s). Maybe at some point
I’ll implement a new system. Maybe I
won’t. Time will tell. But we’ll get there when we get there.
And that’s about all I’ve got for now. Tune in next week (probably), because I get
to do something I haven’t done in a while: rail on a terrible video game
(that’s not named Final Fantasy). It’s an essential endeavor, because it’ll
lead directly into the next important topic.
That is, I’ll use it as a springboard to rail on a terrible anime. And/or manga.
And/or light novel. And/or
franchise. They’re all kind of blurring
into one another here, and I can’t be bothered to do any more research than
absolutely necessary. Google be damned.
So there you go.
And now I go back to my natural state: fawning over HIMYM-era (and beyond) Alyson Hannigan.
UNRIVALED.
UNBEATABLE. UNSTOPPABLE.
No comments:
Post a Comment