A review of the ratings

By Brian Reinhart     1/22/09 6:00pm

When my friends and I make plans to see a movie and wonder which shows are good, we often start by saying something like, "Well, the Thresher gave it four stars!" For us and other readers, the star rating is an easy way to learn something about a movie - or album or game - without reading the review.For the critics assigned with writing critiques, though, the number of stars can mean something entirely different. It can be a subjective rating of the work's merits, a sign of how much the author liked the work or even a mathematical rubric of some kind. What relationship does the numerical ranking have to the text of a written review? How do we decide to hand out the stars?

A review is an entirely subjective affair, composed of paragraphs upon paragraphs of somebody's thoughts. No review is "correct" about anything, as movies rarely have objective, measurable means on which to judge their success. Instead, the reviewer's job is more difficult than imagined. One does not simply judge art against an objective standard; rather, he or she has to guess who will be interested in it and tell those people whether or not they should be as well.

My own written reviews, therefore, often divide time among a discussion of what exactly the work is - an analysis of the merits of the work - and some sort of guess as to its intended audience and whether it will satisfy expectations. What role does the star rating play in all of this?

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For Roger Ebert, possibly the greatest film critic alive, the star rating is a message specifically directed at a film's target audience. Ebert uses his star rating to indicate if the movie achieves its stated goals rather than to answer the much trickier question of whether or not he actually liked it. Thus, despite their obvious buffoonery and low-brow humor, Ebert gives Zack and Miri Make a Porno and Paul Blart: Mall Cop top recommendation.

For me, the star rating works in the opposite way. (But I agree with Ebert that Zack and Miri was terrific.) Stars are an extremely subjective measure of exactly how much I liked something, regardless of any other criteria.

For example, when I reviewed the Paul McCartney album Electric Arguments ("Electric Arguments eclectic but electrifying," Jan. 9), I really disliked five of the 13 songs on the CD. Those five tunes amount to a whopping 31 minutes - exactly half the length of the album! Simply doing a mathematical breakdown of music I like and dislike, I would need to give Electric Arguments a 50 percent rating, or 2.5 stars. Instead, I assigned it a near-perfect score of 4.5. Why?

The purpose of this high rating was to communicate three things: (1) I am really, really happy to own the CD; (2) I don't care that there are some crappy songs, because the good ones buoy the album in awesome fashion; and (3) Electric Arguments is superb, warts and all. In other words, the 4.5 out of 5 rating says, "I only liked half of the songs, but I still thought this was an amazing album, so you should buy it anyway."

Gamespot.com, a video game review site, has a review breakdown in which they rate games on a scale of 1-10 in categories like game difficulty, graphics, sound effects and so on. The reviewer then plugs the numbers into a calculator and receives a strict mathematical average as the game's overall score. But there is an additional category: "tilt." This is the place for the reviewer to adjust the final rating if the mathematical average seems unfair. For instance, if you play a game with terrible graphics (say, a 4 out of 10) and no sound at all (0 out of 10), but it's your favorite thing ever, and you don't want to give it a really low rating, you'd add a high "Tilt Value" (say, a 9 or a 10) to skew the final average.

I view star ratings as my "tilt." They reflect not just my subjective view of where a work falls on an arbitrary scale but also my attempt to clarify my bottom-line personal opinion of the work. If I devote some space to praising the good parts of a really bad movie, or vice versa, I will use the star rating to set a baseline. The written review is all about introducing a work of art, discussing its merits and flaws and maybe even analyzing its meaning. In the star rating, all that talk about the work's value gives way to a much simpler question: did I like it?

Brian Reinhart is a Wiess College sophomore.

Editor's note: In the midst of so many opinions on the purpose and accuracy of the star ratings, many of which have made their way to the ears of A&E, the Thresher realizes the demand for a revised system. We're working on it as we type, but it's a confusing process, and we'd love your input! Please feel free to write a Letter to the Editor or to contact us at thresher-arts@rice.edu with any ideas you may have.

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