My Rating System
5 Stars – Both perfect and of special importance to me
4 Stars – Great, brilliant or perfect
3 Stars – Very enjoyable, worth watching or a guilty pleasure
2 Stars – It was alright, pretty mediocre, probably wouldn’t watch it again
1 Star – I’ll never get that precious time back. Bummer.
Refusal To Rate – So far I’ve only done this for Movie 43.
I judge films on three things primarily.
The very first is Filmicness… Would this film have been better as a book? How much of it’s point relies on it being a film? Does it use the unique features of filmmaking to convey it’s point (or it’s entertainment)? My favourite movies are those that have to be movies… They couldn’t be books, paintings or plays. This applies even to adaptations… I think it would be very hard to write a book of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and still convey the same points, feeling of dread and sheer entertainment he managed to.
The second is Cinematography. The beauty of a film is very important to me, as well as the choreography of the camera. I am sick of the shaky handy-cam style that has become so prevalent even in very good films (Black Swan, Biutiful). Camera movement can be so much more beautiful when the camera-man moves it in a deliberate manner.
The third is Watchability. Peter Greenaway once said that he would like his films to be “infinitely watchable”. Obviously an impossible standard but there are some films I have not tired of watching and won’t for a very long time.
This is sure to make me some enemies
Least Favourite Filmmakers:
Steven Soderbergh
Michael Bay
Jim Jarmusch
Bernardo Bertolucci
James Cameron
Wes Anderson
Gus Van Sant
Yasujiro Ozu
Catherine Breillat
Michelangelo Antonioni
However, my favourite directors:
Michael Haneke
Peter Greenaway
Spike Lee
Paul Schrader
Milos Forman
Stanley Kubrick
Francois Truffaut
Jean-Luc Godard
Nicholas Ray
Werner Herzog
Charlie Chaplin
Kenji Mizoguchi
Bela Tarr
Hiroshi Teshigahara
Federico Fellini
David Cronenberg
Bruce Robinson
Michael Powell
Robert Altman
Alfred Hitchcock
Sidney Lumet
Bob Rafelson
Stan Brakhage
Henri-Georges Clouzot
Orson Welles
Milos Forman
Takeshi Kitano
Sergei Parajanov
John Carpenter
William Friedkin
George A. Romero
Tobe Hooper
Dario Argento
Samuel Fuller
Wim Wenders
Directors I need to watch more of:
Luis Bunuel
John Cassavetes
Nagisa Oshima
Robert Bresson
Seijun Suzuki
Eric Rohmer
Wong Kar Wai
Jean Renoir
Sergei Eisenstein
Larissa Shepitko
Allan King
Max Linder
Buster Keaton
Harold Lloyd
W. C. Fields
Akira Kurosawa
Elia Kazan
Ken Russel
Lotte Reiniger
Frantisek Vlacil
Jean Vigo
Otto Preminger
Marcel Carne
Yoshishige Yoshida
Leo McCarey
Lav Diaz
Jacques Rivette
Lindsay Anderson
Lee Chang Dong
Lech Majewski
Jafar Panahi
John Slesinger
Michael Mann
Hit Or Miss:
Martin Scorcese
Terry Gilliam
Ingmar Bergman
Kevin Smith
Ridley Scott
Lara Von Trier
Jean-Pierre Melville
Gaspar Noe
Robert Wise
Rainer Werner Fassbender
Terrence Mallick
George Lucas
Roman Polanski
Fritz Lang
Andrei Tarkovsky
Steven Spielberg
Hayao Miyazaki
Tim Burton
David Fincher
One Hit Wonders:
George Sluizer
