The FFG Ranking System

The Fat Film Guy Presents:

My Overly Complex Way of Ranking Movies

I feel sorry for most movie and TV reviewers. Sure it sounds like it would be great to get to watch Movies and TV all day long and comment on what you see, but their reviews are forced in two ways that would not work for me. First, they have to attempt to gauge how others will like what they have seen (I am a horrible judge of what other people like or dislike). And second, they have to rank each film on a scale which is far too small to give an accurate representation of what a movie is. 4 stars, 3 stars even 5 stars, how can you fit all movies into a 5 star range? The fact that it is a scale in and of itself makes the task impossible. Is  Maverick starring Jodie Foster better than The Accused also starring Jodie Foster? I suppose if you put a gun to most people’s heads they would say The Accused because she won the Oscar for her role as a rape victim, but if those same people were flipping through the channels and both movies were on 8 times out of 10 those same people are watching Maverick (and I am probably being generous to The Accused for giving them 2 out of the 10). In the end better or worse is an entirely irrelevant way to categorize the two films, saying The Accused is 3 1/2 stars because of the power of Jodie Foster’s performance (the only really good thing about the movie) and Maverick is 2 1/2 because it is predictable and predictably entertaining is meaningless, isn’t it? Doesn’t it make more sense to say The Accused falls into the category of ambitious, flawed films that are carried by one performance but ultimately fall well short of their potential, while Maverick falls into the great pile of movies that are exactly what you think they will be, entertaining and forgettable? That is the way I am going to rank movies, by levels, that certainly fit within a scale to a degree (the highest level is reserved for the greatest movies and the lowest level is for the worst movies) but are more designed to group the movies together rather than definitively say this movie is better than that.

Level I: The World Is Worse For These Movies Having Been Made

Level II : Train-Wreck

Level III: Caught Between Two Worlds

Level IV: Didn’t Quite Get There

Level V:  Exactly What I Thought It Would Be

Level VI: Pleasantly Surprised

Level VII: Ambitious But Flawed

Level VIII: It Was Awesome!!!

Level IX: Would Not Change A Frame … Perfect

Level X: Transcendent

So, there you go, my movie ranking system. Overly complex and in dire need of an editor, much like everything else I produce.