Ebert's Star Inflation?

Ebert defends himself against the facts that he gives too many stars. Here are the facts. First, his reviews are, on average, 8.9 points higher than any other critic on metacritic (on a 0-100 scale). Second, he gives more stars today than he did in the early part of his career. I suspected the first fact, but didn't know it nor the magnitudes of it. And I didn't know the second. His explanations for both are interesting.

Part of what skews Ebert's ratings is, he said, the effect of the Siskel and Ebert show (and the later Ebert and Roeper show). Ebert has the unique role as a film critic of having to write reviews that can be simultaneously, and consistently, translated into two ordinal rankings. The first is to place the film on a 0-4 star rating (with fractions allowed). He says he prefers the 5-star rating, because it allows for a truly middle position (the 3 star), whereas the 4-star rating offers no such thing and thus forces a compromise on the part of the critic. But, his ratings have to also translate into a binary indicator review of 0 ("thumbs down") or 1 ("thumbs up"). This, he argues, explains why over time his reviews tended to creep up in stars. Before the show, he had no such constraints, and so he had far fewer stars in his ratings, but after the show, the binary indicator rating schemed pulled his reviews up a bit.

But he also gives a more detailed explanation of why he still consistently gives more favorable reviews than other critics that is worth your time. The first point is one that I share with Ebert, and maybe even learned from Ebert. If I did learn it from Ebert, it means that some of my best attributes as a human being were "caught" from reading Ebert's reviews of movies. That he approaches movies with an open-mind, warmth, hope and respect, willing to extend the story-teller maximum benefit-of-the-doubt on all things is, I personally believe, the only appropriate way to treat people and their work. I don't do it remotely as well as Ebert, because I'm not the humanitarian he is, but I aspire to it nonetheless. I'll let the Great Man speak, though, as he's better at it than me.

1. I like movies too much. I walk into the theater not in an adversarial attitude, but with hope and optimism (except for some movies, of course). I know that to get a movie made is a small miracle, that the reputations, careers and finances of the participants are on the line, and that hardly anybody sets out to make a bad movie. I do not feel comfortable posing as impossible to please. Film lovers attend different movies for different reasons, all of them valid; did I enjoy "Joe vs. the Volcano" more than some Oscar winners? Certainly.

2. Directors. There are some who make films I simply find myself vibrating with. I will have difficulty in not admiring a work by Bergman, Altman, Fellini, Herzog, Morris, Scorsese, Cox, Leigh, Ozu, Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Keaton...and to borrow an observation from my previous entry, I haven't even reached directors under 60.

3. I feel strongly about actors I admire, watching their ups and downs and struggles to work in a system that often sees them only as meat. Example. I opened my review of "The Women" this way: "What a pleasure this movie is, showcasing actresses I've admired for a long time, all at the top of their form. Yes, they're older now, as are we all, but they look great, and know what they're doing." Yes, I really believe that. I interviewed Candice Bergen for the first time in 1971. God, she was wonderful. I mean as a person. She was one of the most beautiful women in the world, and she married Louis Malle, and was happy. Louis Malle was beautiful too, if you know what I mean, and a great filmmaker. She fell in love with both her head and her heart. I felt a particular pleasure in seeing her and that whole cast together.

4. Once the scent of blood is in the water, the sharks arrive. I like to write as if I'm on an empty sea. I don't much care what others think. "The Women" scored an astonishingly low 28 score at Metacritic. "Sex and the City" scored 53. How could "The Women" be worse than SATC? See them both and tell me. I am never concerned about finding myself in the minority.

5. I have sympathy for genres, film noir in particular. I am almost capable of liking a movie simply for its b&w noir photography. I like science fiction. Ed Harris has a new Western coming out named "Appaloosa." I'll like it more than the Metacritic average. You wait and see.

6. In connection with my affinity for genres, in the early days of my career I said I rated a movie according to its "generic expectations," whatever that meant. It might translate like this: "The star ratings are relative, not absolute. If a director is clearly trying to make a particular kind of movie, and his audiences are looking for a particular kind of movie, part of my job is judging how close he came to achieving his purpose." Of course that doesn't necessarily mean I'd give four stars to the best possible chainsaw movie. In my mind, four stars and, for that matter, one star, are absolute, not relative. They move outside "generic expectations" and triumph or fail on their own.

7. I have quoted countless times a sentence by the critic Robert Warshow (1917-1955), who wrote: "A man goes to the movies. The critic must be honest enough to admit that he is that man." If my admiration for a movie is inspired by populism, politics, personal experience, generic conventions or even lust, I must say so. I cannot walk out of a movie that engaged me and deny that it did. I must certainly never lower it from three to 2.5 so I can look better on the Metacritic scale.

Ah, what a wonderful article. Seriously, if I lay dying on my bed, please just read to me Ebert's movie reviews. On my tombstone, put point #5 - something I agree with so deeply, that it's not even an overstatement to steal Robert Browning's lines and say that I love film genre with all my heart. I do not have the affinity for noir that Ebert has, but I have affinities for genres in general. I wrote a paper in grad school, for IO, on the "economics of film genre" that one day I'd like to work on again. It's just one of the most interesting parts of the film industry, as genre is entirely driven by the Invisible Hand of the movie biz.