about this site

It all started with movies. You see, I love great movies. I am a cinemaphile. But I, as well as my friends, have a dark secret.

I love bad movies.

So, when discussing movies and trying to come up with some appropriate way of comparing them, we ran into a problem. On your traditional movie rating scale (5 stars, 0 to 100, what have you), there is no way to differentiate between so-bad-it's-fun and mediocre. Both kinds get extremely low scores. This would not do.

A new paradigm in movie ratings was thusly born. To properly signify the inherent interesting-ness of a movie, negative values were allowed in the scale. 0 is perfect mediocrity. It's a movie that is neither good nor bad. You walk out and immediately forget the movie. There is no post-movie converesation praising or destroying the movie. There is nothing.

A 10 maintains the same meaning as in older scales; it is as good as it can possibly be. A -10 is reserved for movies that are so bad they're good. These are the movies that you openly mock during the showing. These are the ones that spawn 4 hour conversations about all the problems and mistakes that occurred. These movies are a good time.

Some quick examples:

• City of God: 10. A thoroughly amazing movie in all aspects of moviemaking.
• Manos: Hands of Fate: -10. Made famous by Mystery Science Theater 3000 as quite possibly the worst movie ever conceived in the history of man. It's that bad.
• A Man Apart: 0. There was nothing good or bad about this movie. It was just boring as the filmmakers went through all the appropriate motions of a good cop turned vigilante movie.
• Big Fish: 6. It was good, but not great. It was worth seeing, but it couldn't been much, much more.
• League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: -2. On the bad side of things, but not very far over. Had I been with a more incisive group that wanted to make fun of it, this couldn've been higher on the negative side.

So you've gotten the basics there. The other thing that happened with this scale was that we found it to be extremely appropriate in all areas of life. That date I had last night? Straight up 0. How's that restaurant? Definitely a 7. What's your opinion on shitty dance techno? I can't help loving it - definitely a -10.

This scale has turned more into a philosophy on life for us. It engenders the desire to find intersting things in life. Mediocrity is what I avoid right now. If it doesn't make me feel something, it's not worth my time.

The scale is also not without its problems. Both Manos: Hands of Fate and The Core get a -10 in my book, but for very different reasons. We have not yet developed a way to differentiate between so-bad-it's-good and so-bad-it's-painful-in-that-kind-of-masochistic-good-way.

What this has all led to is a site dedicated to rating everything. It's still in pretty early beta, but it's coming along. Come join us talk about the movie The Order (-9), the real world (-3), and the weekday monday (-3). The scale provides some interesting information when collected from several people. How much do people disagree about something? Check the standard deviation of the set of scores. What's the overall interesting-ness of something? Take the average of the absolute value of the set of scores.

So what are you waiting for? Let it change your life.