KD^3C^3 - 20260215 They're gonna make you crawl
I know I’m a nerd, but I have been reminded of the joy of physical reference works. I don’t know why specifically, but I had a sudden memory of the Video Hound Golden Movie Retriever a couple weeks ago. The Video Hound Golden Movie Retriever (VHGMR, pronounced V’Gamer, according to the rules I just made up) was a phone book* sized volume containing little capsule reviews of every movie.** like a phone book, you could think of a movie, flip through the pages where as many movies as they could possibly fit in the book were listed and find the move, who directed it, the year it came out, the names of the man actors and a little one to three sentence review of the movie to give a brief idea of what to expect.
*a phone book was a physical directory of names and phone numbers, delivered to your house. It contained almost all residential phone numbers in a given area, and if you wanted to be kept out of it you had to pay extra to the phone company. Otherwise people who knew your name could look it up, guess which of the 2 dozen Ana Ng’s you might be, then call the number they found.
**not every movie, but close
I had a copy of the VHGMR from roughly the mid to late 90s. If I had to guess I would probably say 1997, but I cannot confirm that. Before the internet, and especially before the Internet Movie Database, this was the best way to have a little information on a lot of movies all in one place. I fondly remember flipping through the very fragile thin pages looking up movies I had heard of or just watched and seeing what the guide thought of them. At the time I didn’t have a full understanding of the work that would go into making something like this, let alone update it every year and publish a new edition. I just thought it was a cool way to store objective information about movies.
Once I had that memory I knew I wanted to own a copy again. So I did what I always do when these impulses strike me: I went to eBay. I was surprised to see that there were copies for sale from years as recent as 2018. Surely they went out of production before then? The whole world was online by 2018, right? But I did some digging and the last edition was published in 2021! Niche nerds being who they are, a 2021 edition seems nearly impossible to get ahold of now. Everyone who is dorky enough to want one probably isn’t willing to sell it on the open market for cheap. They are now collectibles and that changes the value proposition dramatically.
But I was willing to moderate my scope a bit. In researching the last VHGMR I learned that it was actually the last of the big movie reference guides to still be putting out new editions when it shut down after 2021. There were other ones, like the Blockbuster movie guide or Halliwell’s guide or the other one I remembered specifically, Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide.
I know who Leonard Maltin is because of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Well that and Gremlins 2. Maltin was a pretty established name in the movie critic game, and getting his own annual book was certainly evidence of that. But I remember the episode of MST3k, where they had an extended riff on how the movie of the week, Laserblast had been given a 2.5 star rating (out of 4!) by Maltin. Let me tell you, Laserblast is not a 2.5 out of 4 movie.
So since a final edition of the VHGMR wasn’t going to come up to market any time soon at a reasonable price, I figured picking up the last Maltin Movie Guide would be a nice consolation. At some point in the decades long production of this annual volume the publisher, in order to save space, made Maltin jettison a lot of movies that were older than roughly 1960. Some of the biggest, most familiar names were still kept (Citizen Kane, 12 Angry Men, etc) but the rest were kicked to make room for newer movies. Maltin convinced the publisher to also put out Maltin’s Classic Movie Guide for all these pre ‘60s cast offs. I was able to get a copy of both the classic guide and the last annual guide (2015) for a pretty reasonable price off eBay. Well I bought them off eBay, but it turns out they were actually sold by ThriftBooks through eBay, so next time I might just start there.
Getting the books in my hands has been great. The first thing I looked up was Laserblast, of course, just to confirm the 2.5 rating. The guide uses a slightly atypical rating standard. The highest rating is 4 stars (instead of the much more common these days 5) but the lowest rating is 1.5. Below that and it just gets labeled BOMB. So with half star ratings, we end up with effectively 7 steps:
BOMB
1.5
2
2.5
3
3.5
4
And based on my initial scans through the book these fall on a pretty strict bell curve distribution. 2.5 is probably the most common rating, followed by 2 and 3. BOMB and 4 stars are very rare. Based on what research I have done, somewhere around only 400 of the 16000 movies reviewed get a 4-star rating from Maltin. Roughly 2.5% of the total.
The 2 books have spent the week on my desk and when I get the idea, I’ll pick one up and look for a movie. Sometimes I’m searching for something specific and sometimes I just flip aimlessly to see what I can find. I have really loved the joy of discovery that comes from sing unexpected movies next to the ones I’m looking up, or stopping because my eye caught on one while I was searching for another. In my wanderings I have also discovered that Maltin has some pretty atypical tastes. In addition to giving Laserblast a middle of the road 2.5 stars, that puts it above some modern films considered outright classics like Hot Fuzz, which got 2 stars and Maltin called “a protracted, disappointing spoof of crime/buddy movies” or Christopher Nolans’s Memento which barely escaped BOMB status by getting by 1.5 stars.
I appreciate that Leonard Maltin is just one dude giving his honest opinions of movies. His tastes are not my tastes, even if there is overlap. I also fully understand that he is rating movies on their own terms, rather than trying to “objectively” compare every movie to every other movie. He (probably) wasn’t thinking about Lasetblast while giving Memento 1.5 stars.
But the wild swindle away from the expected do make me wonder, what is he rating these movies against? Is it anything? The front matter of the edition I have does not provide much clarity, beyond explaining the Bomb to 4 star system. It does have an entire page listing the aspect ratios of every mentioned format, so you can be confident in knowing Techniscope is 2.35:1.
So if you want to understand the ratings, I think you have to do it via inference. Read a bunch of ratings, watch the movies (not necessarily in that order) and start to see how your opinion matches or varies from the ones in the book.
To be clear, I wouldn’t want even a reference book like this to be the “objective” ratings of anything. It’s an impossible task and one that would cheapen the act of experiencing the art for yourself. I’m no saint either, when it comes to my own rating systems. When I put a ranking on a movie on Letterboxd, I would like to think I have some internal metric or rubric that I am always consistently applying to movies, but that’s not happening. I tend to ask some of the same questions: Did I like it? Did the movie accomplish what it set out to be? But there’s no perfect answers to that question and nothing’s get heavily skewed based on vibes. And that fine, good even! Art happens not on the page, or the screen, but rather when the audience reacts to it, when they have a possibly indescribable connection and reaction to the mind of another person or people through time. So maybe putting a star rating on anything is a fruitless endeavor. But also, Laserblast is not a 2.5 star movie. Two things can be true.
*a phone book was a physical directory of names and phone numbers, delivered to your house. It contained almost all residential phone numbers in a given area, and if you wanted to be kept out of it you had to pay extra to the phone company. Otherwise people who knew your name could look it up, guess which of the 2 dozen Ana Ng’s you might be, then call the number they found.
**not every movie, but close
I had a copy of the VHGMR from roughly the mid to late 90s. If I had to guess I would probably say 1997, but I cannot confirm that. Before the internet, and especially before the Internet Movie Database, this was the best way to have a little information on a lot of movies all in one place. I fondly remember flipping through the very fragile thin pages looking up movies I had heard of or just watched and seeing what the guide thought of them. At the time I didn’t have a full understanding of the work that would go into making something like this, let alone update it every year and publish a new edition. I just thought it was a cool way to store objective information about movies.
Once I had that memory I knew I wanted to own a copy again. So I did what I always do when these impulses strike me: I went to eBay. I was surprised to see that there were copies for sale from years as recent as 2018. Surely they went out of production before then? The whole world was online by 2018, right? But I did some digging and the last edition was published in 2021! Niche nerds being who they are, a 2021 edition seems nearly impossible to get ahold of now. Everyone who is dorky enough to want one probably isn’t willing to sell it on the open market for cheap. They are now collectibles and that changes the value proposition dramatically.
But I was willing to moderate my scope a bit. In researching the last VHGMR I learned that it was actually the last of the big movie reference guides to still be putting out new editions when it shut down after 2021. There were other ones, like the Blockbuster movie guide or Halliwell’s guide or the other one I remembered specifically, Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide.
I know who Leonard Maltin is because of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Well that and Gremlins 2. Maltin was a pretty established name in the movie critic game, and getting his own annual book was certainly evidence of that. But I remember the episode of MST3k, where they had an extended riff on how the movie of the week, Laserblast had been given a 2.5 star rating (out of 4!) by Maltin. Let me tell you, Laserblast is not a 2.5 out of 4 movie.
So since a final edition of the VHGMR wasn’t going to come up to market any time soon at a reasonable price, I figured picking up the last Maltin Movie Guide would be a nice consolation. At some point in the decades long production of this annual volume the publisher, in order to save space, made Maltin jettison a lot of movies that were older than roughly 1960. Some of the biggest, most familiar names were still kept (Citizen Kane, 12 Angry Men, etc) but the rest were kicked to make room for newer movies. Maltin convinced the publisher to also put out Maltin’s Classic Movie Guide for all these pre ‘60s cast offs. I was able to get a copy of both the classic guide and the last annual guide (2015) for a pretty reasonable price off eBay. Well I bought them off eBay, but it turns out they were actually sold by ThriftBooks through eBay, so next time I might just start there.
Getting the books in my hands has been great. The first thing I looked up was Laserblast, of course, just to confirm the 2.5 rating. The guide uses a slightly atypical rating standard. The highest rating is 4 stars (instead of the much more common these days 5) but the lowest rating is 1.5. Below that and it just gets labeled BOMB. So with half star ratings, we end up with effectively 7 steps:
BOMB
1.5
2
2.5
3
3.5
4
And based on my initial scans through the book these fall on a pretty strict bell curve distribution. 2.5 is probably the most common rating, followed by 2 and 3. BOMB and 4 stars are very rare. Based on what research I have done, somewhere around only 400 of the 16000 movies reviewed get a 4-star rating from Maltin. Roughly 2.5% of the total.
The 2 books have spent the week on my desk and when I get the idea, I’ll pick one up and look for a movie. Sometimes I’m searching for something specific and sometimes I just flip aimlessly to see what I can find. I have really loved the joy of discovery that comes from sing unexpected movies next to the ones I’m looking up, or stopping because my eye caught on one while I was searching for another. In my wanderings I have also discovered that Maltin has some pretty atypical tastes. In addition to giving Laserblast a middle of the road 2.5 stars, that puts it above some modern films considered outright classics like Hot Fuzz, which got 2 stars and Maltin called “a protracted, disappointing spoof of crime/buddy movies” or Christopher Nolans’s Memento which barely escaped BOMB status by getting by 1.5 stars.
I appreciate that Leonard Maltin is just one dude giving his honest opinions of movies. His tastes are not my tastes, even if there is overlap. I also fully understand that he is rating movies on their own terms, rather than trying to “objectively” compare every movie to every other movie. He (probably) wasn’t thinking about Lasetblast while giving Memento 1.5 stars.
But the wild swindle away from the expected do make me wonder, what is he rating these movies against? Is it anything? The front matter of the edition I have does not provide much clarity, beyond explaining the Bomb to 4 star system. It does have an entire page listing the aspect ratios of every mentioned format, so you can be confident in knowing Techniscope is 2.35:1.
So if you want to understand the ratings, I think you have to do it via inference. Read a bunch of ratings, watch the movies (not necessarily in that order) and start to see how your opinion matches or varies from the ones in the book.
To be clear, I wouldn’t want even a reference book like this to be the “objective” ratings of anything. It’s an impossible task and one that would cheapen the act of experiencing the art for yourself. I’m no saint either, when it comes to my own rating systems. When I put a ranking on a movie on Letterboxd, I would like to think I have some internal metric or rubric that I am always consistently applying to movies, but that’s not happening. I tend to ask some of the same questions: Did I like it? Did the movie accomplish what it set out to be? But there’s no perfect answers to that question and nothing’s get heavily skewed based on vibes. And that fine, good even! Art happens not on the page, or the screen, but rather when the audience reacts to it, when they have a possibly indescribable connection and reaction to the mind of another person or people through time. So maybe putting a star rating on anything is a fruitless endeavor. But also, Laserblast is not a 2.5 star movie. Two things can be true.