How to Turn a Hobby into a Chore

So you've been a movie fan your whole life. You love watching movies. You love learning about how they were made. Or how films are made in general. Maybe you even frequent film news sites and get excited when projects get greenlit or casting announcements are made. So you think, what else can you do to enhance that experience? Maybe generate a huge list of movies to watch and then self assign homework? 

So I guess that is the goal here... turn a hobby into a chore.

I, by coincidence, created a very long watchlist on IMDB. And as I make my way through them, Ill throw in a quick review and see what I thought. That's really it. No real goal or metrics or overanalyzation. Just getting an excuse to watch films and throw some thoughts out into the ether. 

But because I like structure and lack creativity, Ill throw down some rubrics and see if I can develop a way to qualify why I think a movie is good, bad, or somewhere in between. And if art is subjective, then surely following fixed guidelines and imposing my interpretation isn't a complete waste of time, right? 

So here's the going in plan. A list of categories, loosely defined, that will embody my thoughts and judgments of a film, accompanied by the rating system used by IMDB so I can keep track (1-10 stars). Each film gets a watch, I throw my thoughts into the rubric, and we see where it all shakes out. 

The last thing to do on this inaugural post then is simple; define obscure facets of films, fail to succinctly define them, and try to ignore the fact that they are all interwoven and impossible to judge individually. Easy. Therefore, each entry will consider the following

1. Acting- actors bring life to the characters of the story trying to be told. In considering acting I will reflect on a wide range of skills including emotional range, physical expression, vocal projection, embodiment, nuance, authenticity and the ability to invoke feeling in the audience. 

2. Cinematography - is the art and craft of photographing motion pictures in order to tell a story. We will consider its ability to convey mood and feeling as well as its technical use of lighting, camera, movement, color and composition. 

3. Production/Costume Design - How does the environment tell a story? What choices were made in use of architecture, space, shapes, colors? How was the technical execution of creating the world in which the story lives? 

4. Writing - How well did words on a page translate into actually becoming a story? Was there originality/authenticity? How were the characters? Their dialogue? Was there clear structure, lack of cliches, believability, clarity, and did it grasp us? 

5. Sound - Sound design is the development and editing of all audio in a film. It includes the speech, sound effects, ambient noise and soundtrack. How did these elements work together? How did it work in the context of the story?

6. Editing - Perhaps of all the elements this is the one that is most unclear. A good edit is invisible. A great edit might smack you in the face. But perhaps the things to consider here will be the pace, timing/rhythm, creativity, cohesion and integration within the story

7. Visual Effects- Defined as the process by which imagery is created or manipulated into live-action footage. Much like cinematography, we will have to consider not just its technical execution, but how does it fit into and help tell the story.

8. Originality or Strength of Adaptation - Humans have been telling stories for thousands of years. How does this new story match up? If we have seen this before, how does it alter or reinvigorate what came before it?  

9. Stunt Coordination - Somehow, there still isn't an Oscar for best stunts. This overlooked element is important. Its not just about Tom Cruise hanging off an airplane. How do the characters move within the story? How does the action tell its own story? How was the technical execution? How did it integrate with VFX, tone, character, sound, and editing?

10. Direction - The director is responsible for the integration of all the previous listed criteria. Did all the different elements fuse together into a totally cohesive piece? Or was the final product a mixed bag of strong and weak components? 

*Bonus - What is the films legacy?

 Final Note - The rating system (1-10) is what IMDB uses so I will stick to it. However, you'll notice I will rarely give a film below a 5. The reasoning there is that when I created the watchlist, I looked at each year from 1990-Present and sorted by ratings and popularity. This means the pool of movies I am watching are largely considered to be 'good' movies by a majority of people. Point being, the numbers will be skewed. Therefore anything you see thats below a 5 is a bad-atrocious movie. And the rest are loosely like this:

5: Big ol' Meh. Didn't dislike it. Didn't really like it. Ambivalent 

6: An okay film. Largely forgettable and flawed in a few areas. Unlikely to rewatch or recommend

7: Solid-to-good film, but either doesn't stand out significantly from the crowd, or fails to elevate itself into something special. May rewatch or recommend on case by case

8: Good-to-excellent film that likely excels in multiple areas. May have one or two elements that hold it back from extraordinary. 

9: Near Masterpiece - excels an almost all facets. The only thing holding it back is a very subjective je ne sais quoi.

10: Masterpiece - I am trying to reserve a perfect 10 for films that define a genre or whose legacy is exceptional. There is also a great deal of subjectivity between a 9 and 10 and will probably come down to what that particular film meant to me within the context of my life and love of film. 

That's it. That's the deeply flawed, shallow and inadequate criteria by which I will judge all films. Then again what is critique if not an incredibly reductive look at the culmination of hundreds if not thousands of peoples collective work. Better get started.