Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Favourite films? Or just the best?

I know what my favourite ten films are. But over the last couple of days I have been very geeky and have given several films I like scores in various categories, weighted the categories, and ranked the films quantitatively. I was surprised that some films performed much better or worse than I expected. For example, one of my top 10 finished in 15th and a film I expected to be mid-teens came 7th.
It is clear that this method I used, while designed to examine each film critically, does not give an entirely accurate picture of my personal favourites (though the top 5 at least are pretty spot on).

I scored the films out of 10 in nine categories: plot, characters, themes, script, acting, mood, visual, audio and re-watchability. I weighted each section to give a final score out of 200, and the results of the 26 films scored so far are below. However this is not exactly a rank of my personal favourites, but rather an attempt to objectively decide what I think are the best films I have seen. Obviously I have seen more than 26 films, so there may be films I have not scored yet that will enter this top 26.

Rank

Film

Score

1

The Lord Of The Rings

197

2

Gladiator

176

3

The Matrix

170

4

The Green Mile

167

5

Stardust

166

6

Shrek

161

7

Shrek 2

159

8

Fight Club

158

9

Minority Report

158

10

The Man In The Iron Mask

157

11

Good Will Hunting

157

12

The Shawshank Redemption

156

13

A Beautiful Mind

155

14

Chariots of Fire

154

15

Notting Hill

152

16

Moulin Rouge

148

17

Cool Runnings

147

18

Equilibrium

145

19

Forrest Gump

143

20

Usual Suspects

143

21

X-men trilogy

142

22

Monsters Inc

139

23

The Rock

138

24

Toy Story 2

137

25

Finding Nemo

134

26

Toy Story

129


Clearly I am quite a harsh marker. Only 7 films got over 80%. According to the star rating, thats only 7 5-star films. Luckily I think the star system is a sham and don't use it. But I don't deny I am hard to please when it comes to films. They're all measured against a ludicrously high benchmark (see film #1!).
For now this system will suffice, but I don't really like marking out of 10 because I often get split between two numbers. So sometime I'll probably redo it scoring each category out of 20. Good times.

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