8: Kaleidoscopic Spectrum of Stimuli (Rating Guide)

I'm looking forward to reviewing every manner of mass media on this page, so I thought I'd put together a baseline ratings guide to keep myself centered as a fancy-ass critic of culture both low and high.

This was a suggestion from my wife who was teasing me about explaining the difference between a 7.4 and 6.9 on my scale. It is mostly a gut feeling for me, not an average of values for a given work, but a final tally meant to indicate overall place in quality relative to everything else I've ever experienced. Most importantly, higher scores indicate something was more memorable, moving, or meaningful - the rarest qualities in the modern glut of available media.

In the Army Now (1994)

Rating: 0.0 

I love a good terrible movie. Based on what I've experienced over the years, it is easier to make a movie that is so bad it is good than it is to make just a flat out bad movie. I can't imagine how difficult it was to make this sucking chest wound of a movie. Even setting aside the toxicity of the main character (an "actor" playing himself) and the fact that the movie isn't funny, there is nothing redeeming about this movie, no matter how apologetic you are, or how far down the credits you go to try and find someone who succeeded at their job. It is loud, aggressively obnoxious, completely devoid of heart or soul, and bitterly, jaggedly unfunny. I'd rather sit in a dark closet for ninety minutes. NO REDEEMING VALUE, ZERO POINT ZERO. 

Look Who's Talking Now! (1993)

Rating: 1.0 

Is it ever a good sign if your movie has an exclamation point in the title? If you can fucking believe it, this is the third turd from this horrific, dead on arrival franchise. It stretches to the absolute breaking point the concept that babies and dogs talking is inherently funny, gleefully regardless of content. The jarring juxtaposition of the cutesy, kid movie jokes and voices with the sad, flattened performance of the human beings is deeply depressing. The key difference between a 0.0 and 1.0 is this: although there is no enjoyment to be found whatsoever from the experience, there isn't any active pain and suffering. In fact, there's often a feeling of empowerment for surviving a 1.0 book, movie, or TV series, and their terribleness tends to help a stinking corpse flower blossom of a memory to remain, so you'll always get a laugh when you see the VHS for sale at a garage sale. 

Two and a Half Men (2003-2015)

Rating: 2.0 

When I was in college and I lived with huge groups of people, the TV remote was more powerful than a handgun. My friends and I would hold each other hostage with absolute bliss and force each other to watch stuff we hated. My friend Mitchell would put on a marathon of Nickelodeon GUTS and then sit on the remote for six to seven hours. Two and a Half Men was always my pick when I got the gun. We would play a game: first person to genuinely laugh was out and would typically be beaten mercilessly with a Slim Jim. It was astonishing how long we were able to go without cracking a smile, let alone needing to stifle a genuine laugh. Between the laugh track, the lazy acting, the insultingly formulaic approach to each and every episode - this show just sucks. The reason it is a good representation of the difference between a 1.0 and a 2.0 is in the ease and availability of enjoyment because it is bad. We were certainly able to make each other laugh by shitting on it, and that's good for a 2.0. Twelve fucking seasons of this muck. 

Eminem - Revival (2017)

Rating: 3.0

To illustrate the difference between a 2.0 and 3.0, I chose a truly terrible album I would never listen to again from a great artist that I typically enjoy. Right around 3.0 is when I start considering awarding bonus points to anything awful that is still better than the relative competition. When Eminem is on point with his songwriting, he is typically light years away from any and all competition. When he isn't, it's just bad music that would be harmless and forgettable if it wasn't made by someone considered a great - maybe the greatest. In the grand scheme of listening to music in my life, I'd be happy to give this a zero. But as bad as it is, when I consider the unreal variety of worse music I've heard, I feel that 3.0 in my soul. In general, 3.0 is also the point that I'm willing to justify the existence of a project itself; although in this case it is ONLY due to good will toward the artist, cuz this is hot trash. 

Sinbad of the Seven Seas (1989)

Rating: 4.0 

Here we are at 4.0, one of my favorite ratings because it is tickling at the feet of a 5.0 which is my mid-point or "meh" score. A piece of art can wind up at a 4.0 for many reasons, but I chose this Lou Ferigno vehicle because it so perfectly embodies that point in my grading curve where a mixed review pushes something toward, or even below average. This movie is my favorite terrible movie of all time. The acting, writing, production, and sound is all garbage; but the movie itself, and the actual experience of watching it, is like attending a circus staged inside a graveyard behind a minimall. It is transcendently silly, memorably wacky, and timelessly cheap. 4.0: highly recommended and terrible.

Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1877)

Rating: 5.0 

Ahhh, 5.0. Average. Meh. Neither great nor terrible. Some good some bad, or in the most interesting cases, all bad with one stunning redeeming factor. I chose Anna Karenina because of how little impression or impact it left on me after nine-hundred pages...and after hearing about it for years, seeing it on best-of lists, and of course sitting through five hours of lectures about how incredible it was. I'm grateful for those fantastic lectures because they placed the book in time and gave me some appreciation for it relative to other fiction then. When I compare it to other classics I've read, I'm fairly stumped. It really didn't seem like a book that would appeal to a variety of people. That never was a prerequisite for classics, of course, but I went into this book wanting desperately to like it and didn't. I finished it and was immediately ready to consume something else - and that's average for me. 

The Big Bang Theory (2007-2019)

Rating: 6.0 

When it comes to 6.0, I always think of guilty pleasures. They are better than average but aren't actually good enough to really embrace, where the good outweighs the bad and vice versa at any given moment, sometimes dizzyingly. My wife and I started watching The Big Bang Theory very late, around seasons six. We had tried a few times before and just couldn't stand it: the writing for the female characters, the screeching laugh track, Raj. The only reason we forced our way forward in 2012 was because we were living in the Thai jungle and only had a few things on our hard drive. What we found was probably what most people who watch the show have found: it can actually be really, really funny. And by "it", I mean Sheldon. I can confidently say I never found the vast majority of these characters funny, and perhaps the only reason I score it a 6.0 and consider the good outweighing the bad is because we didn't watch the last three seasons. But I do think it is a great example of hit-or-miss quality, and for something we've always referred to as "The Poop Show", we still quote it to this day. 

The Patriot (2000)

Rating: 7.0 

Now we're really getting into the heart of my personal philosophy on art, enjoyment, and the very meaning of life itself. No surprise, it's a Mel Gibson movie. 7.0, the transition from a guilty pleasure you love to something you'll admit you like. That transition is often bumpy, hazy, and reversible. What you consider a 7.0 could still be a guilty pleasure unworthy of mention depending on your audience or mood. What I always think of, in the truly nebulous region of 6.5-8.0, is not how much I "like" the project, but how well it succeeds at its own goals. If Sinbad of the Seven Seas is my favorite bad movie, The Patriot is my favorite guilty pleasure, to such an extent that it has earned a higher rating than it deserves. That's sort of cheating, but considering 5 is average, 6 is just slightly above average or a great guilty pleasure, I think 7 should be the spot for stuff you absolutely love that isn't quite one of your favorites. I think everyone should see The Patriot, but I know no one I would recommend it to. It is absurd, beautiful, bloated, captivating, inaccurate, thrilling, and memorable. It happily holds a place as a standard 7, as good as a non-favorite can get. 

Dark Souls III (2016)

[Playstation 4] 

Rating: 8.0

We are finally at the point where the scoring becomes a little easier for me, as I have a three-tiered approach to my favorites, the 8s, 9s, and incredibly rare 10s. From a 7 to an 8, the difference is usually emotional. For something to become a favorite for me, and to move from something I love in the 7s into the 8s and above, it has to have emotional resonance. I have to think about it when I'm not experiencing it, and it has to be something I'd recommend to anyone interested in the genre. Once again I'm sort of cheating because Dark Souls III isn't even my favorite Dark Souls game; I prefer the story, characters, and world of II much more. But I can't deny the third entry is the best game, with the best and most fully realized experience for the gamer. The game world is layered, the characters are nuanced, and the story and lore is only revealed to players through exploration and effort. In other words, you are rewarded for playing the game beyond scoring points and getting a bigger sword. It is the only game I've ever "platinumed": earning every possible achievement within the game. At 8 we have the bottom of the top, the third-tier of my favorites. Hopefully by giving an 8 to a game where you run around with an axe hacking up infected ghouls, I'm getting across how impressively Dark Souls III succeeds as a video game and a work of art. 

Pud - The One On the Wall Is a Trout, I'm the Shark (1997)

Rating: 9.0

I went back and forth about using an album almost no one has ever heard of for so high a spot on my reference points, but this is my blog and if I don't post about this forgotten album who will? 9.0 and above is almost unheard of, and if you see an entry with a score like that among the Fading Light, you know it completely changed my life. Simply put, this is the best "rock" album I've ever heard. It matches a punk attitude and looseness with tight songwriting, harmonies, interludes, and wild changes of tone and approach. I have made so many mixes over the years, and this is the band that people invariably ask me about. I've been listening to this album for 23 years and I still can't come close to wrapping my head around it. Why did a silly punk band release an 18 song mega album absolutely loaded with catchy songs and then disappear? How is every song unique in tone and memorable? What would have been different if the approach was more serious or if more people were able to hear the album? Really, none of that matters. Just put this on, grab your significant other or pet, and dance your ass off: 

The dividing line between 8 and 9 is a sacred place for me. In most cases these scores are reserved for stuff I actually like more over time, and they work their way up. No matter how many times you experience it, you still find new things to love about it. It changes because you change. I can't think of a higher compliment to pay to a piece of art.

Veep (2012-2019)

Rating: 10.0

...and with joyous abandon, I present a work of art I enjoyed so much, it wasn't even possible to enjoy it more over time. It didn't require careful study or decades of appreciation to become an all-time favorite; it just floored me completely, immediately, and totally. The most recent time my wife and I watched the entire series, we started it over immediately. You can tell the writers and actors are smart because of how funny the show is, but you can tell they are fucking geniuses because they quit before the show got bad. It was almost orgasmic to finally experience a TV series that doesn't slowly rot into a pathetic caricature of itself - seriously, when does that ever happen? You can also tell really clearly that the Seinfeld connection goes beyond Veep being incredibly lucky to have Julia Louis-Dreyfus: later seasons are run and co-written by Dave Mandel, who took over for Larry David when Larry left Seinfeld. Veep takes a concept that was hilarious on Seinfeld and milks it beautifully for seven gorgeously nasty seasons: it is funny when the closest of friends, acquaintances, and family cannot stand each other. The fact that these vain, distracted, and completely fucked up people are running the country only makes things funnier. The show even handled the Trump presidency well without going over the top or attempting to moralize. And, really, that's why the show is so fucking funny: there is no learning, no growth, and no holding back. What makes this a 10 versus my other all-time favorite shows at 8 and 9? The show's truly perfect execution, over seven seasons and no more, of a singular focused goal. Veep tells a satisfying story, impeccably acted and produced, as an afterthought to insult comedy. Every character made me laugh at one point or another, and some made me laugh just by entering the scene. I can't think of a single thing I didn't like about it and, again, in this day and age for a show to end on a relatively early high note deserves praise beyond words. I laughed my ass off and I would recommend Veep to absolutely everyone, including people I think it would offend. That is, after all, what the show would want. 

Thank you so much for reading some or all of this :) I had a great time writing it and the rest of the posts this month. We are one month and eight chapters into the Fading Light; now more than ever I have to be OK with all of this being just for me, but if you have time to leave a comment I'd love to hear from you!