alan little’s weblog
movies aren’t getting worse
22nd January 2004 permanent link
One of Brian's favourite themes - the web, and weblogging in particular, as learning tools. You say something off-the-cuff: “Nazi Germany was clearly even worse than the Soviet Union”, “movies are clearly getting worse”. Somebody questions this, you think “hmm, maybe it's not so self-evident after all” and you re-examine your assumptions. Which is never a bad thing.
The latest example of this: Brian commented on my off-the-cuff observation that “they don’t make films like that any more” – “do art forms have a life cycle, and are movies at the end of theirs?”. Bruce Baugh replied that “I'm not convinced that much pessimism is warranted", and reeled off a list of great (in his opinion) movies made in the last twenty years or so. Of which I agreed with a few, strongly disagreed with one (the Lord of the Rings trilogy) and hadn't seen the majority. And he made me think. Do I really think movies are getting worse?
Fortunately, for this question we have - unusually - a good source of hard quantitative data on the inner workings of Alan's mind, in the form of my ratings on movielens. And plotting rating against the year the film was made gives us this, where 5 = “absolute classic” and 1 = “dreadful”:
What I see here:
- If you plotted this data as “average movie quality by decade”, the line would be dropping steeply. But this isn’t because movies are getting worse …
- I see no general downward trend in the arrival rate of good films
- … although I am very stingy about rating movies as five-star classics. The last one was Snatch in 2000.
- I only remember really bad films I have seen as an adult - since 1980 or so. Really bad films from before that I either haven't seen or have blotted from my memory
- Generalisation of the previous point - I am more likely to remember good films that I saw a long time ago than average-to-bad ones
- ... and I am far more likely to have seen outstandingly good films made before I was born or when I was a small child (1960s or earlier) than bad ones
So ok, I admit movies aren’t getting worse after all. One less thing to be pessimistic about. Thanks Bruce.
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