Modification complete. Commence countdown.




Here at The Man Who Viewed Too Much, we take pride in bringing you the very latest in anal-retentive geekoid technology. In keeping with this objective, we've just completed a minor site upgrade (Version 8.0.2), shifting our reductionist critical methodology from the popular but somewhat antiquated letter-grade system to the more discriminatory 100-point scale. This overhaul was long overdue. Not since Version 4.1, when we abandoned the Maltin four-star scale in favor of letter grades, had anything more than routine maintenance been performed. While longtime visitors may initially feel a little disoriented, we feel confident that you'll have the hang of the new system in no time, and will be as pleased as we are by the greater flexibility and accuracy it offers.

Seriously, though, what happened was that I found myself becoming more and more frustrated during my two weeks at Cannes -- doling out B after B after B with no way to distinguish between the pictures that nearly got a + (Sweet Sixteen, Morvern Callar) and the pictures that nearly got a - (Welcome to Collinwood, Bowling for Columbine). I'd been toying with the idea of switching over for some time, and while the stick up my ass predictably wanted to wait until 1 January, I was ultimately able to partially dislodge it and make the retroactive changes over the course of this weekend.

To make the transition a bit less confusing, I'm retaining the page of films ranked by letter grade, adding the new ratings in parentheses. So if you're not sure what a 74 means to me yet, check and see where it landed on the old scale. Nor should readers of Theo Panayides' invaluable site assume that my 74 is roughly equivalent to his 74. Unlike Theo, who seems to reserve everything above 87 for the second coming of Sullivan's Travels, I'll actually be using all 100 points; Memento, for example, would surely get at least a 96. (I'll probably be tinkering with the exact ratings for a few weeks, as I develop a more intuitive feel for where various pictures belong.) I'd suggest subtracting 10 or so points from my rating to come up with the number Theo would give the film if he agreed with me.

Eventually I hope to rank movies using angstroms, thus scientifically proving that Shrek is an overrated hunk of offal.

Carry on.

md'a