Sixth Annual Movie Ratings Recap

I have been out of the legal beagle business for six and a half years.  During that time I have tried to wean myself away from the arcane mumbo jumbo which, by necessity, becomes a part of almost every lawyer's job.  However, once in awhile a drafting situation presents itself where resorting to legalese works better than attempting to write around it.  Such is the case with my annual Movie Ratings Recap.  The phrase which comes in handy at these moments is "incorporate by reference."  (The usual lingo is, "Document X is hereby incorporated by reference as if set out in full.")  The term simply means that, rather than rewriting something from an older document into the present document, the writer (via incorporating by reference) advises the reader to read the new document as if she (the writer) had rewritten the passage from the older document. In other words, the reader is asked to pretend the older language is in the new document.

What does all that have to do with movie reviews?  The answer is as follows:

1. My blog post from January 12, 2012 (Prelude To 2011 Movie Ratings Recap) explains my grading system and briefly discusses how I select which movies to attend.  You can disregard the last paragraph of the post, as it was rendered obsolete by # 3 below.

2. My blog post from January 15, 2012 (Fourth Annual Movie Ratings Recap) explains the order in which I list movies having the same grade.  There is also a two-sentence history of my practice of putting together annual Movie Ratings Recaps.

3. The second paragraph of my blog post from December 31, 2012 (Quarterly Cinema Scan - Volume X) describes my rationale for changing the last day of my annual review period from December 31 to January 31.

I hereby incorporate by reference the three items described above. Tah-dah!  Did you see how efficient that was?

In preparation for this Sixth Annual Ratings Recap, I reread twenty-five of the twenty-nine reviews I wrote for the twelve-month period which ended on January 31, 2014, so that I could be as accurate as possible with the order of preference for movies having the same grade.  (I already knew the order of my top three and bottom one without rereading those reviews.)  I also did a little math to determine how this past year's movies stacked up against the previous five years' movies.  For that exercise I calculated what percentage of the movies I attended merited a grade of B+ or higher.  Here is what I came up with:

2008: 29 movies, to which I gave 0 an A, 3 an A-, and 10 a B+ = 44.8%.

2009: 21 movies, to which I gave 0 an A, 3 an A-, and 6 a B+ = 42.9%.

2010: 31 movies, to which I gave 1 an A, 4 an A-, and 8 a B+ = 41.9%.

2011: 28 movies, to which I gave 1 an A, 4 an A-, and 11 a B+ = 57.1%.

2012 (a 13 month period): 37 movies, to which I gave 2 an A, 8 an A-, and 10 a B+ = 54.1%.

2013: 29 movies, to which I gave 2 an A, 6 an A-, and 10 a B+ = 62.1%.

As the numbers indicate, this past year has been my favorite movie year out of the six years I've been writing reviews.  Either the movies are getting better or I'm doing a better job of selecting what to see.  I'd hate to think of the third possibility, viz., that I'm becoming a softer grader in my old age.

Okay, enough with the preliminaries!  Here is how I graded the twenty-nine movies I attended in a theater during the twelve month period which ended nine days ago.  The month of my review accompanies each title.

A:

Blue Jasmine (August '13)

Captain Phillips (October '13)

A-:

Mud (June '13)

Quartet (May '13)

The Place Beyond The Pines (April '13)

The Wolf Of Wall Street (January '14)

20 Feet From Stardom (July '13)

Fruitvale Station (August '13)

B+:

Enough Said (November '13)

American Hustle (January '14)

Gravity (November '13)

This Is 40 (February '13)

Philomena (January '14)

Oz The Great And Powerful (March '13)

The Sapphires (June '13)

12 Years A Slave (December '13)

The Spectacular Now (September '13)

Safe Haven (April '13)

B:

The Way, Way Back (July '13)

Ginger & Rosa (April '13)

Lee Daniels' The Butler (August '13)

Prisoners (September '13)

B-:

The Company You Keep (May '13)

Before Midnight (June '13)

Trance (April '13)

The East (July '13)

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (December '13)

Nebraska (January '14)

C+:

None

C:

Admission (April '13)