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This sums it up for me perfectly. I've always felt this way. No matter how technically proficient a film is, it is great to me if I can't bear to not see it again. And for many of those films not only could I bear to not see them again, I couldn't bear to see them again! A well-made boring film is a bad film, not a great one.
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Well said, George (and Ebert). And I'm mostly of a similar view. But the nagging element of personal film rating for me is that I see that not every rule applies to every film all the time! For example, there are films I've seen which I thought were "good" movies (CHICAGO for example) and yet I have no desire to see ever again. So, objectivity often works as part of my system too, just to put that on the record.
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Which brings me back to the Maltese Falcon. To paraphrase Ebert, Joe's rating is just an opinion, which can't be right or wrong, except in the case of his rating of the Maltese Falcon, which is wrong.
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Well, one thing I like about Ebert is that he seems to take chances. I'll never forget the praise he gave what's generally considered to be a lousy film - LIGHT OF DAY (1987) -
1/2 !!
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Humor aside, I do think that greatness is in the eye of the beholder, not something inherent in the film itself, and so of course there's no wrong opinion
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Absolutely in agreement. At the same time, there is some validity to the "majority view" on movies setting the tone for a film's "general reputation". So with something like LIGHT OF DAY, Roger Ebert would be -- not "wrong," -- but in the minority. Likewise, I fully recognize that I'm not "wrong" for finding THE MALTESE FALCON "Above Average", but I'm certainly out of the loop as far as the film's accepted "great reputation" is concerned.
And I've always felt that a person doesn't really "need" to explain why he likes or dislikes a movie when he's in the "majority"; that's up to the guy in the minority.
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but one can still disagree with other's opinions and be baffled when you find yourself in agreement with them on some things, but then extremely far apart on others.
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You're right.