consensus: great movies - results

george kaplan · 03-20-2002, 05:09 PM

I've started a new thread to post the various results of our study. However, I am giving voters one last chance to finish up. In particular, I'd like to encourage andrew_sch, jay e, jeff amaris, and martin teller who are all very nearly complete. Look for results here coming soon.

"LAST CALL for votes".

rhett · 03-21-2002, 10:44 AM

george kaplan · 03-21-2002, 11:24 AM

First of all, I spelled consensus incorrectly in the title, but, then again, no one noticed.

The voting is complete and now we can consider the results. I’m going to do this in bite-size pieces to keep from getting overwhelmed. There’s a lot of data here. Hell, I could do a dissertation with this much data. First things first. Some provisos:

1. Our sample is neither a random sample, nor necessarily representative of any larger population. I’ll talk as if our results generalize to the HTF community as a whole, but there’s no way to know how accurate that is.

2. There were a lot of votes cast. Over 7500! I created an excel spreadsheet and entered each vote in it’s appropriate place, one at a time. I was very careful in doing this, but I did NOT double-check my work by entering each vote a second time. Also, not everyone voted in quite the same way. There were occasional ambiguous votes that I couldn’t get clarification on. I did my best to figure out the correct votes in such cases. Also, some people may have changed their votes after I first entered them. If this was done with a new post, I updated the results. If people just edited their original post, the changes might not have been reflected. Overall, I think this data is a nearly perfect representation of the votes cast.

3. I’ve created various index scores and I also provide rank ordering. You may notice two films with the same score but different rankings. There are two reasons for this. One, the scores may not in actuality be the same, but may simply look that way due to rounding. And two, I typically used tiebreakers in ranking (e.g., number of votes cast or number of abstentions). For example, if one film got 10 thumbs up out of 10 votes cast, and another got 30 out of 30, they both got 100%, but the latter has more precision and would get a higher ranking.

4. There were a few people who only cast a few votes. I have left these votes in when calculating statistics on the movies, but excluded these people when talking about any statistics on the voters.

I think that’s it. I’ll be back soon with some initial results.

george kaplan · 03-21-2002, 11:33 AM

This all started when I noticed that it seemed every movie, no matter how well-regarded in general, seemed to have it’s detractors around here. So this got me wondering whether there were any films that we’d all agree was a great film, not necessarily the greatest or even the top 10, just great. The idea was if we were all in a room and the names of films were called out and we raised our hand if we agreed it was great, were there any films where we’d all raise our hands.

The answer, sadly, is no. We voted on 220 films that were nominated because they were felt they had a good chance of being a universal choice, and not a single one was. Of course, when people fail to raise their hands, it could be for one of two reasons. Either they’ve seen the film and don’t think it’s great, or they haven’t seen the film and are abstaining.

I’ll look at abstaining in different ways, but our first statistical index, the consensus index, treats them as no votes. I think this is appropriate. Consider Sons of the Desert. Every single voter who saw this film considered it a great movie. Yet, over 85% of us, haven’t seen it. Can we say it’s a consensus choice for a great movie? No. It’s possible if we all sat and watched it that we’d have 100% consensus. But I’d consider that unlikely.

So what film did have the highest degree of consensus? Rear Window with a consensus index of 97.22. The only thing keeping this from being a true consensus film was one person who hasn’t seen it. But out of our 220 films, only 8 obtained 90% or higher consensus. They are:

rank...........film.........consensus
1.....Rear Window...............97.22
2.....Psycho.......................97.14
3.....The Godfather.............94.44
3.....The Godfather, Part 2...94.44
5.....Citizen Kane................94.29
6.....Star Wars...................91.89
7.....Dr. Strangelove............91.43
8.....North by Northwest......91.43

The second tier of films, reaching at least 80% consensus are:

rank...........film.........consensus
9.....2001: A Space Odyssey..................88.89
10....Goodfellas.................................. .88.57
11....The Wizard of Oz..........................88.57
12....Apocalypse Now...........................88.24
13....Vertigo..................................... ...85.71
13....Bridge on the River Kwai.................85.71
15....Chinatown................................... 85.71
16....Casablanca.................................. 85.71
17....Ben-Hur (1959).............................82.86
18....Raiders of the Lost Ark...................82.86
18....Snow White And the Seven Dwarfs...82.86
18....One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.....82.86
21....Schindler's List..............................82.35
22....To Kill a Mockingbird.......................80.00
23....A Clockwork Orange.......................80.00
24....Lawrence of Arabia........................80.00

In general, some of the observations I’ve made include:

Big winners:

Hitchcock – not only does he have the number 1 and number 2 film, he has 3 of the top 8 (the 90% club).

Mafia films – 3 of the top 10, Godfather 1 & 2 tied for #3, Goodfellas at #10

Kubrick – #7, #9, #23

Lean – not as good as the others, but still good (#14, #24)

Big losers:

Comedies – yes, Dr. Strangelove did well (#7), but after that the next highest consensus comedy is a tie at #52 between Duck Soup & the Apartment, each getting only 60% consensus. What’s Up Doc?, a great comedy in my opinion came in at #218, with only 8.57% consensus.

Silents – The best silent was the Gold Rush wish came in at #70 with 54.29% consensus. Greed was #213, with 14.29% consensus.

Billy Wilder – I think Hitch & Wilder are the two best directors. You guys agree with me on Hitch, but not Billy. His highest ranking film was The Apartment #52, only 60% consensus. One, Two, Three came in #215, with only 11.76% consensus

Foreign films – they didn’t do quite as badly as the above, but still nowhere near consensus. The best was Seven Samurai at #36 (71.43% consensus), the worst, The Killer, #219 (8.33% consensus).

Most of us are going to agree with the top films. After all, they’re the top films because almost all of us called them great. But there’s bound to be less happiness with the bottom films. After all, somebody nominated them, not only because they thought they were great, but thought there’d be near universal agreement with that sentiment. And our bottom 10 are:

rank...........film.........consensus
211....Predator.................14.71
212....Sons of the Desert...14.29
213....Greed....................14.29
214....Open City................11.76
215....One, Two, Three......11.76
216....Victor/Victoria..........11.43
217....Pillow Talk..............11.11
218....What's Up Doc?........8.57
219....The Killer................8.33
220....Wag the Dog...........2.86

Keep in mind, that these are only the worst of those 220 that were nominated. There are tons of films that would have fared much worse. And in most cases, a thumbs down meant “a very good, but not great film”, not “this film sucks”. So, it’s kind of unfair to consider these films as having done really bad. But, in terms of consensus, they are far from it. Those of us who thought there’d be near universal praise for these films, were wrong. J

I’ll be back with more analyses later. Feel free to comment, or ask questions or ask for analyses. I’ll do those that I can reasonably do.

Gabe D · 03-21-2002, 11:55 AM

Quote:

First of all, I spelled consensus incorrectly in the title, but, then again, no one noticed.

Just because I didn't say anything...

**HTF Ads**

Darren H · 03-21-2002, 11:58 AM

George, I'd love to see an analysis that omits the abstains. I'm curious about other films like Sons of the Desert (which I also haven't seen). I bet Open City, for instance, got a high percentage of thumbs ups from those of us who have seen it.

MartinTeller · 03-21-2002, 12:01 PM

I think you should compile a separate set of scores that DOESN'T factor in the abstains. For example:

Rear Window - 100% (99% of voters)
Sons of the Desert - 100% (15% of voters)

I would definitely be interested in those scores. IMHO, a vote shouldn't count for anything if the person hasn't seen the film. If only 5 people saw a film but they all loved it, it shouldn't rank lower than a film that 50 people saw but only 30 loved it.

Dheiner · 03-21-2002, 12:02 PM

I am looking forward to more analysis. I am most interested in the ratings among those who saw each of these. I agree that from one perspective a didn't see vote is a no, but, often, at least in my case, a didn't see vote was due to my ignorance in selecting films to watch.

Also, at least one of us noticed, but you caught it before I could ping you on it.

SteveGon · 03-21-2002, 12:06 PM

Quote:

This all started when I noticed that it seemed every movie, no matter how well-regarded in general, seemed to have it’s detractors around here.

I think a lot of that detraction could be due to over-kill in praising certain films. Case in point: the Star Wars movies. The nonstop idolization of the those films gets rather tiresome after awhile. This idolatry started bothering me during the course of my first SF tourney. Like any other, that tournament had its core group of voters but it seemed like whenever a Star Wars film was featured in a bracket, everyone and his brother would come out of the woodwork and vote for it, thus skewing the results. You know it's getting bad when a certain HTF member, who loves the SW films, confides in me that he's getting tired of hearing about them! Just for the record, I too, enjoy Star Wars, but am willing to admit that they are NOT the greatest movies ever made. The same goes for The Third Man, my favorite movie. It's a darn good movie, but it is not the greatest film ever made. Well, that's enough ranting for now...