Digital Bits reviews question (1 Viewer)

[Robert Anthony]

yeah, but the public didn't write the review. Todd Doogan did.

So email todd Doogan to ask him about it.

I seriously doubt there's some huge conspiracy that needs to be unearthed on the boards and brought to light to expose the hypocrisy that is The Digital Bits grading scale. And I'm also doubly sure you'd get more answers (not necessarily answers you like) by actually emailing the person who can give them to you: The guy who WROTE the review. Not a bunch of members of a public messageboard.

 

[MarkBourne]

A reviewer's inherently subjective nature is one of the strengths and advantages of "reviewing" generally, especially for the reader. Once you find a reviewer whose up-front, out-in-the-open, flag-waving personal tastes, sensibilities, and style tend to be aligned with your own, then you know you have a reviewer you can consider a reliable resource for your own tastes.

For instance, my personal tastes about movies tend to be closer to those of Andrew Sarris and Anthony Lane than to, say, Roger Ebert. (Plus I enjoy their writing styles a bit more.) So if Sarris gives a movie "four stars" and Ebert gives it "two stars," I know that the odds are good that my own opinion will more likely be "four stars" as well. There are always exceptions, of course, but it's a good general approach.

Similarly, if critic X repeatedly pans movies I enjoy, then I know that his tastes/prejudices/sensibilities are simply not aligned with mine. I may still consider him a damn fine reviewer (that depends largely on the quality and flair of the writing and the thinking behind it), but I know that he and I tend to be of different minds about the same movies.

I personally prefer DVD reviews, online or otherwise, that focus more on the film's craft or "aesthetic" than on "gearhead" details, and that are written with a well-honed prose style. So I gravitate to (and bookmark) those writers who fulfill that for me. Other readers are the antipodes of me in that regard, and I'm all for it.

As a writer for DVD Journal, I always keep objective criteria at easy reach within my reviewer's toolkit and strive to balance everyone's needs, but it's my style and subjectivity that bring in the fan mail and give me pleasure as a writer. Because of where my strengths and interests are, my attention will typically aim first toward, say, scriptwriting or filmcraft, and then toward DVD technical issues, which other reviewers are much better at than I. The fact that I loathe close to everything about The Lion King as a movie would impact my overall opinions of what is by all acounts a technically splendid disc, and I'd be obligated to make a good case for why that's so; at the same time, my love for Forbidden Planet positively colored my review of a bare-bones disc that needs/deserves some modern TLC treatment. (And my first goal always is to craft an honest, informed opinion wrapped in a good read, period.)

My/our readers know who they are or are not aligned with most of the time. "YMMV" is entirely the point. Otherwise, there'd be a need for only one reviewer. And that'd be just pretty damn dull.

In my opinion.

 

[Colin Jacobson]

The review grades are based on quality not quantity.

I think it should be a combination of the two. I mean, if some movie includes only a 20-minute featurette but it's a GREAT featurette, should I give the DVD an "A+" for extras? No, just as I wouldn't give a set with two hours of dull featurettes (cough, Matrix Reloaded) a high mark for extras.

I balance the two factors when I review. That said, I have no clue how X2 got only a "B-" for extras from TDB. That's a seriously stuffed SE, and the vast majority of the materials are very good. Two solid audio commentaries and many interesting interviews and documentaries. No way in hell that set should get a barely-above-average grade from anyone - it'll easily land on my year-end top ten list...

 

[Jeff Swearingen]

The Bits is one hell of a site.

A review is completely what the reviewer writes and believes. I don't think that there is a heuristic in place that says that if you have x, y, and z on a disc it gets this grade. I wouldn't want that.

And really, who cares what the grade is if you actually read the review. Let Bill's words about the extras speak for themselves and quit trying to figure out if the grading was correct or not. This says more than any B+ or B- ever will...

All in all, there's nothing on either of these two discs, save perhaps the film itself, that really strikes you as terribly unique or special. But the extras, in total, are solid enough that you end up being mostly satisfied. There's enough to sink your teeth into here that most fans will be quite happy with this special edition. And I will say this: Particularly welcome here are the insights of the original creators of these characters - the folks who molded them on the colorful page of the comic. Too often these contributors get overlooked and I was very pleased to hear from them at some length on Disc Two.

 

[Brian PB]

As a fairly new online reviewer, I struggle mightily over my number ratings, because I'm convinced that many people only scan the review for the "grade" and don't bother to read my carefully worded justification within the text of the review. At DVD Verdict, we use a 100-point scale and rate six different criteria: Video Quality, Audio Quality, Extras, Acting, Story, and Overall Judgment. But the 100-point scale is really used like a school grading scale, where "average" for most reviewers is around 75 to 80 (we also publish averages for each reviewer, and how much each deviates from the overall mean for the site).

Personally, I don't think it's possible to have perfectly defined criteria which objectively rate DVD content and presentation in such a way that five independent viewers will arrive at identical scores or letter grades (the site which has probably gone the furthest in trying to achieve standardized, objective criteria is The Laser Examiner, which uses a very complicated system). Personally, I try for internal consistency in my ratings, but I'm often left worrying over the difference between an "82", an "83", and an "84".

Also, I don't believe there are any scared cows in film reviewing. For every film selected as one of the "greatest films of all time" in the Sight + Sound poll, there is some experienced, well-informed reviewer somewhere who will consider it garbage.

I think that the best a reviewer can do is try to explain or justify the rating he or she gave. And the best a reader of these reviews can do is to focus less on the numerical or letter grade, and more on the text.

 

[Adam Tyner]

I think that the best a reviewer can do is try to explain or justify the rating he or she gave.

I think it would be even better to go a step further and ditch the concept of numeric/summary ratings. It seems like 80% of the time, if someone on a message board complaints about a review, it's about a summary rating that's deemed too high/too low/too inconsistent with other reviews on the site. I don't pay attention to summary ratings unless they're placed directly next to the text and are otherwise unavoidable. A detailed message is much more substantial and is of much greater interest to me than a single number or letter.

 

[Bill Burns]

David wrote:

Before I do a review, I ask God to make sure that my opinions and perceptions are 100% in line with His own ultimate, objective, view-point.

That way I'm assured that whatever I write in my review is a reflection of absolute reality and *not* just the subjective opinion from a normal person's point of view.

Now just don't tell me Ireland is still yours, Stephen -- eh, I mean, Dave.

"I'm the most wanted man on my island! But I'm not on my island."
"Your island? You mean Ireland."
"Yeah. It's mine."*

* I don't have the disc loaded up at the moment, so I'm relying on an IMDB transcription (with corrections of my own), but I believe this is about right.

 

[Scott Kimball]

I have struggled with the idea of "grading" in reviews. I know many people like them, but I don't - and I haven't used them, yet. I don't feel it's fair to the film or DVD presentation to boil it all down to a number. When you evaluate numerically, you inevitably end up comparing one film / DVD to another - whether you mean to or not... even if you use a carefully designed "rubric" for grading. Eventually you come to the point where you think... "well, I gave THAT DVD an 85, but I like this one better, even though it scored the same... maybe I'll give THIS DVD an 87..."

I think each DVD should stand or fall on its own merits. It's okay to use comparisons for illustrative purposes, but using numerical grading, you end up cornering yourself over time. Once you give video quality a near perfect rating, there's nowhere to go when that inevitable improvement comes along... frankly, as good as most DVDs are, I haven't found a "perfect" presentation yet.

I'll write my review, and then either recommend it or not - sometimes qualifying a recommendation "for genre fans only" or some such thing.

-Scott

 

[MarkBourne]

Hear hear. These days I don't even both looking at "star" ratings or alphanumeric "grades." I'm far more interested in what the writer has to say in the body of a review. That said, my hat's off to sites such as the 'Bits and dvdbreakdown.com (both among my daily bookmarks) that can granularize the various components of a DVD review for the movie and the DVD tech issues. At DVD Journal, our aggregate "voice" (or style, of whatever) and typical audience make it okay to reserve the all-encompassing "star" grade (or beer-glass grade, which I think is more revealing ) to the bottom of any review, though that does force us to still subjectively weigh the components of (for instance) a lousy movie given a superb DVD treatment, or vice-versa, into a single grade. Hence more emphasis on a journalistic approach.

For myself, I write as I would for, say, Time magazine or Salon.com unless I'm doing a specialized genre review, such as a Harryhausen or Star Trek or classic SF film, in which case I assume that the reader who clicked the link is a fellow fan with a similar fannish level of interest in the topic at hand. (My hands-down favorite reviewer/writer, DVD Savant, whose easy-going style and long-time in-the-biz savvy I envy, has a similar approach.)

 

[DaViD Boulet]

I certainly try to describe the audio and video characterstics in detail and put them in context with the artistic intentions of the creators (as best to my knowledge) and condition of the source elements and not just depend on a "score" to represent my impression of picture or sound.

for instance, ALIENS will always have some film-grain, but it's *supposed to*. The 16x9 Heathers has been filtered to remove all grain but in so doing they removed all fine-level image detail so that's a *bad* thing.

IMO, just artibitrarily giving a bad score to grain a good score to a "clean" image does a disservice to the film and the readers. Similarly, just giving a good score to the grainy picture of Aliens (A.I. is another good example) and a bad score to the "scrubbed" Heathers picture doesn't help anyone understand the reason why...and the average consumer looking at the image on the average 27" TV might not get the connection. But (using this example) by discussing the complex circumstances surrounding the image of a particular DVD, hopefully readers will become better aware of the nature of that individual title, how it was intended to appear when projected as film, and consequently how we should "judge" the merrits of the DVDs faithfulness to replicating that experience as closely as possible within a digital 720 x 480 MPEG2 system.

My knowledge is still quite limited about film as a medium and the history of various film-titles. But my hope is that opening up discussion in that direction helps everyone...myself included..come to understand film a little bit better and help fine-tune our expectations of the DVD format.

-dave