Over the years I have collected about 300 DVD movies. I have given each a rating from 1-10, where 1 is terrible and 10 is only given to my favorite movies. I try to make it a Gaussian distribution with a mean of 5.5. Today I compared my own ratings to the ratings on the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) where a few tens to thousands of people have given their rating on the same scale. Here is the comparison for my top-10:

Movie title	Hans	IMDB	Comment
Se7en	10	8.6	Top-30 on IMDB
Taxi Driver	10	8.6	Top-38 on IMDB
The Shining	10	8.5	Top-54 on IMDB
Chinatown	10	8.5	Top-60 on IMDB
Blade Runner	10	8.3	Top-113 on IMDB
12 Monkeys	10	7.9	Top-188 on IMDB
Happiness	10	7.8
Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas	10	7.6
Lost Highway	10	7.5	David Lynch
Alien 3 (director's cut)	10	6.2	Outlier?

From this list It seems I favor detective and sci-fi flicks and that my taste is pretty much main stream. The only clear outlier is Alien 3, which is an average movie according to the IMDB users. My guess is most people have only seen the theatrical release of David Fincher's debut film. In fact the director's cut is much better IMHO. Perhaps it's more interesting to have a look at the movies where I have given a low rating, but where IMDB users have given a relatively high rating. Below is a table with "Hans rating" at 4 or less and IMDB above 7:

Movie title	Hans	IMDB	Director or lead actor
Repulsion	4	7.8	Roman Polanski
Assault on Presinct 13 (1976)	4	7.4	John Carpenter
Manhunter	4	7.2	Michael Mann
Highlander	4	7.1	Starring Ch. Lambert
An American Werewolf in London	3	7.5	John Landis
Westworld (1973 version)	3	7.1	Michael Crichton
Legends of the Fall	2	7.1	Edward Zwick
Quiet Earth	2	7.1	Geoff Murphy
Ichi the Killer	1	7.2	Miike Takeshi
Sliding Doors	1	6.8	Peter Howitt

All of these movies are "pretty good" according to IMDB, but I didn't like them. Well, Westworld is kind of interesting, but only because it was the first sci-fi movie I saw back in 1984. How about Polanski's Repulsion and Takeshi's horror movie Ichi the Killer? They are completely overrated. To make a fair rating system one would to have to take the "nostalgia" factor into account. And what about the "this movie was groundbreaking at the time" factor? That would favor movies like Repulsion and perhaps Highlander. But then the whole rating system would become extremely complex.

No comments.