Stars and gripes

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/09/2016 (3333 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The fall season is upon us, which, in the entertainment world, means there will be new TV shows, movies and concert tours out the wazoo, most of which will be accompanied by some form of review. 

Reviews are a tricky beast — tricky to write and tricky to digest — and every reviewer has their own style, process and reasoning behind the number of stars they hand out. 

The Free Press offers ratings on a five-star scale for a variety of things — from restaurants to wine, from live music to live theatre — so we’ve asked some of our well-versed reviewers to talk about their experience and how they feel about star ratings specifically — as that seems to be what drums up the most conversation (and frustration) from reviewers, reviewees and readers alike. 

 

Randall King 

Movie and theatre critic

I’ve been assigning star ratings for more than 25 years, and while I would rather people read a movie/theatre review and make a go-or-don’t-go decision on that basis, I won’t be disingenuous about their practicality. They serve a handy consumer function to readers, especially in the movie capsules the Free Press runs Thursdays and Sundays.

Truth be told, I use them myself. I might have gone to see the movie War Dogs when I was on vacation last month, but I noticed Alison Gillmor’s one-star review. I trust Alison. So I didn’t bother, and was rewarded by taking in the lovely Kubo and the Two Strings, which Alison praised with a lavish 4½ stars.

Bear in mind: I have more reason than most to dislike star ratings. In 1997, when I was employed by the Winnipeg Sun, I wrote a review of the family non-classic Air Bud that was wholly backhanded in its praise. The upshot: this movie about a basketball-dunking dog wasn’t as egregious a viewing experience as I thought it would be. I assigned it 2½ stars.

Unfortunately, the review ran with a typo — turning a 2½ -star shrug into a 4½ -star rave.

If you read the review, you probably would have been able to surmise something was amiss. But try telling that to the movie’s distributor.

When ads started appearing with the mistaken star rating serving as a blurb, I duly informed Malofilm, but to no avail.

A few months later, when the film went to video, I was horrified to see the 4½ stars plastered all over the VHS cover and the promotional poster. It was funny in hindsight, but it was mortifying at the time.

It was a small mercy the stars were attributed to the Winnipeg Sun and not Randall King, although I did once get a message from a disgruntled reader taking issue with one of my reviews, saying in effect: what do you know? You’re the guy who gave a 4½-star review to Air Bud!

 

Brad Oswald

TV critic

I must admit I resisted the notion of adding star ratings to TV reviews when the system was first introduced at the Free Press, and by dragging my figurative feet and conveniently “forgetting” to add them to my columns, I probably made television the last entertainment-review form to use the five-star scale in this newspaper.

I’m still not a huge fan. I’d prefer readers immerse themselves in the full text of the written reviews rather than making a snap decision (and perhaps bypassing the rest of the column) based on a numerical-shorthand summary.

I’ve grown accustomed to the star-system additions and will even confess to reading them myself in other reviews — but I still also read the reviews.

My approach to assigning star ratings is basically this: a really, really good TV show gets four stars, and everything else is assessed relative to that benchmark.

Most television content falls into the average — from two stars to 3½ — category, and the stinkers get tagged with two or fewer stars.

If memory serves, I believe I once gave something zero stars.

The four-star benchmark still leaves room for the completely, excellently amazing TV stuff to be given 4½ or — on the rarest of rare occasions — five stars out of five. 

 

Alison Gillmor 

Food and movie critic

Overall, I would give the star system maybe a three out of five.

For me, it partly depends on what’s getting the stars.

I’ve covered several beats during my years with the Free Press. At one point, while doing the visual arts reviews, I was asked to apply the star system, which I found confounding.

Somehow, watching opaque video images of historical racial injustice or looking at drawings that exposed the scars of childhood abuse didn’t easily lend itself to keeping score.

I remember an artist friend jokingly inquiring whether the newspaper would start giving star ratings to news events: would civil wars be dismissed as derivative and underwhelming (two stars)? Would city council meetings be summed up as workmanlike but overly generic (3½ stars)?

Star ratings for the restaurant beat have a certain broad-based value: five stars should catch your attention, while one star might make you lose your appetite. But a restaurant gets a single star rating to cover a range of issues — ambience, service, value for money and, of course, food. That’s a lot of weight to put onto one digit.

For me, movies are the most easily starred medium. Partly, this is because the Internet language of movie reviews has in large part become numerical, with an individual critic’s star rating immediately being absorbed into a much larger aggregate score on websites such as Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes.

And sure, maybe diehard fans of Suicide Squad don’t care about stars. But fence-sitters might find 53 reviews averaged out to 40 per cent — or two stars out of five — to be a significant indicator.

At the same time, I think glancing at a movie’s star rating is no replacement for reading a whole review.

Of course, I would say that. I’m a writer. But really, a three-star review can mean so many different things. Some three-star movies are valiant, ambitious failures. Some are guilty pleasures, maybe a bit idiotic but still irresistible. Others are merely average — competent and serviceable but immediately forgettable.

Starred numerical ratings can be handy shorthand, but they don’t tell the whole story. That’s what words are for.

 

Ben MacPhee-Sigurdson

Wine critic

Some years ago, I adopted the 100-point rating scale for wines made popular by Robert Parker Jr. of the Wine Advocate and used by many wine websites, magazines and critics worldwide.

But I found I, like many wine writers, tended to rank most wines somewhere in the 85- to 95-point range, thereby really making the rating system a 10-point spread.

I decided a couple of years ago to switch to the five-star system, in part to fall in line with other Free Press reviews for CDs, plays, movies, restaurants, and so on. Most readers understand the five-star rating system better than they do the 100-point wine rating system.

Using a less-specific scale also removes questions that surround the 100-point scale.

What makes one wine an 85 and one an 86? Or what makes one wine an 89 — a very good score — and one a 90 (which drives sales in a big way)?

It’s all relative, I suppose, but for me the five-star rating system allows a bit more breathing room and lets me think of a wine in a broader category of quality rather than micro-scoring it for reasons I can’t as easily justify.

I find myself less hesitant to give a serviceable but not great wine a 2½ than I do a 50/100. The former still looks as if it has appeal, while the latter looks like the wine is a borderline failure.

 

Erin Lebar

Music critic

For live music, I can’t say I’m a fan of doling out star ratings.

Unlike the other forms of entertainment, a concert is something that happens once and then is gone, never to be experienced again, so the rating really carries no weight moving forward, and instead is just a snapshot of how things were at that specific time.

However, I am well aware how much readers appreciate the rating attached to concert reviews, so I press on. 

The assumption is writing concert reviews is a fun job, a piece of cake even. In reality, live music reviews are a uniquely difficult task.

The deadline is tight — often a headlining act won’t get on stage until 8:30 or 9 p.m., or later, and the review must be submitted by 10:15 p.m. at the latest.

That’s around an hour — an hour to put comprehensive thoughts and critiques and notes down, frantically Googling for song titles based on garbled lyrics, while thousands of people are screaming and music is blasting so loud you can feel your brain shaking. Sometimes, the words just flow; other times, the process is a painful, stressful slog. 

The star rating is the last thing I consider before sending in my review.

Usually, it’s 10:10 p.m., five minutes away from deadline, and I ask myself a few simple questions: did this performer deliver what was expected? If so, how well? If I were a fan who’d paid to be here, would I be satisfied?

Those questions help me keep my own personal music bias at bay and look at each show for what it is. 

With concert reviews, it’s important to remember your experience as a fan may be different than my experience as a reviewer. Unlike food or films or wine, there is a personal connection between musicians and their listeners, and that invested emotion affects how a concert is viewed. In short, every show will be someone’s best night ever, no matter what I say about it. 

I get a lot of emails (oh, so many emails) about the stars I’ve given to one act or another, most of them saying 3½ is not a sufficiently positive evaluation. But in my view, a three-star review might be completely appropriate; perhaps the singer or band merely went through the motions, but didn’t offer much more.

A 3½-star review signifies an above-average performance, meaning there were at least one or two “wow” moments worth noting.

Four stars equates to amazing, and five stars, flawless.

I can count on one hand the number of five-star reviews I’ve written — that number is reserved for the truly unforgettable performances.

In case you think I’m too harsh… I have yet to award two stars or less for a concert.