A better way to rate films

Aliens is very rewatchable. It has tense but predictable action (the aliens kill everyone, "get away from her", etc.). Sure, it's best the first time, but Aliens only ceases to be rewatchable when you get tired of watching Aliens.

Films like Primer, Fight Club, and The Usual Suspects, are very rewatchable once, with a sharp decline afterwards. The Soze/Durden effect is incredible once. The next time, you want to watch very closely to catch all of the obvious hints that you missed. You might still miss some, but not many. By the fourth time, it's almost pointless.

I have never considered the rewatchability criteria as a potential factor in rating a movie, but must admit that is has appeal. But thinking about it further, it is a very personal metric so would not be very useful in determining the overall watchability of a movie. I.e. if you consider a movie rewatchable it might not correlate with me considering it to be watchable.

I would love to be able to see a plot of individuals and how their ratings cluster (some interesting visual way of adding and removing individuals would be cool) because I would guess (based on our own data) that these plots would not be uniform. And if they are not, then an individual's movie recommendation, based on rewatchability, would have less value to me.

Films, music, books, etc. are not about some abstract universal gradation of quality that a large enough, good enough statistical sampling of viewers will reveal with increasing precision. No, they are art. Enjoyment and appreciation of art is a matter of personal taste, which is not, will not, and cannot be universal for everyone.

That's why up/down votes are decent enough ratings systems despite their crudeness, all they do is tell people whether or not taking the effort to find out if a piece of art suits your personal taste is likely to be worthwhile.

Ultimately what ratings are trying to get at is recommendations. The simplest idea being to measure the average opinion of everyone and present the highest rated works as recommendations. However, more sophisticated systems which try to find people with similar taste and recommend to you things that they seem to like but you haven't been exposed to are likely to be more successful, though significantly more complex to implement. It seems unlikely that even that represents the limit of improvement for the problem, but nobody's done much better yet.

Why would you limit your pool of advice-givers to your friends?

They are good for service advice where you need someone you can trust to give you the whole and honest story.

In movies it's beyond that, it's much more important to find people with the closest match to you in movie taste as possible. The more people the closer taste match you will get (goes without saying).

I also don't see the point of giving "quality" scores. I really don't care if a stranger thinks some movie was of high or low quality. I'd much rather know if my taste-twin loved it or hated it. I for example thought Lord of the Rings was super well done and yet super boring. But this opinion of mine only matters to someone who resembles me in movie taste, who hates and loves the same quirky things as I do about movies. And of the two opinions i mentioned (well done, boring) its really only the latter that matters to my twin, he/she should pay most attention to that when deciding if to go and see the Lord, not if I thought the movie was of high or low quality.

But having said that, I like "rewatchability" as a concept to study further. I too would rip of my nails before seeing Black Swan again but I still thought it was a masterpiece. However, I have seen Requim for a Dream (Darren's Arrenovsky's previous movie) again and again although it was also very emotionally intense like the Swan. Just in a different way, less depressive, but killer strong in an exhaustive yet positive way. And then.. yet and still.. I would recommend both movies to everyone I meet. I think both are a must see even though one of them I would never want to see again.