Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) – 4/4
It’s really pretty great. Thrilling, mysterious, carried by likable and compelling characters played by great actors, and I’ll just say that the twist at the end is wonderfully crafted.
(I’ve decided to adopt Ebert’s 4 star scale, because I’ve always taken a liking to it, and I started to realize how dumb it is to use letter grades.)
Yeah, letters are so much dumber than stars.
The letter grading system is based on a percentage system that doesn’t make sense when used outside of school grade context.
That makes even less sense. A four star system is just a percentage system with less detail.
This is true, in a way. Yes, the 4-star scale is just a strict set of percentages, the same way a 10-star scale is, only with less variation. But you’re looking at it the wrong way in comparison to the letter grade system.
The letter grades, when used outside a school grading context, are convoluted.
In the 4-star, 1/4=25%, 2/4=50%, 3/4=75%, and 4/4=100%. This is proper, even scaling.
In the letter grades, A=90–100%, B=80–89%, C=70–79%, D=60–69%, and F=0–59%. This makes C the midpoint, or average; but that means that average is 70–79%, and that’s just stupid. 50–59% is the midsection where average is. It’s middle ground; nothing special, but not bad. 70–79% is good, not average.
See I disagree, which is why I adopted the letter grades. 70-79 will always be middle ground to me.
Which I why when I did the 10 scale I used to regularly be ragged on for rating things too highly. But something like a 5/10 is to me never something that’d I’d want to watch, it’s plain bad (though not as bad as 1-4 - see the problem with this scale being there’s too much specificity for the bad stuff when it should all just be F). Anyway that’s just me.