// May 20th, 2009 // 5 Comments » // Gradebook
So the other day Chris and I had a very short text messaging conversation about j.j. Abrams and Ron Howard, because j.j. abrams just made the new Star Trek movie and Ron Howard just made Angels and Demons. Anyway we were saying how j.j. abrams is awesome and is constantly making great movies and tv shows. Then on the other hand there was Ron Howard and I said that I don’t think he has done that much stuff lately that is anything to be proud of. This got me thinking about how I would not put Ron Howard on my “A” list and I think he is a tad overrated. So I wondered what grade I would give him and other actors/actresses/filmmakers. So I decided to grade all of these people as actors and so forth. But I didn’t just want to give them a letter grade, because that’s lame and boring. Jesse and I came up with a system that grades them on different criteria. The first criteria is that they have to have at least ten movies to their credit in their primary field. For example, Ron Howard has also been an actor in the past but the guy is a director and everybody knows him as a director now so I am just grading him on the movies that he has directed, and obviously I can only grade the ones that I have seen and obviously this is all based on my opinion. Each movie that they do is worth 5 points and I give the movie points based on how good it is. So if a movie is brilliant it gets 5 points out of the 5 possible, and if it sucks the butt it gets 1 point. Then they are graded on their likeability as a person and as an actor/filmmaker. A couple things go into this. Once again this is about how much that I like you. So if you beat up your mom you probably are going to get a pretty low score. There are 50 points possible here because this is very important to me and whether or not I see your movies. Then I grade you on your talent. If I think you are a fantastic actor with a wide range of abilities you will get the full 50 points, oh yeah there are 50 points possible here too, because, um, it’s the talent portion. Duh. Quite important really. When judging somebody’s talent. But if I think you are a one dimensional hack you will get docked for that. Or if you aren’t that diverse in your roles you will get docked for that too. Then there is the performance part. You start with 50 points here and for every bad performance you get 5 points taken off of that. And it is very possible for your performance score to be higher than your talent score. For example, I think Cameron Diaz is not very talented and usually plays the exact same character all the time. So her talent score is pretty low, but her performances are generally not bad, not good by any means, but for the movie she usually works with just a couple of exceptions. So she doesn’t really get docked for performance with few exceptions. So to sum all that nonsense up she is one dimensional and not very good so her talent is low but her acting is usually not bad and works with the role she is playing so performance is higher. Make sense? If it doesn’t then I can’t help you. The final category is for people that have been rewarded for their performances whether I agree with it or not. The final criteria is that they get 10 extra points for each oscar they have won, but once again only in their primary field that they are being graded on. For another example, Mel Gibson is going to be graded on being an actor because that is primarily what he is outside of being a jackass. So he won an oscar for best director and braveheart won the oscar for best picture. Neither of these count for him because the one is for directing and the other is grading the movie as a whole and he didn’t play every character in the entire movie. At least I hope he wasn’t that naked girl…..Does this make sense at all? This is very lengthy, maybe I should have just given a short description and given you an example. And now I am just making it lengthier with ramblings. Oh yeah, and then we add all the points they earned and divide them into the points possible to get a percentage. So then we had to come up with a scale of what percentage is what letter grade, because let’s face it, everybody is in bad movies sometimes and everybody has different sizes of resumes. So for this we used Robert De Niro as the scale setter because he is my favorite of all time and I think he is the greatest actor of all time. It seemed fitting. Whatever percentage Robert De Niro got was what we were going to use as an A+ and then set it from there. We had to try it out after that to see if it worked at all or not and turns out, it works perfectly. We have done it with almost forty actors/actresses/filmmakers and they have all earned the exact grade I would have given them. It’s great, and ridiculously fun for me. Here is the grading scale:
84% and above—-A+
82-83%—-A
79-81%—-A-
76-78%—-B+
73-75%—-B
70-72%—-B-
67-69%—-C+
64-66%—-C
61-63%—-C-
58-60%—-D+
55-57%—-D
52-54%—-D-
51% and below—-F
Grading Robert De Niro
15 Minutes——3
Analyze This—-2.5
Awakenings—–4
Backdraft——2.5
Bang the Drum Slowly—-3.5
Brazil—–2
A Bronx Tale—-5
Cape Fear—-5
Casino—–5
City By The Sea—-3
Cop Land—-2.5
The Deer Hunter—4
The Fan—-2
Flawless—-3
The Godfather II—-5
Godsend—-1.5
The Good Shepherd—-3
Goodfellas—-5
Great Expectations—-2
Guilty By Suspicion—-4
Heat—–5
Hide And Seek—2
Jackie Brown—-2.5
King of Comedy—4
Mean Streets—-3.5
Meet The Fockers—-1
Meet The Parents—-2.5
Men of Honor—-3
The Mission—-2.5
New York, New York—-2.5
The Night And The City—–3
Once Upon A Time In America—-3.5
Raging Bull—–5
Righteous Kill—-2
Rocky & Bullwinkle—–2
Ronin—-3
The Score—-4
Shark Tale—-2
Showtime—-1
Sleepers—-3.5
Stardust—-4
Sleepers—–3.5
This Boy’s Life—4
The Untouchables—-4.5
Wag The Dog—-4
Likeability—-50
Talent—-50
Performance—-50
Oscars—-20
Total: 316/375
Percentage: 84%
Final Grade: A+
<——- Look at the size of that head!
