Movie Ratings

When I was in college, my good friend Ralph Cohen and I would watch a LOT of movies.  We became friends because of this, in fact, because we kept running into each other at midnight screenings of films like "The Maltese Falcon" which we of course had both seen dozens of times.  But not that often on a big screen, so if a film class or the local theater was showing it, there we would be.  We ultimately wound up living in the same building, so it was just a short walk down the hall to whatever was playing on TV at 1:00 AM on the local Richmond, VA, station.

We came up with our own rating system for the stuff we watched.  Initially it was quite simple:  in descending order of perceived quality, it went --

• Film
• Movie
• Flick

But then for some reason we progressively hit a string of movies that were so awful that it seemed wrong to dignify them with the designation of "Flick."  So Ralph and I kept coming up with lower and lower qualifications for our system.  Ultimately, it went like this:

• Film
• Movie
• Flick
• Talkie
• Mere Use of Celluloid
• Complete Waste of Celluloid
• Kaiju Crapfest
• "El Topo" Special
• Ed Wood Must Have Been Behind This Somehow

I have no idea why this came to mind today.  I never forgot it, though.  Miss you, Ralph!