POSTS TAGGED : ratings

Movie Reviews and Ratings

Ratings by movie reviewers are ubiquitous, from thumbs up or down to a star-rating system or any kind of sliding point system. Are they a waste of time that should be avoided and abolished, a necessary marketing tool to pull readers in to read reviews, or an objective measurement of the reviewer’s overall evaluation of a movie?

During my days as Managing Partner at Box Office Mojo, when the site still published movie reviews, we struggled with this question. Initially we used a letter grade scoring system. Continue reading →

Eight Reasons to Quit Cable TV

Two years ago I canceled my cable TV subscription and never regretted it, and you should consider doing it too, for the following eight reasons:

1. Cable is too expensive. At $60-$100 per month, depending on what you subscribe to, that money can be put to better use — and I don’t mean on something other than entertainment. With this budget at your discretion each month, subscribe to Netflix ($10-$30), go to the movie theater ($20-$40) and have enough left over to buy/rent a TV show or movies from iTunes, Amazon or the local video store. Sure, you can’t get everything that’s on TV that way, but once you shut off access to cable, you soon forget about what you might have had if you had it, and focus on enjoying the shows you do have access to. Continue reading →