(complaint) All movies are typically graded on a "Good -- Bad" scale. The problem inherent with that is different people define "Good" and "Bad" in different ways. It is subjective based on an individual's preference for a movie. There are certainly some common grounds (typically, well-written movies are more "Good" than poorly-written movies), but as you start comparing movies across genre, decade, and so on, the single dimension critique begins to break down.
(example 1) I personally would describe both Evil Dead II and Up In The Air as very "Good" movies. Clearly they are extremely different movies, and thus any sort of comparison requires follow-up questions about why they are good. For me, Evil Dead II is "Good" because of all the entertaining action scenes and the hilarious one-liners. Up In The Air is "Good" because of the great (and believable) quick and witty dialogue, the personal emotions and connections conveyed by the actors, and so on.
(tangent) My fourth grade teacher once told us, while instructing us in creative writing, that the word "nice" is worthless, because it communicates no real meaning. You have to explain why or how someone is nice ("they are compassionate," "her eyes conveyed the infinite depth of the night sky," "he always shares his juicebox with me"), so you might as well just do that in the first place, and skip the empty descriptor.
(back to the main topic) Describing a movie as "Good" is a lot like describing it as nice. You need to be more specific anyways. That's why most serious movie reviews are accompanied by pages-long descriptions of the movie, and what it's rating means.
(the important stuff) So, we more narrowly defined "Good" vs "Bad," and added an entirely new dimension to our ratings: "Lame" vs "Awesome." (note: it is "Lame/Awesome" rather than "Awesome/Lame" because it sounds better and is easier to pronounce)
"Good" movies tend to have strong and believable dialogue, deep and layered characters, well thought out and clever plots, very well executed direction, powerful acting, and deep emotional/spiritual/philosophical themes.
"Bad" movies tend to have contrived and hackneyed dialogue, flat characters, obvious and re-hashed plots, poor direction, bad acting, and no greater message or thing to think about.
"Awesome" movies tend to have lots of exciting action, and lots of humor.
"Lame" movies tend to have little-to-no exciting action, and are not funny
(examples 2-9) Examples:
| GOOD | BAD | |
| LAME |
|
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| AWESOME |
|
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(elaboration) Note that, in addition to the four quadrants, movies can actually be assigned values, essentially working as co-ordinates. More on this later.
