Top 100 OVERRATED Movies

Top 100 OVERRATED Movies

Wow. This critic has pretty much decided to denigrate the entire catalog of great movies. He's right about many of these being overrated (Of course Hiroshima, Mon Amour is overrated. Hell, even his own low score is still too high!), but he's really just trolling. He made up the list with at least a vague attempt at an arithmetic justification based on the difference between his score and the average critic's score, so it all has kind of a patina of objectivity. The problem is that his own scores are ridiculous. He rates Godfather and Godfather Part 2 a mere 6/10. He rates Wings of Desire 4/10. Maybe those films are overrated, but you can't prove that by giving them an obvious underrating to establish a bogus comparison.

Reader comment from J: 

The methodology is even worse then that, "Overrated" is a list option he designates, it is not derived from comparing the rating numbers: 

The "So Bad They're Good" category has several entries that are 5/10 stars, which would logically be "So Average They're Good". 

In the "Underrated" category the majority of the entries have Avg. Ratings that are higher than the Reviewer's Ratings, which also seems odd, particularly as some of the Avg Ratings are close to 10/10. 

Much the same with the "Unjustly Panned" category, the top 6 all have excellent critical reviews with his own ratings noticibly lower. 

DATABASE NERD ALERT! 

If you look at the above URLs it's obvious from the querystrings that the criteria for inclusion in the respective lists is that the webmaster put each film in a named category corresponding to "Overrated" or "Underrated", etc., solely based on a qualitative arbitrary judgement without comparing his own review scores to the critical average. (The algorithm by which they are ranked is written backwards at the top of each list.) Given the lack of sophistication in the database design it's logically possible to be "Overrated" and "Underrated", although by manipulating the querystring you can run a search that says none are. Since this query is impossible through the search form, it is possible that they did not code for multiple categories, although the fact that the search results page has a comma delimited listing of categories suggests they did. 

I figured all this out by trying to search for films the reviewer ranked greater than 8 that critical consensus scored less than 8, to see what he considered underrated. The search failed because the hack who designed the thing copy and pasted the SQL Server code for searching ranges of the reviewer's scores into the code for searching ranges of Avg. Ratings. He forgot the Avg. Rating is a fraction, and SQL throws a hissy fit when you try to convert whole numbers to fractions without asking nicely.