Sunday, January 28, 2018

Statistical Analysis of the 141 films I watched in 2017, with BBFC analysis.

Just like last year, when I put my hard-earned coding skills into practice by analysing all the marks I’d awarded every film I watched in 2016, I repeated the process again this year.

The arithmetic mean of the 141 films was 6.64, a fractional increase from last year, meaning that my discernment skills to have improved slightly. That being said, the lowest mark out of 10 I gave last year was a 2, whereas I gave 1/10 to two films this year, and zero out of 10 to one, Darren Aronofsky’s bloated stinker, mother!, which is the worst film I’ve ever seen in my entire life, and featured that movie ingredient that I am so averse to: Jennifer Lawrence screaming her head off.


The same general distribution of BBFC ratings as in 2016, although I watched slightly more 18s last year. The gap between the proportion of PG and 12-rated films I watched in 2016 was much more prominent than in 2017, where the proportion of PG and 12-rated films converged slightly.



There was an overall increase in the proportion of 7.5 and 8/10s that I awarded last year, which contributed to the mean mark I awarded increasing slightly this year, despite the fact that I didn’t give a single 9.5 or 10 (there was one of each in my viewing log from 2016). Thus, whilst the overall quality of films elevated slightly, there wasn’t anything that was so good it entered my all-time top 50 canon. When I conducted a statistical analysis of all the films watched in 2016, I think I found it quite aesthetically jarring to see so many gaps in the tail end of the histogram (see last year’s). This may have played on my mind subconsciously, because the number of gaps in the tail end of this histogram has gone down from 4 to 3.

U-rated films performed very well, median-wise, and this was a consequence of me trialing Amazon Prime, which has a tonne of classic era Hollywood films on. Some of the ropier ones tended to PG (and hence PG's lower tail), but the U's fared very well, accounting for my favourite film that I watched last year, the adorable screwball comedy My Man Godfrey. As such, U has both the tightest confidence intervals in terms of quality, and accounts for 30% of my top 10 of films viewed in 2017, despite only representing 6.4% of the films I watched that year.

The law of averages would suggest that 15 would be the most variable rating in terms of quality, but not quite. For, whilst the 15-rating did produce a film I rated 1/10 and a 2/10, I also awarded a 1/10 to the 18, as well as a rating that I had never given prior to seeing Darren Aronofsky's shocking (in more ways than one) mother!.

And without further ado, the ten films I enjoyed the most and least last year, along with top 5 acting awards out of all the performances seen!


Top 10 films watched in 2017 (including rewatches)
01. My Man Godfrey (Gregory La Cava, 1936) U
02. Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945) PG
03. Carol (Todd Haynes, 2015) 15
04. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks, 1953) U
05. Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016) 15
06. Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan, 2017) 12
07. The Handmaiden (Park Chan-Wook, 2016) 18
08. Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014) 18
09. Ran (Akira Kurosawa, 1985) 12
10. The Age of Innocence (Martin Scorsese, 1993) U

Best director
01. Akira Kurosawa, Ran
02. Christopher Nolan, Dunkirk
03. Barry Jenkins, Moonlight
04. Todd Haynes, Carol
05. Michael Curtiz, Mildred Pierce


Best actor
01. William Powell, My Man Godfrey
02. Timothée Chalamet, Call Me By Your Name
03. Denzel Washington, Fences 
04. Daniel Kaluuya, Get Out
05. Daniel Day-Lewis, The Age of Innocence

^^ With the exception of the now-deceased William Powell, this category mirrors the Best Actor category at the Oscars in terms of performers, crazy (although obviously Denzel and Daniel DL are for films from previous years)!


Best actress
01. Rosamund Pike, Gone Girl
02. Rooney Mara, Carol
03. Isabelle Huppert, Elle
04. Jane Russell, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
05. Joan Crawford, Mildred Pierce

Supporting actor
01. Trevante Rhodes, Moonlight
02. Willem Dafoe, The Florida Project
03. Mahershala Ali, Moonlight
04. Michael Stuhlbarg, Call Me By Your Name
05. Barry Keoghan, The Killing of a Sacred Deer



Supporting actress
01. Winona Ryder, The Age of Innocence
02. Sarah Paulson, Carol
03. Michelle Williams, Manchester by the Sea
04. Naomi Harris, Moonlight
05. Jessica Chastain, Interstellar

Worst films I watched in 2017 including rewatches 😨😨😨😨 (which none of these happened to be, as I don’t watch a film again if I loathed it the first time around!)
01. mother! (Darren Aronofsky, 2017) 18
02. Snatched (Jonathan Levine, 2017) 15
03. Wild at Heart (David Lynch, 1990) 18
04. Song to Song (Terrence Malick, 2017) 15
05. The Human Centipede: First Sequence (Tom Six, 2009) 18
06. Evolution (Lucile Hadžihalilović, 2015) 115
07. Miss Julie (Liv Ullmann, 2014) 12
08. A Ghost Story (David Lowery, 2017) 12
09. Get a Job (Dylan Kidd, 2016) 15
10. The Dilemma (Ron Howard, 2011) 12

The moral of the story is don’t watch films you know you’re going to detest made from directors and actors who irk you (mother!, Snatched, Wild at Heart). Don’t watch vile films like The Human Centipede just out of curiosity. And having Rooney Mara, Jessica Chastain or Miles Teller in is not an immediate guarantee to the film’s quality.

Worst director 😒
01. David Lynch, Wild at Heart
02. Darren Aronofsky, mother!
03. Terrence Malick, Song to Song
04. Tom Six, The Human Centipede
05. Simon Verhoeven, Friend Request




Worst actor 
01. Chris Pratt, Guardians of the Galaxy 2
02. Laurence Payne, The Third Alibi
03. Kris Wu, Journey to the West 2
04. Chris Pratt, Passengers
05. Dane DeHaan, Valerian

Worst actress
01. Emma Watson, Beauty and the Beast
02. Jennifer Lawrence, Passengers
03. Cara Delevingne, Valerian
04. Jennifer Lawrence, mother!
05. Jane Levy, Don't Breathe

Worst supporting actor
02. Dieter Laser, The Human Centipede
03. T.J. Miller, Office Christmas Party
04. Willem Dafoe, Wild at Heart
05. Kris Wu, Valerian


Worst supporting actress
01. Emily Ratajkowski, Gone Girl
02. Cara Delevingne's sister, Kingsman 2 - The Golden Circle
03. Natalie Portman, Song to Song
04. Patricia Dainton, The Third Alibi
05. Daisy Ridley, Murder on the Orient Express

For more BBFC-related nerdery, click here!

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