So, An Explainer to the Kubrick Rubric.

Six months ago, when this whole pandemic really hit the States hard, I decided I would use the quarantine to watch some classic movies I may have missed growing up (and to rewatch some of my favorites). While doing so I gave them ratings and put them on a list - something anyone familiar with this blog will be totally unsurprised by. After six months of tinkering with my ratings system, I'm here to introduce it. With brevity. Of course.

I call it the Kubrick Rubric. Named after the greatest director of all time, Stanley Kubrick, the Rubric is used to rate a movie not by how much I enjoy it (which is totally subjective) or how it compares to other films (as that feigns an air of objectivity), but on how much better it could have been made.

Allow me to explain. The problem - in my eyes - with rating a movie based on my enjoyment is two-fold: First, I'm the only me. I love The Game. Blair hates it. Case in point. Second, it would mean that a movie like Sorry to Bother You, which I've watched half a dozen times in the two years since its release, would score much higher than American History X, which I vowed to never watch again, simply because I enjoy watching the former more than the latter. But I am not here to say that Sorry to Bother You is better than American History X. It isn't. But I do enjoy it more.

The other way in which folks rate movies, a comparative method, is troublesome for different reasons. If I tell somebody that Get Out is a 10/10, they may very well go, "That's impossible. It's not better than The Godfather, and The Godfather is a 10/10!" To which I'd say, "Sure." Because that doesn't matter. Movies aren't necessarily made to be compared to others. Get Out and The Godfather can both be 10/10s without it being a foot race to the top. And that's where the Kubrick Rubric comes in.

Stanley Kubrick is famous for being a perfectionist. His legacy as the most important director of all time comes not from the quantity of films he made, but from the quality of them. Take Kubrick's 1980 suspense/horror film The Shining for example. Maybe you've heard of it? The Shining became an instantaneous success upon its release. It set the precedent for modern horror, it turned empty corridors into nightmares, it left audiences with some of the most iconic shots and lines in cinema history. But, and there's always a but, it required shooting the movie hundreds and hundreds of times. 

Take the famous baseball bat scene for example, where Shelley Duvall is wailing and walking backwards up the hotel lobby's stairs while swinging a baseball bat at her deranged husband played by Jack Nicholson. For audiences, the scene is utterly terrifying and singularly memorable. But for Shelley Duvall, it was an actual nightmare. Kubrick made them shoot the scene and reshoot the scene until he was happy with every single aspect of it. The cut we see in the movie is the 127th take. By the end of shooting that night, Duvall had clumps of her hair falling out from the stress of screaming for hours on end. This is what Kubrick demanded every day in every scene, no matter how big or small. 

He demanded perfection. 

And that is what the Kubrick Rubric is looking for in a movie. It asks, "What more could we have gotten from those actors? How much better could the soundtrack be? What about this massive plot hole?" It gives a score based on how close a movie came to becoming the best version of itself. While I know that this is also a subjective rating system with an air of objectivity, I've used it to rate almost a hundred films this year and have found so far that it's the fairest way to critique such complex pieces of art. 

An amazing story with half-assed acting does not equal an amazing movie. And even the greatest acting can't totally save a poorly written script. By giving a movie a Kubrick Rubric Rating (KRR), we're ascertaining how far the movie came, and how much further it had to go to reach, for lack of a better term - perfection.