{"id":1202,"date":"2004-04-08T10:49:23","date_gmt":"2004-04-07T23:49:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/?p=1202"},"modified":"2010-03-13T18:31:12","modified_gmt":"2010-03-13T07:31:12","slug":"a-passionate-dichotomy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/?p=1202","title":{"rendered":"A Passionate Dichotomy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Regardless of what you may think about Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ<\/em><\/a>, it seems to have aroused a passionate response, both from its fans and detractors. One of the many useful things about the Internet Movie Database<\/a> is the insight it can give into the cultural views of large groups of people. In addition to the many mini-movie reviews it carries by anyone feeling moved to contribute (and some of these are of such insight and quality of writing that they could be from print-media reviewers), there is also the voting system.<\/p>\n

Anyone at all can vote on a scale of 1 to 10 for any of the tens of thousands of movies listed on the database. The ratings are averaged and range from 9.0 (from over 90,000 votes) for The Godfather<\/em><\/a> to 1.5 for You Got Served<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Passion<\/em> scores 7.5 (over 17,000 votes), which from my experience indicates a memorable and well done movie, but not one destined to become a widely recognised classic. What’s interesting, though, is to see how it got this score. Consider, again, The Godfather<\/em>. Its voting histogram shows that nearly 52% of voters gave it a ’10’, and another 19% gave it ‘9’. An usually high 6.2% gave it a ‘1’.<\/p>\n

Now consider a movie that was perhaps as controversial as Passion<\/em>, dealing with the same subject matter: The Last Temptation of Christ<\/em><\/a>. This movie received an average vote of 7.4, not much different from that received by Passion<\/em>, with the bulk of its voting spread fairly evenly across the ‘8’, ‘9’ and ’10’ categories (64%) and only 4.4% giving it a ‘1’. Interesting, given the highly publicised protests against the movie by elements within the Christian community upon its release (in the late 1980s).<\/p>\n

So, back to Passion<\/em>. Its voting pattern<\/a> shows 56.3% giving it a ’10’, 10.5% a ‘9’ and 8% voting ‘8’ for a total of nearly 75% in these three categories. So why is the average only 7.5? At the other end of the scale 9.4% voted ‘1’, and this is what pulled down the average.<\/p>\n

It seems that The Passion of the Christ<\/em> really is a controversial movie!<\/p>\n

(Cross-posted on the Australian Libertarian Society Blog<\/a>.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Regardless of what you may think about Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ, it seems to have aroused a passionate response, both from its fans and detractors. One of the many useful things about the Internet Movie Database … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[31],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1202"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1202"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1202\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1204,"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1202\/revisions\/1204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}