In boxing the "lineal" champion is defined very easily: the guy who beats The Guy. What does that mean? Imagine whoever won the Heavyweight Championship for the first time in history. Then someone beat him and became the new champion. Then someone else beat the new champion to become yet another champion and on and on and on until today.

This is a simplification, at least one heavyweight champion retired undefeated (Rocky Marciano) but you get the gist of it. I have for a long time applied that concept to the movies I have rated. Why? What do you mean by why? Because it is fun! It is silly but I like to have fun with the concept.

So my lineal champion for movies, how do I define it? I define the lineal movie champion as the last movie that I have rated 8 or above. That would make the current movie champion:Field of Dreams with an 8 out of 10 rated on November 21st, 2018.

Why movies 8 and above? I feel 7 and above would be too expansive of a definition, I have rated 542 movies a 7, not 7 and above, but just 7! In total I have 694 films rated 7 or above on a 1 to 10 scale. I think the lineal champion should feel special, and 694 films are just too much.

Ok, so why not just films rated 9 and above or just 10's? Because that would be too restrictive, let me show you. I have 45 movie rated 9 or 10, 16 10's and 29 9's. At first glance this might seem like a nice number for this subset to be "my champions" but the problem is twofold.

First, today a day, I just don't seem to rate movies 8 or above, heck I rarely even rate movies a 7. 8's, 9's, and 10's are in such a premium that we would rarely see any turnover at the top. Take a look: In the year 2007, which is for practical effect the year I started rating movies in IMDb, I rated 53 films 8 or above out of 145 movies that I rated in 2007. That's a staggering 37% of the current total of my 8 and above ratings.

*(The Godfather was the 1st film I rated in IMDb and it was the only film I rated in 2006).

Needless to say that if I subtract the 8's the percentages are even dire.

The 2nd problem is that while I have rated a total of 152 films 8 or above the reality is that many of those films, if I were to rate them again wouldn't stay in the 8 or above bracket. Which makes sense, I still see a healthy amount of movies each year but the percentage of the 8 or above group keeps dwindling, that's a product of a more refined palate (snob alert!) and discriminating taste.

My journey to re-rate films that have suspect ratings (in today's context) will be the subject of another blog but needless to say that it is an incredibly painstaking process to complete since to complete said process I have to abide by the most important rule of them all: I can only rate (or re-rate in this case) a movie if I see it (or re-watch it).

This re-rating problem is also related (and worthy of another blog) to the "Original Sin" problem. In short: when I first opened my IMDb account and started rating movies I tended to rate movies that I had "seen" before but had not watched recently in some cases in batches which is the natural impulse. Basically you start rating movies that you have seen left and right which isn't the same exercise as sitting down, going through the experience of watching a movie, thinking about it and then rating it. When you rate movies that you watched months ago or even years ago those ratings tend to be more unmoored in reality and more on how good you "remember" a film being. Memory can be a fuzzy thing, and that, mixed with the fact that I'm simply a much more tougher rater nowadays means older ratings a less representative of my current thinking and taste than the more recent ratings (so always keep that in mind).

With all that said, how does the Lineal Champion list actually looks?

In my next blog I will be probably discuss the more interesting concept of the Contemporary Champion or the concept of the Crisis of Infinite Films.