Dale Peck thoughtfully turns is hatcheting attentions from things that people should care about but don’t (books) to things they shouldn’t care about but do (movies).
And what he finds is, the current star-based movie rating system is inadequately and overly generous; it needs “a negative unit of measurement to warn viewers away,” a Dark Side, if you will.
Naturally, his proposal is based on things people shouldn’t care about and don’t (the ‘new’ Star Wars movies).
Go to his NY Observer article and see how, exactly, his new unit of evil film measure, The Lucas, works.
[But go soon. Here, I thought that the NYO had just bunged up their search function, gone even cheaper and crappier with their site by adding free/slow-to-update Google search, and given up on ever publishing persistent links to their stories, when in fact, they’ve done all that and started charging money for the stories you can’t find in the first place.]