dumb and dumber imdb — vs the rating my microwave would give

dumb and dumber imdb is a rating, and the seventh microwave, which has lived through the spoon incident and survived, would give the film a higher rating, if microwaves rated. mom heard about this on a sunday. the bulk membership card listened. the spoon, by the way, is a hot take.

i am writing this on a friday at 7:14am, between the second coffee and the third, with carla on the third floor for the vendor walkthrough. she took the laptop and the larger notebook, which usually means at least an hour. the door has closed. the kitchen is mine. the rewatch is mine. so is the verdict.

so. dumb and dumber imdb. you came here for a number. you will get one. but you will get a few other numbers along the way, including the count of forks killed, the count of minutes spent on a snooze cycle, and the count of hot takes mom has, on this and adjacent topics, when i visit her kitchen and her microwave, which is older than mine and has, somehow, killed nothing.

i pulled up the page from the broader investigation into dumb i drafted at my desk last month. that is the pillar. this is one of its branches. the branch is, technically, this rewatch.

1. dumb and dumber imdb, the public score, and what it actually measures

the public score on the 1994 farrelly brothers comedy sits in the lower-seven range, give or take a tenth, depending on the season. that is, on the surface, a perfectly respectable rating for a film about two men driving a van shaped like a dog across a country that never asked them to. it places the movie above several oscar winners and below several films my mom has, in her words, “walked out of the room during, on principle”.

here is the thing the score does not measure. it does not measure how many times you have rewatched it on a sunday afternoon when the apartment was cold and the heating bill was unopened. it does not measure how many of its lines you can quote without prompting. it does not measure the hot dog truck, the suitcase, or the snowball scene. all of those are higher than seven. all of those are, by the count i keep running, closer to nine.

2. the microwave incident that interrupted the rewatch

the rewatch did not survive the second act. forty-seven minutes in, somewhere around the gas station scene, the microwave on the counter coughed and produced a smell. this is the seventh microwave i have lived with. the previous six are, in various states, in various landfills. this one had, until then, been a calm tenant. then the cough.

i had put a plate of leftovers in there with the spoon still in it. the spoon. i did not learn from sparky the fork. i did not learn from the little black mark. i put the spoon in. the spoon did the spoon thing. small light. small smell. the plate survived. the spoon is now bent in a way that suggests it has, at some point, taken a position.

the rewatch paused. carrey and bridges and the van froze on the screen with their hair in mid-flap. i opened the door. i let the smell out. the microwave is, somehow, still alive. the microwave is, somehow, still rating the film. it would, if asked, give it an 8.5, because it watched the whole thing without dimming.

this is the seventh, by the way. the previous six did less. one of them lasted a week.

3. mom called sunday, she had her own rating

mom called on sunday, which is what mom does, and i made the mistake of mentioning the rewatch. mom does not understand the film. mom has not understood the film since 1994, when she sat through about twelve minutes of it on a sofa next to my dad and announced, calmly, that she “did not see what was funny”. the verdict has not moved.

“why are you watching that on a friday morning?” mom asked. i had not said it was a friday morning. mom inferred. mothers infer. it cannot be defeated.

i told her about the spoon. she laughed for about nine seconds and then said, “you’re being dumb again, hon.” that is, in mom’s economy, both a verdict and an act of love. she rates the film a 4.0 and rates me a 4.0 and somehow the two ratings sit on the same shelf in her head without bumping. i am, in mom’s home accounting, a comedy she has not walked out of yet.

MOM. KEEPS. THE. LEDGER.

4. the diy haircut, also a low-rated experience

this is a side road. but it is, structurally, the same story. last winter i gave myself a diy haircut on a wednesday because the appointment had moved twice and the bulk membership had recently delivered a kit of clippers in a clamshell box. the clamshell box took fourteen minutes to open. the haircut took eleven minutes. neither was good.

i rated the haircut a 3 out of 10. carla rated it a “did you do something different” with no follow-up question. dave rated it, on the second ring, a 6, “because the back is fine, you can’t see the back”. the back was not fine. the back was where i had, somehow, also done the thing. dave was being kind. dave is, on haircuts, biased, because dave gets his haircut by a woman who has been cutting his hair since 2014 and who, on this point, has my respect.

the diy haircut and the dumb and dumber rewatch share a structure. you commit to the bit. you do not look up halfway through. you finish, and then you assess. the assessment is always lower than the commitment. that is, in fact, a thesis. that is what dumb is. you can read the longer version of it in the am-i-dumb-or-smart questionnaire i drafted at my desk last spring.

5. the spoon take, briefly, since it appears in the diner scene

there is a diner scene in the film. there are spoons in it. this is, for our purposes, relevant.

i mention this because the spoon is what almost ended the seventh microwave during the rewatch, and because the diner scene in the film features a spoon being used in a way that, on close reading, supports my position. the film knows. the film has always known. that is part of why the film is, on the relevant register, a 9.

6. verdict — the rating is generous, the microwave is honest

here is where we land. the public score for dumb and dumber is, on a generous day, a 7.3. the seventh microwave’s score, by behavior, is an 8.5. mom’s score, by phone, is a 4.0. dave’s score, by snowball recall, is a 9.5. mine, today, is somewhere between the microwave and dave, which puts it at about a 9.0, with one tenth deducted for the spoon incident.

i’d argue, briefly, that this is the dumbest movie ever made on purpose, and “on purpose” is the part the public film database under-weights. the film is not dumb by accident. the film is dumb by craft. the same way the long dumb road i drafted notes on at my desk is dumb by craft, not by failure.

any honest rating system has to account for the watcher. on a friday morning, with a vendor walkthrough on the third floor and a 9-min snooze still on the alarm history from earlier, i am a generous rater. on a sunday with mom on the phone, i knock a point off. the watcher changes. the database averages all of us into a 7.3 and calls it a number. it is a compromise. it is the number of people who refuse to admit they enjoyed it.

this rewatch was, by the way, what the broader idiot project — the long-running case for being not-quite-bright on purpose — looks like in a single afternoon. you can read more on the idiot brand i drafted at my desk last spring for the longer position; this post is one rewatch, one spoon, one mom call.

carla is back on the floor by the sound of the elevator. the vendor walkthrough finished early or the toner ran out. i have about eleven minutes. the microwave is still humming. the spoon is in the sink, slightly bent.

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