On December 21 Wal-Mart closed the online movie download service the company had launched in February this year. According to a report from AP Wal-Mart says the decision was made after Hewlett-Packard decided “to discontinue its video download-only merchant store service.” The retail giant gave up on DVD rentals two years go.
Last time I checked, enjoying a movie was a subjective thing. But hey, we’re ambitious people, and making lists is fun! So clearly subjectivity doesn’t stop us from making list after list of the best, the worst, the funniest, the most heart-wrenching films of all time. What’s my point? Well, what I’m trying to segue into here is a discussion of the American Film Institute’s newly renovated “100 Years…100 Movies” list, which (arguably) documents the 100 best films of the past century.
First of all, I would like to point out that I am by no means a film connoisseur. I am young, and I only had the pleasure witnessing the last 15 years of the 20th century. (I am counting on the fact that most people don’t like math and won’t bother calculating my age and disregarding my opinion just yet.) That being said, I consider myself an unfortunate representative of the 20-somethings roaming this earth who are apparently overexposed to the garbage produced today and underexposed to the classics that populate AFI’s treasured list. I have seen 21 of the movies on the list. I remind you, that is out of 100. Does that make me uncultured? Most likely. But I think that it also makes me typical for my age.
To recap, AFI re-released the legendary rankings this week to celebrate the 10th anniversary of its initial list, and to allow recent films (made between 1996 and 2006) to earn a slot. Now I could sit here and give you a play-by-play of all the movies that I HAVE actually seen, or regurgitate the reviews that other, more cultured and knowledgeable bloggers have given of the new list, but I don’t feel like it. And I doubt that anyone would want to read it. Because as I originally stated, watching movies is subjective. There is no right answer, mostly just wrong ones. I do, however, have an issue with this list that I would like to point out to AFI now.
Who exactly are these faceless voters determining the “greatest movies of all time”? Some of you might wonder how AFI compiles this all-knowing list. I was curious as well, and with a few clicks of the mouse, I got some ambiguous answers. Shocking, I know.
First of all, this isn’t random polling. A panel of directors, screenwriters, critics, actors, editors, cinematographers, and historians are the predetermined voters. (Insert a yawn here, followed by an angry grimace.)
I’m not quite sure why this bothered me so much. It isn’t as though I am saying I know more about movies than the pros, I am actually disturbingly confident in my naiveté when it comes to films. But I know I am less biased, and when it comes to asking for opinions, I think we should be looking towards the people the movies are made for (the audiences), rather than the people who make them. For example, Citizen Kane was chosen as #1 (just as it was with the first list 10 years ago). An Orson Welles’ masterpiece. Released in 1941. A classic. I’m not trying to dispute whether or not it should have won, I just don’t know why the rest of the list has to read almost exactly the same way. No one has a list of favorite movies that all originated before 1950.
I read the master list of 400 films that these professionals got to choose from, and I have to say they missed some good ones. This is where that whole subjectivity issue comes into play again. When you release a list of that magnitude, everyone has an opinion, and you have admittedly clueless people like me thinking that they should have a say too. The only justifiable claim I can make is that I at least have some semblance of a clue about films made within the last decade or so, which is why the idea of this remodeled list excited me. For about 5 seconds.
The only movies to make it from the newly considered crop were Titanic, Saving Private Ryan, The Sixth Sense, and Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. I have seen all of these movies, and none of them are my favorites. Two of the additions are extremely questionable in my mind, but with my self-proclaimed, non-expert status hovering overhead, I don’t feel comfortable specifying which ones. I’ll just give you a few hints. One was known for its breakout performance by a child actor (whose recent successes include voicing characters in The Jungle Book 2 and The Country Bears—very impressive). The other was historically inaccurate and included an excruciating song by Celine Dion. I know that soundtracks may not factor into this contest, but they should, especially when they start to cause movie goers physical pain.
So what does all this mean? Nothing. Did I waste time rambling on about a topic that signifies very little in the grand scheme of things? Of course. But if AFI executives do happen to read this (I’m crossing my fingers as we speak), and they plan on generating a new list in 2017, I urge them to spice up the voting process a little next time. They have 10 years to brainstorm, and I am always available for input. Personally, I think that they should throw some no-name voters into the mix, not unlike myself, who can make clear-headed and impartial decisions.
If we want to make a list representative of our culture, we need voters who understand that how well a movie is made doesn’t necessarily factor into how it makes us feel. I know for a fact that by the time I am a 30-something, my favorite movie will still be The Sandlot, I’m just hoping the rest of the country will catch on by then.
Sony Pictures Entertainment is duking it out with Walt Disney Co. over which movie now hold the record for biggest world-wide gross in in six days. Sony says its movie Spider-Man 3 is the record holder, while Disney insists its irates of the Caribbean: At World’s End is the new title holder. The former movie brought in $382 million, while thelatter reportedly took in $404 million. However, as the Los Angeles Times reports, Sony argues that Pirates’ six-day total includes receipts from early screenings in France and Italy, thus making the movie’s six-day total a seven-day total.
Disney dismisses Sony’s claim that those early showings siginificantly added to the six day total.
Spider-Man 3 still holds the U.S. box office record for an opening weekend.
The lawsuit unfolding between adventure author Clive Cussler and Phillip Anschutz’s Crusader Entertainment may be more about bruised egos than breaches of contract.
A jury ruled last week in Los Angeles Superior Court that Cussler must pay Crusader damages of $5 million for inflating book sales during negotiations for the 2005 film Sahara, while Crusader may have to hand $8 million over to Cussler for failing to follow through with the second movie they originally planned to make.
Cussler initially brought charges against Crusader in 2004, claiming that the production company lied about the level of control he would have over the direction of the film. My guess is that Cussler may have been embarrassed about the poor showing that Sahara made at the box office, pulling in a measly $68 million in the U.S. (consider first that the movie cost $130 million to make–not including promotion expenses).
Crusader of course counter-sued Cussler, claiming that the author told executives that his Dirk Pitt novel Sahara sold 100 million copies, when in actuality it sold 40 million. Considering the wealth of Cussler and Anschutz, who really don’t need to add any more millions to their bank accounts, these lawsuits seem to be more of a blame game for why the film failed so horribly.
It is no secret that adapting books into feature films has made production companies (and authors) a lot of money in the past. Crusader purchased the rights to two of Cussler’s novels with the intention of making a Dirk Pitt film series, so I included some box office sales from other popular series that were based on books:
Harry Potter & The Sorcerer’s Stone (2001): $968.6 million
Harry Potter & The Chamber of Secrets (2002): $866.3 million
Harry Potter & The Prisoner of Azkaban (2004): $789.4 million
Harry Potter & The Goblet of Fire (2005): $892.2 million
*That totals over $3 billion in gross sales, with three movies in the series left to make…
The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (2001):$860.7 million
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002): $921.6 million
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003): $1.2 billion
*And then there’s the 17 Academy Awards that the films collectively won…
Let me also mention that there are over 6,000 movies listed on the Internet Movie Database that were based on novels, with Forrest Gump (which was the highest grossing film in the U.S. the year it was released) and The Godfather to name a few. If you take a look at the list of top grossing movies of all-time, you will also recognize that quite a few of the films were adapted from books.
Cussler and Anschutz probably didn’t think they had the Harry Potter series or the Lord of the Rings trilogy on their hands, but they also weren’t expecting the film to generate an $80 million loss. Especially with stars like Matthew McConaughey and Penelope Cruz headlining the movie.
So in closing, it appears that Cussler and Anschutz tied up the California court system for three months because the author didn’t want to admit that he wrote a lousy book, and Crusader didn’t want to admit that they produced a bad movie. In retrospect, the trial turned out kind of like Sahara did: wasteful, pretentious, and forgettable.
KGW reports that Netflix has moved into a larger shipping and handling facility in Salem than the one it moved into in 2003.
Las Vegas Business Press has a write-up on kiosk DVD-rental vendor TRN Entertainment’s push into Sin City and its competition there against Red Box. Blockbuster is quoted as saying that the DVD-vending box didn’t work for them. Red Box has 1,800 kiosks across the country against TRN’s 1,300.
It’s certainly an admirable goal for Netflix to try to improve its movie recommendations, and an even more admirable PR move, as megamark sagely points out, but I do have to wonder how much headway can actually be made. In my last entry, I pointed to Alexander McCabe’s blog Flaunt It, in which he analyzes the ratings system and Cinematch’s accuracy:
The ratings are between 1 and 5 stars. Their current system ‘Cinematch’ doesn’t do too well. On average it’s out by just under 1 star for each rating - so typically Cinematch will predict that a viewer will watch a movie and score it 4 stars - the viewer will actually score it 3 or 5 stars. You could probably get close to that level of competence by guessing that the viewer will rate every movie at 3 stars. Many times, you’d be right, and many times, you’d only be one star away. The vast majority of movies that I’ve seen are 2, 3 or 4 stars.
The first problem, as I see it, is that we are not dealing with a particularly accurate ratings system to begin with. A margin of error of 1 star doesn’t sound like much, but 1 star does constitute 20% of the ratings graph, and could be the difference between “I really enjoyed it” (4 stars), or “I wasn’t overly aware of the posterior pain of sitting in a chair for two and a half hours” (3 stars), or from the latter to “I was kind of bored after I ran out of popcorn” (2 stars).
So, naturally, there is room for improvement in terms of ratings predictions. But the ratings themselves are given by human beings, which I must confess, despite my fondness for them, are not renowned for consistency. I could rate a movie down by a star if I were feeling grumpy either the day that I watched it or the day that I rated it, or rate it up by a star if I watched the movie at a get-together with friends, forgetting, perhaps, that most of the witty dialogue was supplied for the people on-screen by my friends. And I do not think I am markedly more capricious than the average movie-viewer.
And ’stars’ are about the most subjective rating system after ‘thumbs up/down/horizontal.’ Perhaps 2, 3 and 4 stars have an entirely different meaning for you than for me, and you would call a 3 star movie “I was kind of bored after a ran out of popcorn” and a 2 star movie “I did escape from the experience without gouging out my eyeballs.” What does it mean to be a four star movie? A three star movie? How long will we ponder this question before it starts to become slightly existential?
All this is to say that Netflix knows me about as well as I know myself, and I’m not exactly certain how they can provide a much more accurate prediction. An article in the Times-Herald Record jubilantly opens, “Does it sometimes seem as if Netflix knows your tastes better than your friends, your spouse, even you? ‘You loved it,’ the DVD rental site will remind you, offering a movie for sale that yes, by golly, you did love.”
The news item here is that, while Netflix bides its time waiting for a recommendation engine to tell you how much you loved it with an even greater degree of accuracy, the company has also introduced a new feature in which you can find out what other people loved, too. Just put in a zip code, and you can find out what people in New York, San Fransisco, Portland, Maine, or Portland, Oregon, or, for that matter, Hindustan, Indiana (actual town) are watching and enjoying from Netflix.
An important distinction on the service is that it does not display the movies rented most often, but the titles ordered “much more than other Netflix members” in other or comparable areas. This reveals that regional specialty tastes frequently have to do with (surprise) the region itself. For example, “Northern Exposure,” about the little town of Cecily, Alaska, tops the list in Fairbanks and Juneau, “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” is number two in Savannah, Georgia, where the movie (and book) is set, “Wyatt Earp: Special Edition” is particularly loved by those in Phoenix, near Tombstone, Arizona where it was filmed.
New Yorkers love Ric burns’ historical series “New York,” “New York Stories,” and Woody Allen’s “Manhattan,” but they also display a particular weakness for French films, as opposed to, say, all the Cuban films that are rented in Miami. And regional favourites are not a given: “Fargo” is not on the list for Fargo, North Dakota, nor is “Paris, Texas” on the list for its namesake.
The Times-Herald Record also noted that regional placement made little difference in their own research of “top rentals” rather than “top unique rentals.” For example, “Crash,” though set in L.A., also hit No. 1 in Boston, New York, Miami, Albany, NY, and Billings, Montana. There were a few interesting variations amongst the cities they researched, which you can read about in the full article, but not ones that reflect an easily-definable trend.
After all, no matter how many stars they give it, the capricious human being does have remarkably similar affinities for certain kinds of stories, regardless of where they live. “I think taste is uniform across the country — and across the world, and the millennia,” said Richard Walter, a film professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “People everywhere respond to the same kind of drama, the same characters, the same conflict.”
So, as Greg Gershman wittily suggests on his blog, gregword, you could probably please everyone by suggesting ‘The Shawshank Redemption,’ regardless of which movie they’d just rated, or how they rated it.
“We’re quite curious, really,” says NetflixPrize.com. “To the tune of one million dollars.” Netflix has announced a competition and promised to award the winner $1 million, but the question it seeks to answer is hardly the type found on most game shows. The internet DVD service, facing the challenges of competitors like Blockbuster and looking ahead to the onset of online movie downloading, is seeking to improve the movie recommendation service. Its million dollar challenge goes out to a team that can do just that.
Its current program, “Cinematch,” bases its recommendation on a user’s history, looking both at the movies ordered from Netflix and also the ratings the user affixed to them after viewing. It then creates a list of titles from Netflix’s catalogue of over 65,000 movies that a given user would be likely to enjoy. Netflix’s 5.2 million members contribute about 2 million ratings per day, always feeding more information into the formulae and algorithms that fuel Cinematch’s mathematical predictions.
To sign up for the competition, interested parties must register at NetflixPrize.com, the site that outlines the rules for the Prize. Registered teams receive the Contest training data and a qualifying test sets of 100 million anonymous movie ratings. By 11 AM this morning, over 600 teams of 1,000 people from 31 different countries had registered to participate.
In order to win the $1 million Prize, the accuracy of the predictions submitted via a new method must be at least 10% better than the current Cinematch recommendations. In the event that no one meets this standard within the first year of the competition, a $50,000 Progress Prize will be awarded to the individual or team who improved the recommendation accuracy by the greatest amount. The Progess Prize will continue to be awarded until the 10% goal is reached, with the winner of the previous year’s Progress Prize setting the standard for the next year, should the competition run on for decades to come.
A chief stipulation in order to win either prize is a willingness to share not only the final product but also the way in which it works with the general public. Netflix has no plans to monopolize the new recommendation process; winning also requires that you license the method to Netflix, but not via exclusive licensure.
Netflix also guaranteed the anonymity of all of the reviews, in order to allay the privacy fears of any of its users. Text reviews have also been eliminated as possibly distinguishing factors, leaving only the titles, star ratings, and dates.
Netflix is turning innovation over to the public in part because those who engineer Cinematch are stymied; the method witnessed a period of rapid advancement which has since plateaued. A new eye (or 1,000 new pairs of eyes) to the process is precisely what Netflix desires. “Recommendation systems covering a wide variety of categories will play an increasingly significant commercial role in the future,” said Reed Hastings, the Co- Founder, Chairman and CEO of Netflix. “Right now, we’re driving the Model T version of what is possible. We want to build a Ferrari and establishing the Netflix Prize is a first step.”
Alexander McCabe has an interesting assessment of the current method’s accuracy and his opinion of the competition’s future; read about it at his blog, Flaunt It.
Kodak will install more than 2,000 self-service photo-processing kiosks in Wal-Mart stores under a three-year deal between the two companies. The kiosks will allow customers to view , edit and order prints of their digital photos.
I guess that means HP’s attempt to woo Wal-Mart failed.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Wal-Mart
has found use of kiosks, which shutterbugs often use to print just a few shots at a time, has been rising faster than the use of its one-hour mini-labs. Wal-Mart said it has recently raised the price of prints from one-hour service to 22 cents apiece from 19 cents. That narrowed the price gap with instant prints from kiosks, which cost 28 cents apiece.
The way satellite radio companies count subscribers has been a topic of discussion for some time, so it’s not entirely surprising that that the SEC is looking into Satellite XM’s numbers:
XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. (XMSR) disclosed in a regulatory filing Tuesday that the Securities and Exchange Commission is looking into the company’s handling of its estimates of subscriber counts as well as the cost of recruiting customers.
The Washington-based company said it received a letter from the SEC on Aug. 31 asking for documents regarding its subscriber targets and related matters for the third and fourth quarters of last year.