Snap judgments

I haven't yet reached the next increment of 10,000 duels on Flickchart, but it's time to pimp the site again anyway.

See, www.flickchart.com has just had a major site upgrade that makes some really interesting improvements/ modifications. In addition to some appearance-related upgrades, like a redesign of the movie homepages (which also do have some functionality upgrades that I won't get into here), and some upgrades that I would consider mostly just for fun (like a filter to rank films by franchise), there are some real changes in the way you perform duels, in the interest of getting ever-greater accuracy within your rankings.

The most notable is the filter to rank movies by title. This allows you to take any movie you have in your database and re-rank it until it gets to its exact right spot in the rankings. In other words, the site repeatedly conducts duels between that movie and a series of challengers, until the movie in question beats the movie directly below it in the standings, but does not beat the movie directly above it. This is also the new process for adding films for the first time. When you select that you want to add a film to Flickchart, it immediately opens the By Title filter, and you're off to the races, dueling the movie as many as 10 to 15 times before it lands in the exact right spot.

By contrast, the old method was to duel a film three times, which gets it into the general neighborhood of where it should be. This leaves the fine-tuning of its position until later on, when the movie comes up randomly in duels and beats other films to move up. (Or gets steadily pushed down by the films that beat it.)

Because my ultimate goal is to get my rankings exactly right, and because I always notice films in my rankings that are ranked either way too high or way too low, I was geeked for this change. Indisputably, it's a great feature, and I don't want any of the philosophical ruminating I am about to do to cast any aspersions on it.

Jonathan Parker's (Untitled) (yes, that's its title) was one of the first movies I subjected to this process, having just watched it on Saturday. I thought that was an appropriate film, thematically, because it's a satire that wrestles with the idea of what constitutes art. It features, among other things, a musical trio whose pieces are comprised of dissonant sounds/noise (such as a chain in a bucket), an artist whose work consists of taxidermy and household appliances, and an artist who places a pushpin in a wall and is heralded as a genius.

It's implicit in this kind of deconstruction of what art is, that sometimes you need to truly ruminate on a piece of art before you decide whether it has aesthetic value, and if so, how much. So back to the discussion regarding Flickchart. If you're like me and like to add your newly watched movies to the site as soon as possible, the By Title filtering method doesn't allow much time/head space for rumination.

I knew (Untitled) had aesthetic value -- plenty of it, in fact. Unlike Terry Zwigoff's Art School Confidential, which I loathed but which has similar artistic goals to this film, I thought the tone was perfect, and the satire was spot-on. In short, it really made me think. I'm glad, because the guy who reviewed it for my site couldn't stand it, and I happen to have already read his review, months ago. I watched the film anyway and was certainly glad I did.

But because I was still thinking about it afterwards -- still am, actually -- it means that I'm still processing exactly how much I like it. And knowing the exact line of demarcation between the films it beats, and those it doesn't, isn't really possible at this stage. Is it one of the top 700 movies I've ever seen, or one of the top 500? Or even higher? The By Title filer will assign it an exact spot in the rankings, the result of precise code and algorithms, and I think it may be too soon for that. When (Untitled) beat a certain film and landed at #372, it told me two things: 1) The previous #372 may have been ranked too high, but also, 2) the tool may not be working exactly as I hoped it would -- for me -- because this was not a level of praise I was prepared to bestow on this movie. Not yet, anyway.

Like I said, this has nothing to do with whether this is a good feature or not. It's a great feature, because like most of the features on Flickchart, you can use it as you see fit. The way the feature works, you can actually exit the dueling process before it gets to its exact correct spot, if that's what you want. The By Title filter has a helpful progress bar at the top that shows you how close the film is to arriving in its exact correct spot. The closer you get to the end, the more accurately it will be ranked, according to the judgments you are able to make about it at that particular time. However, if you start to get into the position of making judgments you're uncomfortable making, all you have to do is click out of the dueling process and to another spot on the site. Then just reconsider it only when it comes up randomly in duels later on.

This may just be how I use the By Title feature going forward. I may not want to make these snap judgments about the art I consume. I felt a similar hesitation about ranking My Bloody Valentine 3D, which I've already gone on record hating. But as it dropped downward into my bottom 50 films, I was wondering if it was too soon to be so critical of something I'd only just seen for the first time. Did I really hate it more than movies that I've known I've hated for years? Is hate instantaneous, or does it increase in intensity over time?

Then again, I could just be copping out. If you think about it logically, all this really means is that you're having an escalated number of the duels this film would eventually have, scheduled for right now rather than randomly over time. I might have to make a judgment like this on the film's first random duel, and still not know how I would choose. However, the difference is, in random duels, you are not working one particular film in a systematic way. You aren't required to keep dueling the same film against stiffer and stiffer competition, and deciding the exact point at which that competition becomes too stiff.

Well, as usual, I'm just glad Flickchart provides me the tools to make these decisions for myself. Flickchart makes the tools available, and I decide how exactly I will use them for the purposes of my own agenda.

Working for the other guy's cause

The three movies I brought home from the library for our Halloween weekend viewing "pleasure" were My Bloody Valentine 3D (2009, Patrick Lussier), The Haunting in Connecticut (2009, Peter Cornwell) and Waxwork (1988, Anthony Hickox). I put the word pleasure in quotation marks because none of them looked to be very good choices, and I knew it at the time. However, they rose to the top among an initial group of contenders that also featured the remake of The Stepfather, the remake of Last House on the Left, and the remake of Prom Night. Hey, the pickin's were slim.

My wife sort of laughed at the choices and appeared to have rejected them outright, especially since we now have access to a virtually unlimited supply of horror movies by streaming Netflix through our BluRay player. But when it came time to watch something on Devil's Night last night, it became clear that almost all the movies my wife had singled out ended up being Korean. I wouldn't have ordinarily minded because I've had very good experience with Korean films lately (see here), but we both kind of decided that we weren't in a subtitles mood last night. The only other horror films scattered around in our instant viewing queue were films that seemed as dismal as those I'd brought home from the library, like P2 (killer in a parking garage!) and Below (ghosts in a submarine!). Though just looking up Below now, I see that Darren Aronofsky co-scripted it, so we may have to prioritize that one.

"I'd watch The Haunting in Connecticut," my wife offered. This didn't entirely surprise me, since she watches the show Paranormal State, which involves a team of ghost hunters staking out supposedly haunted homes to try to find evidence of supernatural activity. The Haunting in Connecticut dovetailed with that pretty well ... even if the critic on my site had given it only one star.

So we threw in the disc but failed to skip directly ahead to the menu, exposing ourselves to the trailers instead. One of the first was a trailer for My Bloody Valentine 3D. And it actually looked pretty good. A slasher film to be sure, but with a potentially creepy, original villain -- a miner in a gas mask. (Not original, actually -- as we soon were reminded, this was also a remake.)

So I asked her if she'd rather watch that. "Maybe," she said, in a guilty way that suggests a kid who got caught with her hand in the cookie jar. So out came Connecticut and in went Valentine.

Wouldn't you know it, but My Bloody Valentine returned the favor by showing a trailer for The Haunting in Connecticut. Which we also saw by again uncharacteristically forgetting to jump forward directly to the DVD menu. And wouldn't you know it, The Haunting in Connecticut also looked pretty good. Not to mention that we then saw a trailer for a new remastering of the original My Bloody Valentine, and the scenes we saw from that made the remake we were about to watch seem less promising.

So was a switch back in order?

If you can read my Most Recently Watched section on the right, you'll know the answer was "no." We thought all the flip-flopping was a little ridiculous and decided to stick with our original flop. Leaving The Haunting in Connecticut as a possibility for actual Halloween night if we again feel subtitle-challenged.

I do think it was funny that both of the films had an advertisement for the other film on it. I mean, clearly it was just a coincidence -- there would be no way to expect a person to rent these two films in tandem, and to know that they would each inadvertently be trying to make the case for the other movie. But in this one particular circumstance it turned out quite funny indeed.

Now, I would have been really surprised if we'd thrown in Waxwork and seen a trailer for either or both of these other films.

Not having seen The Haunting in Connecticut yet, I have no idea if we chose incorrectly between the two. But let's just say that you could stack almost any movie up against My Bloody Valentine 3D, and the other film would always be the correct choice. My Bloody Valentine was tedious and uninspired, but to such a degree that we both said it was among the several dozen worst films we'd ever seen. We agreed it wasn't scary for a single moment, but it also wasn't the least bit clever. The film follows the tried-and-boring formula where a killer seems to reappear exactly ten years after his first series of killings, after which he was presumed dead. Is it the killer returned, or is it a copycat? No one knows, of course, because he's always wearing a miner's helmet, gas mask and heavy work outfit, which don't prevent him from being anywhere and everywhere at once, like Jason Voorhees before him. The reason it's not scary is that the killer always steps out into view long before he attacks anyone, and each kill is different from the one before only in terms of how the killer's pickaxe enters the victim's body.

Structurally, the film also gets off to a really weird start that completely threw my wife and me. It opens with a rather clever device, actually, in which a series of overlapping newspaper articles whose graphical elements are moving forward in the frame -- remember, 3D -- lays out the whole back story of a man who survives a mine collapse and then goes crazy, killing people. There's nothing at the time that indicates this is ten years before present day, so when the characters are introduced and the plot swings in to gear, it seems like it's just the regular movie starting. Which makes it all the more strange when, at the 14-minute mark, teenagers are being knocked off in a mineshaft like they would be in the middle of a movie that had been set up a lot better. It turns out that this is preparing us for the "TEN YEARS LATER" title card, but because such an unskillful job was done of setting this up as a flashback, it left us laughing and scratching our heads at the structural oddity for several minutes before we were finally oriented correctly. (Oh, and never mind that there's an opening scene where the killer leaves a path of carnage in a hospital that's just ridiculous -- how could anyone dismember so many people (removing their hearts in some cases) without someone intervening?)

My Bloody Valentine 3D would also have been a great film to discuss in my Friday post about the word "3D" being part of movie titles. This was precisely the type of future living room viewing of the movie I was talking about, in which the word "3D" makes no sense in the title. Actually, you could flip the DVD to the appropriate side and watch it in 3D, but naturally, we didn't have the correct equipment. Still, you could easily see the parts that were supposed to be 3D -- I suppose that's always the case -- and it quickly became clear to us that the only excuse for a movie like this is to see which clumps of gore they can flip at the camera, when. I guess the mission statement behind The Final Destination in 3D and Saw 3D wouldn't be much different.

Well, Happy Halloween, everyone. If you're watching something tonight, here's hoping you do better than My Bloody Valentine 3D.

Maybe we should have saved it for a themed viewing on Valentine's Day, rather than Halloween, for how scary it actually was.

The library steps up its game

I've sung the praises of renting from the library before. Not only is it free, but it exposes you to movies you might not otherwise choose. It refines your selection from the thousands in the video store and the tens of thousands online, down to just a couple hundred. You never know what you might come away with.

But in the old days, getting videos from the library felt a little like going to school. You expected to have to pick up a classic, when all you wanted was a popcorn movie. If you got a movie from the last five years, you'd feel like you hit the jackpot.

Well, this is not your father's library.

I can't speak for your library, wherever you may be, but in Los Angeles, it really is a decent substitute for the video store.

I've been accustomed to getting relatively new releases at the library for some time now, but it wasn't until this week that the Los Angeles Public Library really knocked my socks off. I didn't choose to rent it, but had I, I could have walked away with My Bloody Valentine (or My Bloody Valentine 3D, as it is sometimes listed) -- a movie released in theaters on January 16th, just five months ago. It became available for sale and rental less than a month ago, on May 19th.

What I did walk away with -- as the accompanying artwork probably suggests -- was Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist, almost as impressive for having been released in theaters on October 3rd, DVD on February 3rd. That was just one of three movies, of course, the others being Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (4/25/08 theatrical release), and the "old man" of the group, Shutter, which came out way back in March of 2008, and which I'm reviewing.

(To insert an otherwise irrelevant comment about Nick & Norah, which I watched last night: Meh.)

I used to think library movie collections were comprised of the donations of kindly old ladies, and therefore would consist primarily of gentle, inoffensive selections, like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Mary Poppins. But the LAPL doesn't discriminate, at least not in any way I can see. Not only did I see the supposedly gruesome My Bloody Valentine available for rental (loaning/borrowing), but in the past I even noticed that execrable exercise in misogyny and torture porn known as Captivity.

So where do these movies come from?

Well, chalk another one up for the library. I went on the website to see if I could find an answer, but quickly decided that this information wouldn't be all that likely to be publicized. But I realized I had the option to "chat with a librarian," and promptly did so. The librarian on-call wasn't an actual Los Angeles librarian -- she's part of some national organization -- but she said that the library usually buys new releases, and fills in the gaps with donations.

Consider me even more amazed. So the library is actually paying to help rot our brains with movies, rather than encouraging us to nourish them with books? I'm being facetious, of course, because movies don't rot our brains nearly as much as TV. But you'd still think they wouldn't put actual budgetary resources into making themselves the best video store alternative they can be. I mean, even with potential discounted prices, someone still had to decide to spend $10 on a copy of My Bloody Valentine.

Well, library, you've done it. You've convinced me of your relevance. And you've made me a very happy customer.

Now, if you can just get me to read, I will be even more impressed.