fine whine

So an idea struck me for an interesting programming project and a fun diversion: a single-elimination bracket for ranking the movies I’ve watched, 64 random ones at a time.

You see, it’s March, and with that month comes the annual basketball tournament, and while I enjoy making the brackets I don’t know about or care about the teams involved. So movies it is.

The logistics of entering and displaying the data made for an interesting challenge, and it’s taken me a week to clean up my code. It worked fine for me the second day, but the code was horrible and disorganized and very, very bad.

I’ve rewritten it twice already, and with the magic of regular expressions* I’ve condensed some eighty or ninety cut-and-pasted lines down to around ten, and now I can make brackets of more arbitrary sizes (well, powers of two, unless I introduce some sort of ‘bye’ functionality) filled with whatever I want to tourney-ize.

So enough talk. Take a look at this example of the final output.

Yes, it’s huge. Yes, it’s difficult to read. I’m still working on making it legible at smaller sizes, but that’s another project for another day.

Let me walk you trhough some of the more interesting match ups of that particular bracket. You may notice that The Shawshank redemption beat The Godfather, and here you can see my opinions in action. I know Godfather is probably the better movie, but I also know that any time I’d see any bit of Shawshank, from any point in the movie, on TV I’d watch the rest of it all the way through. I’ve ranked the winners by how much I enjoyed watching them, not necessarily how good they really are.

Moving back to round 1 (the one with 64 titles), we have some interesting bouts:

• Local hero vs. Terminator 2: This isn’t the first choice that would probably get me drummed out of the armchair film school. While the former is a fantastic movie, T2 is even more fun to watch, if not one-tenth as intelligent.
• The living daylights vs. Mr. Deeds: This was not a choice to be made lightly: I didn’t really enjoy either film all that much, and neither will be held up on a pedestal anytime soon. In the end Deeds got the nod because the copy I watched had Malaysian subtitles that were as informative as they were entertaining.
• The conversation vs. The last action hero: Actually this isn’t that interesting. It’s a blowout.
• Soylent green vs. Cube: I thought about this one longer than many others. I enjoyed both films, but in the end I liked Cube that little bit more. It’s not nearly as dated as Soylent green, and nowhere near as parodied.

Later notable matchups include these:

• The Blues brothers vs. The conversation: Both of these films are the sort that should appear in the final four; I was sad to eliminate either of them so early on. Other times I’ve run brackets each one has ‘won’ at least once, but the advantage goes to the SNL movie since it’s so much fun in every way that Coppola’s film is serious. They both so darn great, though.
• M*A*S*H vs. The tall blonde man with one red shoe: I doubt these shared any marquees in 1972, unless Altman’s film got stuck in the art houses. The latter is a small French picture made into a rollicking remake with pre-Forrest Tom Hanks, and it’s a good movie too, but like most foreign movies remade here, it loses just a little in the translation. M*A*S*H, on the other hand, is too loose, too unstructured, too disorganized to grab onto without watching it five or fifteen times. I may like it more someday, but I’ve only watched it once so far and I’m in no hurry to see it again.

I’ve found this method for picking the movies I liked far better than picking favorites. I could never pick the one (or five, even) movie I enjoyed the most to yoke myself to it as a favorite. Grabbing sixty-four at once means I can subjectively pick the ones I liked most, on something of an equal playing field.

Of course, something like pitting Scary movie 3 against The Empire strikes back isn’t exactly a meeting of equals, but I’m pretty sure that’s how these things work out with the athletes, too.

* Regular expressions are cryptic strings of letters, numbers and other characters that make matching patterns inside text much, much easier. I wish I’d learned them in grade school, or at least high school. Read more about them here; at least, that’s what I do every time I need to use them.