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.

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* 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.

If Microsoft Outlook (the second-newest version) is so advanced, why doesn't it have a simple image viewer built-in for attached photos? It understands images, since it renders them in the messages, but it farms out attachments to whatever the system uses for viewing images.

On other file types (PDFs, ZIP archives, Office files, etc) this makes sense*, but not on images. When I'm reading a message with seven photos attached, I want to be able to toggle back and forth between them without going back to the message window. My image viewer of choice (IrfanView) can only open one at a time, since they are dowloaded to the temporary directory when you load the image, not the message.

I cannot say exactly how much time and productivity I've lost over the years of using Outlook, but I'm certain it can be measured in minutes... sheer tens of minutes.

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* Even then, I must but wonder why a program that can embed Microsoft Word as an editor (and probably a viewer) isn't smart enough to take a message that contains no text, only a .DOC attachment (or worse yet, PowerPoint) and save me a click or two by just displaying the attachment.

I mean, if you're gonna make an email program dumb enough to trust every file it gets, why not make it smart enough to make things easier?

The Wedding Crashers (2005)

It doesn't live up
to the frenetic montage
in the first one-third*.

Christoper Walken
plays himself; it's not enough
to carry the film.

The Longest Yard (2005)

Copied from the old
its basic plot and editing**,
but not all the fun.

Rob Schneider stands out
near the end of the film, bringing
it to a halt--twice.

How to murder your wife (1965)

Backward, out of date,
it's even embarrassing
how wrong it all is***.

The Punisher (2004)

Travolta's a ham;
too bad there are no sequels,
he'd not be in them****

Who played the main guy?
I've already forgotten-
left no impression.

Family Guy presents Stewie Griffin - The Untold Story (2005)

The show is funny.
This movie isn't*****. In fact,
it's painful to watch.

There's a case to be made that these aren't haiku, but closer perhaps to senryū in that they don't mention the seasons. I'd heard such talk before, but ontly now looked it up. Maybe I'll rename my haiku category to senryu, or maybe just 5-7-5. Then again, until I learn Kanji and the rest of written Japanese, it won't really be either in its completely traditional form anyway.

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* This is a fairly common thing in blockbuster films. Characters are introduced, they do the wacky hijinks they do, until something happens about one third of the way through (Act 2 starts, that's what happens) and then it's a whole new ballgame. Would a movie only about their exploits be better? Maybe. Maybe I just felt like complaining. Chasers is ripe for complaints. Take Chris Walken, for example. Just having him playing the oddly menacing fellow he always plays isn't enough. He needs to be given with which to work. By now, I wouldn't be surprised if his character is desribed to him simply as, "You, you know, you. Be yourself" and it just doesn't work this time. Any other actor in the part (except perhaps John Travolta) would show the part to be so poorly-written. His motivations are unclear, his rages almost random. He's not the only one-dimensional character in the film, just the oddest one.

** The original Yard wasn't just about bucking authority in society (well, prison) but also conventions in film, with some rather innovative editing and framing done in the last football game. The new version apes that style well, and even extends it to a game of 1-on-1 basketball quite faithfully. Little touches like that were nice, but too many big problems overshadow them, like broad character generalizations (stupid big football player can't even speak something sounding like correct grammar), easy jokes taken to stupid extremes (big dumb guy takes estrogen, becomes big dumb effeminate guy overnight), and the few, but still sore-thumb-esque, Sandlerisms, most notably Rob Schneider's appearance in the bleachers. We know he's your pal, Adam, give him a break (and us too) next time.

*** Murder flops on so many levels. Jack Lemmon's not convincing as a cartoonist (though his swinging bachelor bit is believable enough), but that's just the smallest of the faults found here. Every mean stereotype, every broad generalization ever used in the so-called battle of the sexes rears its ugly head, even the annoyingly yappy dog. It's embarrassing, even, to think that anybody could've taken any of this seriously to even want to write it. If this is what Hollywood thought normal people were like (well, the richer portion of them) back then, then the disconnect was as big then as it is now. Only the budgets have changed. This movie belongs with Houseboat in a genre all their own: poorly made artifacts of a past that never happened, resplendent with annoying foreign actresses and otherwise bankable leading men. Crap, utter crap.

**** I hope I didn't spoil the surprise for anybody. To elaborate: our eponymous protagonist (played by some unknown forgettable guy) hunts down John Travolta, and in the end, probably kills him. I say probably because he makes the commonest of mistakes: not watching his victim die. Admittedly this is the same lazy loophole that propels the movie, in that at the beginning Travolta's thugs set him up in a certain death situation and leave him to die. Don't these people know that only people you watch die are dead, and even then, only most of the time? I realize the makers wanted to leave room for Travolta's surprise return in a sequel, deep into the franchise, but everything about this movie is like that: overdone. For once I'd like to watch a superhero movie that didn't waste time with the setup and origin story, and end with the defiant declaration on a bridge or near a cityscape. Just drop us into the middle of the action and let us figure out where the superhero came from, if we even care. Punisher strikes me as somebody whose actions I'd want to watch, not his motivations. Oh well.

***** It's annoying how far removed this Family Guy movie is from the show. The first ten or so minutes of the DVD are painful; somebody's idea of a great intro by way of a self-referential newscast and red carpet scene with the cartoon 'actors' acting out of character (or rather, even more in) and the wacky hijinks that ensue. The 'uncensored' aspect of the film is almost nonexistent, or a stunt at best, as the profanity will be easily bleepable for broadcast, and things such as the giant walking, talking scrotum (don't ask) will probably show up on TV eventually anyway. Did I mention there's a gag about a walking, talking scrotum? That's actually not the low point of the movie (though it may be for Michael Chiklis, again, don't ask). Don't watch this expecting it to be as funny as the show. Watch the show instead, at least until the three 'acts' are reconstituted into ordinary episodes, and sub-ordinary ones at that.

Just because I don't, as a habit, watch regularly-scheduled television shows doesn't mean I never see any; I just don't see them when everyone else does. When the library purchases the DVD sets, well, that's generally when I get to see the shows, new and old. Sometimes I wonder about their choices, though. It took them over a year before somebody (unless it was my requests, late) managed to persuade them to buy Firefly, for example, and that's a show with a fairly decent fanbase. Something like the only-available-on-BBC Manchild seems like it would have an even narrower appeal, but I can't really judge their choices.

I can, however, judge the show. It wasn't all that great. Knowing, as I did, nothing more than what was written on the front DVD cover (I hardly glanced at the back cover), I watched what I expected to be "Sex and the city, but in London, with fifty-year-old men." This didn't sound very appealing, but I know that front cover pullquotes are meaningless at best and more often misleading, so I bascially approached it with no preconceptions.

Well, it wasn't really my cup of tea. While I enjoy seeing an ostensibly all-knowing, well-put-together narrator's life not quite going the way he seems to think it is, I'm not really all that interested in the doings of four upper-crust forty-and-fifty-something men. The appeal isn't universal enough for humor centered around 'male enhancement', the proper selection of paintings as investment, motorcycle brands favorable with today's youth, and the merits of pipe-smoking. More serious bits such as one fellow's mother in a vegetative state seem tacked on to introduce a bit of gravity, and it's not unbelievable just unnecessary. Then again, so's the whole show. For me. There are a lot of boats out there, and it may well float yours.

I find myself preferring the episodes of another BBC series, Jeeves and Wooster, but saying that is like picking between the burnt brownies or the cake with much too much frosting. Both are things that are supposed to be good, but something along the way things have gone wrong. This isn't to say that Jeeves and Wooster is bad, per se, but to say that it's not as great as I'd like it to be.

Again, different boats for different folks, perhaps. For the uninitiated, Jeeves and Wooster is a decade-and-a-half old BBC series adapted from P.D. Wodehouse's turn of the century stories about the British upper class, particularly one Bertram Wooster (played by Hugh Laurie) and his valet Jeeves (Stephen Fry). Jeeves is pretty much everything you expect him to be, from hearing the name: polite, reserved, intelligent and, well, Jeeves-ish. I recall watching Mr. Belvedere as a child and then working at Arthur Treacher's Fish and Chips as a teenager, so I can recognize the sort of character Jeeves should be, even though I've never read any Wodehouse.

I'm working on watching the third season right now, and it's something of an improvement over the second. Many of the episodes of the first and second seasons center around the making and breaking of marriage engagements, not normally the subject of shows I watch. Romantic entanglements, tussles with the law (well, minor chicanery like stealing bobbies' helmets) and newts all appear, but what keeps the show going is the good chemistry between the leads. Nevermind Bertie's ridiculous friends (among them we find Stiffy, Gussie, Rocky and Tuppy) or his overbearing Aunt and her near-unreasonable demands; the show is about getting them (and Bertie) out of silly jams with solutions serious and otherwise.

The third season picks up briefly with a change of venue to swinging New York during Prohibition, but sadly that is cut short midway through and its back to soap opera territory. I'll still seek out subsequent seasons, but I'm in no rush.

Frankly, I'd rather see House on DVD*, though it might be a bit jarring to see Hugh Laurie older, speaking with an American accent.

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* Sadly, the library hasn't procured a copy of any seasons of House yet. Guess I'll need to put in a request for them to ignore.

This entry was posted from my treadmill*.

It was only a matter of time before I'd do something like this. I've played PS2 games on the treadmill, I've read books and watched movies, and now, I've been online... at three miles per hour. The board isn't quite the right size, and I couldn't find matching clamps, but for a first attempt it was entirely adequate.

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* Of course the photo was not. While I considered setting up the tripod and a timer shot, the fact that I was walking in boxers ruled out any photo featuring me. And I'd probably block some of the view of my fantastic workmanship.

It has occurred to me that I haven't mentioned any vanity license plates lately. Today while we were out driving, I happened to see quite possibly the ultimate one again, VAN T PL8 in amongst the ones named for the cars (CMBENZ), their drivers (LEX N ROB) or their hobbies (XBOX360... I kid you not). Every time I see VAN T PL8 I think about writing about it, but only now am I remembering to do so. Sorry about that.

I can't remember everything, after all.

There comes a time in every American's life* when he or she stops watching Saturday Night Live. I can't remember when it happened for me, but I know that it has happened, and that the new cast is over half unfamiliar to me. The humor hasn't improved all that much since I stopped, but as always there's the random funny bit scattered between too-long-and-unfunny skits (any sketch that starts out introducing a home video is a bad one, and now there too lazy even to add the fake camcorder viewfinder stuff to the frame. Tsk,tsk) that makes finding the pearls a question of patience.

Then again, my plan otherwise was to watch half an hour of some bad movie tonight, so, for the sake of research, let's call it, I watched SNL. But I can't really say anymore that I watch it, know what I mean? Because I don't and even though I did for a bit tonight, I won't.

Now, if I could somehow acquire a DVD filled with all of the Smigel cartoons over the years (and yes, I mean every single one) that would be a wonderful thing. The show itself lends itself more to the random rerun or best-of compilation episode, but it wouldn't work well as a full-season DVD set (my TV delivery method of choice). I've enough other DVDs to watch already, anyway.

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* Well, almost every American. I may be overgeneralizing. I finished Walter Kirn's excellent Mission to America and its protagonist is a boy who grew up in a secluded Montana town surrounded by religious doctrine but no televisions. I can only assume that, given the fully realized characters and their believeable foibles, that the story was a thinly-veiled autobiography. Bravo, Walter, for telling the true tale of what you did before becoming a jet-setter seeking that million miles. If you don't know what I mean, read his Up in the air. You should probably read it anyway, because it's a good book.