Comments on: The Blockbuster Bell Curve, Revisited: Changes in the IMDB Top 250 List, 2008-2009

By: The Blockbuster Bell Curve, Revisited: Changes in the IMDB Top 250 … QV China

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 10:30:22 +0000

[...] original post here: The Blockbuster Bell Curve, Revisited: Changes in the IMDB Top 250 … By admin | category: imdb | tags: 2008-the-best, being-able, best-year, coming, down-over, [...]

By: jipijipi

jipijipi — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 18:22:03 +0000

not that I care but you switched infernal affair and holw’s moving castle in your last table.

By: Heather

Heather — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 19:22:03 +0000

Somewhat on topic, I liked Bloomberg’s Top-Grossing Films of All-Time list that came out back in July, Gone With The Wind is number one after adjustments for inflation: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=aLzh3gmCoWdo

By: Ryan

Ryan — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 19:06:28 +0000

Will anyone remember Zombieland in 5 years? No. Will anyone remember 500 Days of Summer? Or even Star Trek, of which I’m a huge fan?

No.

All of these “best movies of all times” list should institute some kind of waiting period. Maybe a movie has to be out for at least 5 years before it can go on the list, to prevent the newest and coolest from stealing the spots of more deserving fare.

Unless the point of the IMDB list is to service fanboys. “What’s a really good movie, according to broad pop culture, current generation thinking? Oh, Shaun of the Dead is good, huh? I’ll go see that.” If that’s the point of the list – what’s a good movie, subjectively, right now – then everything is fine.

By: Phoebe

Phoebe — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 13:00:34 +0000

Fascinating analysis, thank you! I come across a surprisingly large number of people who have no patience for older movies (which would include movies from the median year of 1977). I suppose IMDb’s top 250 is a reflection of what movie viewers of all kinds are enjoying the most, rather than a careful analysis of the best movies of all time.

By: lee

lee — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 02:21:35 +0000

@Stokes: Yup, I plan on making it an annual ritual.

Another fun thing to do with the statistics is analyze changes in rankings.

Top 2 losers (without falling off the list):
“Battle of Algiers” (1966), -56
“Crash” (2004), -49

Top 2 gainers:
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), +42
In Bruges (2008), + 40

Also, “Terminator 2″ advanced 16 spots in the rankings. :-)

By: stokes

stokes — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 01:37:54 +0000

Mark, I hope you keep tracking these figures for as long as OTI is running. It’s fascinating stuff.

Hey, you know what else is interesting? Of the movies that fell off the list, nine were foreign-language (although I admit I’m stretching the definition a bit with the silent movies). Of the movies that were added, one, maybe two were foreign-language (depending upon where you place Slumdog Millionaire).

By: mlawski

mlawski — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 01:09:18 +0000

@Stokes, re: stipod: At first I thought Apple had come out with a new trendy product I hadn’t yet heard of.

@Everyone else: It’s funny to me that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is now on the top 250. That movie came up on my Netflix account today and had a ranking of something like 3.5 out of 5–decent, but definitely not “the top films of all time” material. (Also, I thought that movie was stupid and boring and trite, and my opinion is gospel so nyah! But, seriously, any universe in which that movie is considered better than Young Frankenstein or La Dolce Vita is a universe I don’t want to live in.)

By: stokes

stokes — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:21:21 +0000

Ha! I wrote “really stipod.” Who’s stipod now, internet?

By: stokes

stokes — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:20:48 +0000

Actually the Nosferatu and Twilight have more in common than you might think. One of the big emotional beats in Twilight is the idea that the Edward/Bella relationship is a fatally stupid for both of them. If you think about this too carefully, it’s really stipod. Obviously Bella could get killed, but what’s the worst that’s going to happen to Edward? He falls off the no-human-blood wagon for a day? (Or even a year, or a couple hundred years?) Cry me a river. I guess he’d feel bad about destroying his soul mate, but all he has to do to avoid that is make her a vampire too, which we all know is going to happen anyway, so who gives a monkey’s?

But this is a case where the average Twilight fan is a little smarter than people might think. Sure there’s no reason to think that Bella poses a threat to Edward based on Twilight alone. But there’s a STRONG tendency in vampire stories for the monster to be destroyed by the love/sacrifice of a pure woman. And even though you can see this narrative at work in the Gary Oldman ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula,’ it’s actually something that appears for the first time in Nosferatu, as far as I know. And the two versions of Nosferatu are still the only ones where the vampire actually seems to be somewhat afraid of the woman even as he’s drawn to her… other than Twilight. So yeah. Point to Stephanie Meyers.

The upshot is that a Nosferatu-Twilight mashup would actually be hella easy, because Nosferatu is all about doing shot/reverse-shot sequences between the vampire and his love interest. All you’d need to do is replace the footage of Max Schreck looking like a rodent with footage of Robert Pattinson looking like a nubile god.