What is it about this guy that makes him look so goofy?

Love him or hate him, it’s safe to say that Nic Cage is a decidedly uneven actor, or at least that the movies he’s in are all over the map. The same filmography that has critically acclaimed character pieces like Adaptation and Leaving Las Vegas also has disposable mindless fare like Ghost Rider and National Treasure II: Book of Gratuitous Sequels.

Critics have been debating the relative merits of Cage for years, but the recent discovery of the “Nic Cage as Everyone” blog, which gleefully toes the line between tribute and mockery, has stirred the fires of Cage-troversy once again.

Words cannot describe how strange this is.

So are Nic Cage movies crap, or what? When we say his movies are all over the place, just how all over the place are they?

Thankfully, we have our friends IMDB, Excel, and Standard Deviation* to answer that question for us. That’s right, it’s time to analyze the Quanta of Cage.

First, our methodology: let’s take the movies of Nicolas Cage (everything that he’s starred in, excluding animated movies and anything released in 2009), analyze those movies’ IMDB ratings, and compare them to other leading men from his era.

It’s not perfect, but it’s what we’ve got. So let’s crunch some numbers, shall we?

*Standard disclaimer applies: I Am Not A Statistician (IANAS). If I made any mistakes, feel free to give me the “Well, actually” in the comments.

A little over a year ago, I did some data mining on the IMDB Top 250 and AFI Top 100 lists of movies in an attempt to highlight changes in movie quality over time. The resulting analysis spoke more to the flawed nature of these lists, and lists in general, and less to any actual trends in movie-making over the years.

With that in mind, I thought it’d be interesting to revisit the IMDB Top 250 list to see how it had changed over the past year. Was it even more weighted towards recent movies? Is “Pirates of the Carribean” still in the Top 250? Who else made the cut? Find out, after the jump.

Official Poster for Michael Bay Hate-fest 2009, aka ZOMG OPTIMUS PRIME

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen has arrived in theaters, and to no one’s surprise, Michael Bay has stayed true to form and given us a loud, action-packed summer blockbuster. Also to no one’s surprise, critics have savaged his latest work: the Rotten Tomatoes aggregated review score comes in at a meager 20%. And again, to no one’s surprise, the idiot savants of the blogosphere have, as if by reflex, piled on the Bay hate and lampooned his heavy handed filmmaking techniques and lack of sophistication.

The Overthinkers are by and large of the same opinion: we see Michael Bay movies as the epitome of style over substance, cleavage over character development, and explosions over elegance. He does make a convenient whipping boy for the shortcomings of mainstream commercial cinema these days, and as such he’s been the butt of jokes on several occasions on this site.

That being said, I’d like to use this occation, the release of Bay’s latest fil…er, movie, to take a step back and examine his body of work more objectively. How bad is Michael Bay, really? And how does he compare to some of the greatest directors of our time?

As you’re probably aware, almost any effort to objectively analyze the inherently subjective nature of movie quality involves turning to the vast database of user ratings on IMDb. It’s an imperfect methodology, I know, but it’s better than nothing. This is not the time to argue the merits and meanings of the IMDb user ratings (if you’re interested in such things, you should probably check out this earlier piece of analysis on the topic). This is time to take the data we do have, fire up the Excel, and get to work.

[Note: all IMDb ratings used in this article are current as of June 29, 2009]

Who you gonna call?

The Ghostbusters had a problem. They needed substantial start up funds to cover the cost of containment units, proton packs, the receptionist Janine’s salary, and other business expenses.

Who you gonna call?

Your local easy-lending mortgage bank!

VENKMAN
You’ll never gonna regret this, Ray.

STANTZ
(perturbed)
My parents left me that house, I was born there.

VENKMAN
You’re not going to lose the house.
Everybody has three mortgages these days.

STANTZ
But at nineteen percent–you didn’t
even bargain with the guy.

SPENGLER
(calculating)
Ray, for your information, the interest
rate alone for the first five years comes
to $95,000.

The Ghostbusters, it would seem, were not particularly financially savvy. In fact, it’s a miracle they didn’t run out of cash shortly after starting up.

“More people will come if they think we’ll have punch and pie!”

Many have colloquially known that punch and pie is an effective marketing/publicity tool to incentivize attendance at events, but its precise quantitative effect on attendance has largely been left to conjecture…until now, that is.

Here, we shall use the case study opportunity presented in South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut as a basis for extrapolating a general statistical model to demonstrate the effect of offering punch and pie as an attendance incentive.

There seems to be a consensus that the Oscars are becoming less and less populist. Back in the day, movies like Star Wars, Tootsie, Ghost, and E.T. were all nominated for Best Picture. This year, a lot of people haven’t seen a single one of the nominees. The Oscars have gone all snooty on us. But here’s my question: can “snooty” be quantified? Can we graph the Academy’s turn towards art house?

(NOTE: This post would not be possible without the badassery of sheely, whose day job involves all sorts of numerical kung fu.)

Slumdog Millionaire seems to be heading for a big Oscar night, so we thought we’d take a closer look at the prize at stake in the movie.

Without giving away too much, I can say that the protagonist is a contestant on the Indian version of the game show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” where the grand prize is a whopping 20 million rupees. That’s a lot of cash, right?

Right?

Well, let’s take a look, chai-wallah.

(Warning: Slumdog Millionaire “spoiler” to follow, as if the outcome of this movie were ever in doubt.)

Overthinking It salutes this year’s Super Bowl champions with some totally unnecessary Excel.

As the series of graphs below demonstrate, the Pittsburgh Steelers perform better when the US produces more steel, but the Denver Nuggets perform worse with increased gold production, as do the Tennessee Titans (formerly the Houston Oilers) with increased oil production.*

Click on any of the graphs for larger versions.

*Yes, I know that extremely weak (i.e., virtually non-existent) correlation does not equal causation.

Go Steelers, and go steel producers.

As a follow up to the wildly popular “Hubbert Peak Theory of Rock” article on the decline of rock music (and U.S. oil production), I decided to take the logical next step in pop culture quantitative analysis: Greatest Movies Lists. Only this time, no spurious correlations–just straight up number crunching based on these lists.

UPDATE: I can haz arithmetix? There were some errors in the math in the original draft of this post. Details below.

Did movie quality peak in the ‘60s and ‘70s? Has it all been downhill since The Godfather in 1972? Some statistics you can’t refuse, after the jump.

Many rock purists and music snobs (myself included) often lament the quality of most modern pop/rock music.  “Music these days is so trite and derivative,” they say.  “It’s just been downhill since the 60’s and 70’s.  Those were the days.”

A few years ago, Rolling Stone magazine added fuel to the music snobbery fire with its “500 Greatest Songs of All Time” list.  Anyone casually paging through the list would notice that the bulk of the list was comprised of songs from the 60’s and 70’s, just like the music snobs always say.

I, however, wasn’t content with the casual analysis.  So I punched the list into Excel, crunched some numbers, and found an interesting parallel between the decline of rock music quality and, of all things, the decline in US oil discovery and production:

(Sources: Rolling Stone Magazine, US Department of Energy)

Analysis after the jump.  Drill Baby Drill!