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.

THIS IS THE ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION TO THIS POST, WHICH WENT ON A STRANGE JOURNEY . . . A JOURNEY INTO THE WEST . . . A QUEST FOR A WISH . . . and how that wish went unfulfilled. Why did this introduction not result in a successful post on first attempt? Read on . . .

Dozens of you have asked me whether I’ve seen this movie and what I have to say about it. Well, I just watched it on DVD, and it made me a little sick to my stomach. So, read this article. You owe me.

To say my expectations were low going into Dragonball: Abomination (sorry, Dragonball: Evolution) would be an understatement. Even using that cliché to describe it understates the degree of understatement. This is a movie that deeply disappointed me even before it was even released – originally, it was to be a big-budget, live-action Dragonball movie starring Chow Yun Fat and produced by Stephen Chow that was released on my birthday.

It became clear early on that all was not right with this production. The leaked production stills were way off the mark in any sort of reasonable stylistic approach to the material, people were complaining that Goku was a white high school student, as opposed to the child Monkey King of ancient China. It began to come out that it was being directed by the Final Destination Guy, that the studio executives were doing their usual thing and forcing awful failures of artistic decisions on the production out of their own vanity and pigheadedness, and that producer and legend in his own time Stephen Chow had been effectively cut out of the loop. The release was delayed almost a year, presumably for Pluto-Nash-related reasons.

When it came out, the marketing was disastrous. It lost its “built-in audience” almost immediately, and it never found another one. There’s almost universal belief that this movie is awful, but even hardcore Dragonball fans have pretty much refused to see it.

Until now.

What I expected was an irredeemable accident starring the guy from War of the Worlds made by a bunch of people who stole the costumes and props from the people making the Dragonball movie and decided to shoot a random-ass CGI movie about bullshit.

What I got, well, it was certainly a failure. A huge failure. It deserved to bomb with every megaton in its payload. But it wasn’t an accident. It was something quite a bit worse. It screwed everything up on purpose.

Now, the fanboy in me could bitch and moan about it all day — there’s plenty for any fanboy to bitch and moan about. But let’s put that aside for a moment, and ask the real questions — find the real reason why this movie is the way it is, and why it failed in what it attempted to do.

This will be readable for non-Dragon Ball fans and probably include some good lessons. Because with a failure this big, there are plenty of lessons.

Power up, it’s time to Read More . . .

Phew!  We made it.  Here we are at the end of Lost’s third season, and, man, was it awesome.  Awesome awesome awesome.  You guys were right; sitting through those mediocre episodes was worth it.  Thanks for helping me stay the course.

Season-wise, we’re officially halfway through the series, if you include the as yet unaired sixth season.  I want to step back this week and take stock of the series as a whole… through the power of mathematics!  Well, not really, but I’ll be tallying numbers and writing lists.  That’s almost math-y, right?

Anyway, through this pseudo-mathematical analysis, I will answer the following questions: Who are  the most important characters in Lost, really?  Who’s evil-er, the Losties or the Others?  And the big question: why watch the show when its major mysteries are never answered?  Obviously, I won’t be able to come up with a real Grand Unified Theory of Lost just yet, but I’m hoping that, by stepping back and looking at the big picture numerically, I’ll be able to wrap my mind around the series a little better before I leap into season four.

But first, as usual, the episode summaries:

“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.

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.

Here’s the poster for He’s Just Not That Into You. Notice anything interesting about the names?

All of those nine last names are in the first half of the alphabet. What are the odds?

Actually, nevermind, I’ll just tell you.

Last names actually aren’t evenly distributed throughout the alphabet. There are definitely more clustered towards the front half, but it’s tough to find hard numbers. A guy here claims that in the Cleveland phone book, 62.5% of the names are A-L. I’m not saying that Hollywood names follow the same pattern as Cleveland names, but it’ll have to do.

If the probability of one actor’s name being in the first half of the alphabet is 62.5%, the probability of nine actors’ names all being in the first half is .625^9. Which is .01455. So basically, the odds of this poster are 69 to 1. (Giggity giggity.)

A theory: maybe the casting director started at the top of his filing cabinet, and only got to L before all the parts were gone.

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!

Like all good geeks, I have a soft spot for Superman II. Today I want to overthink one scene in particular… and surprisingly, it does not feature the line “Kneel before Zod.”

Early in the film, Lois and Clark are on assignment at Niagara Falls. A little kid is playing on an observation platform, and his grip suddenly slips. He falls off the Falls… and falls… and falls…

So here’s my question: how far would a child really fall in 28.4 seconds?