Never Mr. Right

July 2007 on 50 Words

misternau — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 22:56:09 +0000

I wrote 37 Reviews in July on 50 Words, six more than my goal. In August, I’m going to try to keep up with my average of one review per day. Here’s what I reviewed in July, in order of letter grade:

Highest Grade: A++. Lowest Grade: D-. July’s GPA: 3.21 (B+).

Category Breakdown: Movies (17 – 45.95%), Music (20 – 54.05%)

Goal for August: 31 reviews or more.

Movie 250

misternau — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 18:54:41 +0000

Yesterday, I posted the 250th movie review, The Tao of Steve (2000) at 50 Words. Since May 24, I’ve posted 50 movie reviews, an average of about one a day. Some of the movies I’ve reviewed are ones that I’ve seen before. Some of them I own. I only review things once on 50 Words, though.

Oh, I should update the list:

Seen: 586
In Queue: 443
Unavailable: 319
Left to see (but not in queue): 997
Total: 2345

June 2007 on 50 Words

misternau — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 02:52:52 +0000

I wrote 29 Reviews in June on 50 Words, one short of goal. So, in July, I’m going for 31, an average of one review per day. Here’s what I reviewed in June, in order of letter grade:

Highest Grade: A++. Lowest Grade: F. June’s GPA: 3.46 (B+).

Category Breakdown: Movies (19 – 65.52%), Music (10 – 34.48%)

Goal for July: 31 reviews or more.

May 2007 on 50 Words

misternau — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 17:19:37 +0000

May was a fairly busy month on 50 Words. I wrote 25 Reviews. In order of letter grade, here are the items I reviewed:

Highest Grade: A++. Lowest Grade: C-. May’s GPA: 3.42 (B+).

Category Breakdown: Movies (20 – 80%), Music (3 – 12%), Books (2 – 8%)

Goal for June: 30 reviews or more.

Movie 200

misternau — Thu, 24 May 2007 20:49:43 +0000

A few days ago, I posted the 200th movie review over at 50 Words. It seems like only yesterday, I came up with the idea and sold Mr. Bye and Mr. Ferrante on it. It’s actually been a year, a month, and ten days. The very first post on 50 Words was my review for Primer. There are a few posts dated earlier, primarily remixes of reviews on this site and others in my “review this” list on Backpack (of which nine remain unreviewed).

I really enjoy writing these little tiny reviews, although sometimes I feel as though I’m saying the same things over and over again. Admittedly, I’m not the most creative reviewer out there. I also tend to be very generous with my ratings. That said, I’m looking forward to seeing how the next 200 movies goes.

Oh, I should update the list:

Seen: 567
In Queue: 459
Unavailable: 319
Left to see (but not in queue): 1000
Removed from list: 2 (duplicates)
Total: 2345

Since I posted here two months ago, I’ve seen 14 movies — an average of one movie every 4½ days. At this rate, it should take 18 years to watch the remaining 1459 movies, if no more are added to the list. In order to see all of these wonderful films, I really need to increase my numbers a little bit.

Trimming the List

misternau — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 01:56:22 +0000

Since adding to the list a couple of months ago, I’ve been sorting through the unavailables in the outside chance that some of them are being released eventually on DVD. I was surprised by my results.

Tally from January 27:

Seen: 544
In Queue: 345
Unavailable: 416
Left to see (but not in queue): 1048
Total: 2353

New tally:

Seen: 553
In Queue: 432
Unavailable: 318 (I got to remove almost 100)
Left to see (but not in queue): 1044
Removed from list: 6 (Usually because Short films inadvertently ended up in the master list)
Total: 2347 (I’ve seen 23.56% of them).

Obviously, I’m a list maker. I imagine the unavailables will constitute an ever smaller number as time goes by. On with the movie watching!

Adding to the Tally

misternau — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 07:52:19 +0000

On recent announcements of award nominees for the Independent Spirit Awards, the Golden Globes, and the Academy Awards, I’m awarded the opportunity to more movies to my database. As delineated earlier, I’ve culled the list to the 88 eligible movies and eliminated one of them for not being listed as “Save” on Netflix.

Before the addition to the list, here’s my tally:

Seen: 538.
In Queue: 264.
Unavailable: 415.
Left to see:: 1048.
Total: 2265.

Following are the movies. I’ve seen the ones in bold. The rest are in my queue. The unsavable one is ~~stricken~~. Reviews on 50 Words are linked.

12:08 East of Bucharest
A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints
A Lion in the House
A Prairie Home Companion
~~After the Wedding~~
American Gun
An Inconvenient Truth
Apocalypto
Babel
Blood Diamond
Bobby
Borat
Brothers of the Head
Bubble
Cars
Chalk
Children of Men
Chronicle of an Escape
Click
Conversations With Other Women
Curse of the Golden Flower
Day Night Day Night
Days of Glory
Deliver Us From Evil
Dreamgirls
Flags of Our Fathers
For Your Consideration
Four Eyed Monsters
Friends With Money
Half Nelson
Happy Feet
Hollywoodland
Infamous
Iraq in Fragments
Jesus Camp
Kinky Boots
Land of Plenty
Letters from Iwo Jima
Little Children
Little Miss Sunshine
Man Push Cart
Marie Antoinette
Miss Potter
Monster House
My Country, My Country
Nomad
Notes on a Scandal
Old Joy
Pan’s Labyrinth
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
Poseidon
Quinceañera
Running With Scissors
Sherrybaby
Sorry, Haters
Steel City
Stephanie Daley
Stranger Than Fiction
Superman Returns
Sweet Land
Thank You For Smoking
The Black Dahlia
The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros
The Da Vinci Code
The Dead Girl
The Departed
The Devil Wears Prada
The Fountain
The Good German
The Good Shepherd
The Illusionist
The Last King of Scotland
The Lives of Others
The Motel
The Painted Veil
The Prestige
The Pursuit of Happyness
The Queen
The Road to Guantanamo
The Trials of Darryl Hunt
Twelve and Holding
United 93
Venus
Volver
Water
Wild Tigers I Have Known
Wristcutters: A Love Story
You’re Gonna Miss Me

New tally:

Seen: 544
In Queue: 345
Unavailable: 416
Left to see (but not in queue): 1048
Total: 2353

Last Day at Work

misternau — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 21:58:09 +0000

Today is my last day at BMC Software. It’s been two years as a contractor. I’ve had a lot of fun, lots of laughs, and did some really good things. It’s time, however, to move on. So, right now, I’m taking the posters off the wall, finishing up the last of the AdvancedITIL books in Traditional Chinese.

I really appreciate all the great people I got to work with at Remedy, BMC, and on the peripheral projects. I hope that we all stay in touch and that our cross paths in the future.

Nominee Project Update

misternau — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 04:22:51 +0000

About five months ago, I announced the Nominee Project here. Since I posted that, I’ve seen a few movies, started a reviews site with a couple of friends, and kept my database of nominees up to date.

Let’s take a look at my progress. It isn’t awards nomination time yet, so the total remains the same.

Total: 2,265 movies
Already viewed: 519 (22.91%)
Unavailable on DVD: 415 (18.32%)
Left to See: 1,331 (58.76%) — 267 (11.79%) in my Netflix queue

At this rate of 30 every five months, it should only take me about 18½ years to get through this list. I intend to pick up the pace dramatically. I’ve been a little busy with other things.

Nominee Project

misternau — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 06:01:01 +0000

Some time ago, I decided to embark on a new project. I have decided to attempt to view every movie nominated for either an Oscar, a Golden Globe, or an Independent Spirit Award during the course of my life. This includes any movie nominated from 1971 until now (no matter when it was filmed).

After watching this year’s Independent Spirit Awards, I noticed how many interesting movies had come out that I had never heard of. So, a few weeks ago, I embarked on a hobbyist project to determine just how many we were talking about. In the process, I decided to eliminate certain categories from my project. To wit:

Any movie nominated only for “Best Original Song.” A movie that only got a nod because Elton John sold a few million soundtracks doesn’t merit consideration, if only because that doesn’t have anything to do with the quality of the movie.
Any short movie nominated (“Documentary Short”, “Animated Short”, “Live Action Short”), because of the impossibility to find them reliably on DVD.
Any movie unavailable via Netflix, or unlikely to be available in the future (generally, movies that have been out more than a few years who are not in Netflix’s database — either as “Add to Queue” or “Save”).

In order to build a master list of all of the movies (and eliminate duplicates), I built four tables in a MySQL database (not here), manually grabbed and culled the lists from IMDB, wrote a PHP page that generated an HTML list of the movies, ran ‘sort’ on it, and built a list of all the movies (minus Short Subjects and Best Original Song). From this master list, I found all the movies I’ve already seen, and began clicking on the others (which popped me over to IMDB). Any movies I found that didn’t indicate US DVD availability in that Amazon corner, I searched for them on Netflix. Those that I found were added to my Queue. Those that I didn’t got crossed off the list. In the process, I added them in blocks of 100 (with a status indicating unavailable, added to queue, already seen, or left to see) into a master MySQL table.

This evening, I finished the list. It is rather large:

Total: 2,265 movies
Already Viewed: 489 (21.59%)
Unavailable on DVD: 417 (18.41%)
Left to See: 1359 (60.00%)
- Added to Queue: 245 (10.82%)

When the awards ceremonies roll around again, I’ll add the nominees to my database and watch those, too. Given that I have over 1350 available (or to-be-available) movies in my database, I am hoping to catch up with whatever the current year is in about five years. At an average movie length of 2 hours, this is 113¼ days of movie viewing.

This project in no way restricts me from viewing movies I’ve already seen, movies that weren’t nominated, or TV series on DVD or in tivo. I’m pretty excited, though. I know I’m going to hate some of these films, but a number of them will probably end up in my DVD collection.

Wish me luck!