Movie Ratings Report Anniversary Report
Chuck Musciano
Since then, I've received 174,422 votes for 7,565 movies from 1,467 people.
This works out to 160 votes per day, every day, for three years. To be honest,
I'm astounded that this sort of vote volume could be maintained for so long.
Many thanks to all the people who take the time to vote and make the ratings
report a valuable resource to movie-goers on the net.
Traditionally, I publish the top 10 voters, so here we go:
Votes Person
2,636 Col Needham
2,285 Peter Reiher
2,016 Michael A Green
1,555 Jim Roach
1,417 bo...@babel.sandiego.ncr.com
1,157 Robert Schmunk
1,143 j...@isi.edu
1,097 Andrew E Johnson
1,025 David B Knight
970 Lynn Garry Salmon
In addition, the top vote-getting movies are
Votes Movie
471 Star Wars
471 Raiders Of The Lost Ark
469 Empire Strikes Back, The
452 Batman (1989)
451 Return Of The Jedi
428 Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom
419 Back To The Future
407 Blade Runner
399 Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade
388 Superman
Again, many thanks for participating in the ratings report. I think it's
safe to say the the ratings report is the largest, ongoing, electronically
gathered public opinion survey. This notable achievement would not be
possible without the many helpful readers of rec.arts.movies and
rec.arts.tv.uk.
Chuck Musciano ARPA : ch...@trantor.harris-atd.com
Harris Corporation Usenet: ...!uunet!x102a!trantor!chuck
PO Box 37, MS 3A/1912 AT&T : (407) 727-6131
Melbourne, FL 32902 FAX : (407) 729-3363
A good newspaper is never good enough,
but a lousy newspaper is a joy forever. -- Garrison Keillor
John Locke
> Traditionally, I publish the top 10 voters, so here we go:
>
> Votes Person
> 2,636 Col Needham
> 2,285 Peter Reiher
> 2,016 Michael A Green
> 1,555 Jim Roach
> 1,417 bo...@babel.sandiego.ncr.com
> 1,157 Robert Schmunk
> 1,143 j...@isi.edu
> 1,097 Andrew E Johnson
> 1,025 David B Knight
> 970 Lynn Garry Salmon
What is this, the "get-a-life" all-star team?! No, wait, I didn't mean it.
Honest. I'm just pissed I didn't make the top ten. :-) I once had the goal
of seeing every movie. Poor idea. Too many of the genre pictures are too
similar to keep track of after a while. You know you've gone over the
edge when you've been watching a movie for an hour and it suddenly occurs
to you that you've seen it already. Or have you? I recall Bogdanovich
claiming to have seen 20,000 movies. Incredible. If Wilt Chamberlain includes
quickies I guess Bogdanovich's figure could include short subjects. I think
Scorsese has claimed 6,000. Or has that many in his personal library.
Impertinent questions for Col. Needham, Peter Reiher, Michael A Green, or
any other members of the 2K Club: Do you ever see movies more than once? If
so, what percentage of the movies you've seen have you repeated? What is the
most times you've seen a single movie?
John
Peter Reiher
>ch...@melmac.harris-atd.com (Chuck Musciano) writes:
>
>Impertinent questions for Col. Needham, Peter Reiher, Michael A Green, or
>any other members of the 2K Club: Do you ever see movies more than once? If
>so, what percentage of the movies you've seen have you repeated? What is the
>most times you've seen a single movie?
The percentage of films I see more than once is low. The way I look at
it, I have the choice of seeing a film I've seen again, or seeing a film
I haven't seen. (There are always plenty of the latter.) Most times,
I'll go with the film I haven't seen. Also, I do see a lot of films,
so I'd have to do lots and lots of repetitions to make the percentage
of repeats significant. Of all the films I've seen, I'd say over 95%
I've only seen once, and have no plans to see again.
There are a few films I've seen lots of times. "Lots" here doesn't
mean the same as a "Star Wars" freak's "lots" - it means more like ten
times or so. There are probably some short films that I've been
forced to sit through twenty or thirty times, when they got shown at
a repertory theater before all their films for months on end. I couldn't
count how often I've seen one of the "rabbit season" Bugs Bunny/Daffy
Duck cartoons, which played at the Nuart theater seemingly forever.
--
Peter Reiher
rei...@ashby.cs.ucla.edu
Robert Schmunk
|> ch...@melmac.harris-atd.com (Chuck Musciano) writes:
|>
|> > Traditionally, I publish the top 10 voters, so here we go:
|> > Votes Person
|> > 2,636 Col Needham
|> > 2,285 Peter Reiher
|> > 2,016 Michael A Green
|> > 1,555 Jim Roach
|> > 1,417 bo...@babel.sandiego.ncr.com
|> > 1,157 Robert Schmunk
etc.
|> What is this, the "get-a-life" all-star team?!
But of course. I should mention that my score is inflated from chairing
the Montana State Univ film society for 1.5 years. My eyes are still bleeding
from all the movies I saw in 1984.
|> Impertinent questions for Col. Needham, Peter Reiher, Michael A Green, or
|> any other members of the 2K Club: Do you ever see movies more than once? If
|> so, what percentage of the movies you've seen have you repeated? What is the
|> most times you've seen a single movie?
As a simple member of the 1K club :-), I'll admit to seeing movies more than
once. However, this is primarily due to watching videos that friends have
rented. As for going to see a first-run movie twice, the last one I can
remember was Branagh's HENRY V. Living in a major city with a *lot* of
movie theaters, I have the opportunity to see something new whenever I want
and I take advantage of it, though I shoot for matinee prices. Even when I
lived in a small town, though, I rarely repeated; I just didn't go to the
movies back then.
Excluding TV broadcasts, I don't think that there's any movie that I've seen
more than five times (4 times in a theater, once on video), the winner being
BLADE RUNNER.
--
Robert B. Schmunk <Internet: sch...@spacsun.rice.edu -- SPAN: rice::schmunk>
SPAC, Rice Univ, Box 1892, Houston, TX 77251 USA -- (713) 527-4939
Colin Needham
>any other members of the 2K Club: Do you ever see movies more than once? If
>so, what percentage of the movies you've seen have you repeated? What is the
>most times you've seen a single movie?
Like Peter Reiher, the percentage of movies that I've seen more than once is
fairly low, and given the choice, I too prefer to watch ones I haven't already
seen. A quick check in my movies-I-have-seen database reveals I've only seen
20% of the 2,636 more than once. If I really like a film, I'll usually see
it at most three times: once at the cinema, once on cable-TV and once on
network TV a couple of years later. I've only seen 12 films more than 5 times
(most of these are 6 times). I've never seen *any* movie at the cinema more
than twice, but this is mainly through lack of choice and out of consideration
for my wife, who is almost as addicted as myself, but is rarely interested in
seeing a movie more than once.
I have one weakness when it comes to watching films repeatedly: the films of
Alfred Hitchcock, which account for over half of the aforementioned 12. I watch
his movies in a regular cycle, and the *only* film I've seen more than 10
times is my favourite, "Vertigo" (13).
If I have a movie on tape/LD then it is likely to be watched a few times over
the years. I own copies of over half the 20% that I've seen more than once.
The kinds of movies I like to watch (mainly from the 30's and 40's) don't
often get revived at the theatres around here, so I see most of them on video/
TV. However, recently the choice of films from this era that I haven't seen
seems to be in decline (which is only to be expected of course) so I presume
the 20% will gradually start to rise.
Incidentally, I notice I'm the only member of the 2.5K club :-). There must be
people out there who have seen more than this? (Perhaps I'm the only one
dumb enough to admit it? :-) If you have seen more, why not take part in the
ratings poll and share some of the benefits with the other netters? I personally
would love to see better coverage of older movies on the report.
Anyway, that's enough boring statistics for now. My next obsession after
movies is stats about movies (in case you hadn't noticed), so I could probably
go on like this all day!
Cheers,
Col
P.S. Anyone interested in starting movie-adicts-anonymous? :-)
------------------------------------------------------------
"Look at it this way, in a hundred years who's gonna care ?"
-- The Terminator
------------------------------------------------------------
Col Needham | Phone: +44 272 799910 x 28704
HP Labs | c...@hplb.hpl.hp.com
Bristol | c...@hplabs.hpl.hp.com
U.K. | c...@otter.hpl.hp.com
------------------------------------------------------------
Erkka Varjo
>Since then, I've received 174,422 votes for 7,565 movies from 1,467 people.
=====
Gasp! Does this mean that when there are only 3930 movies in the
report, there are over 3500 movies with 1-4 votes, thus yet to be
seen on the report ?
It would be nice to get to see a report with, say, all the movies
that have received at least 3 votes. That would probably enable us
to see lots of oddities and rarely seen titles.
--
Erkka Varjo, eva...@utu.fi, eva...@firien.bitnet, Tel/Fax +358 21 379627
Residence: Yo-kyla 13 A 16, SF-20540 Turku, Finland, Europe
Robert Schmunk
> people out there who have seen more than this? (Perhaps I'm the only one
> dumb enough to admit it? :-)
Actually, I'm somewhat surprised that Mark Leeper's name was *not* on the
top-ten voters list. I can only figure that he's not voting at all;
probably too busy writing a review.
Chuck Musciano
> In article <1992May21....@mlb.semi.harris.com> ch...@melmac.harris-atd.com (Chuck Musciano) writes:
>
> >Since then, I've received 174,422 votes for 7,565 movies from 1,467 people.
> =====
>
> Gasp! Does this mean that when there are only 3930 movies in the
> report, there are over 3500 movies with 1-4 votes, thus yet to be
> seen on the report ?
>
> It would be nice to get to see a report with, say, all the movies
> that have received at least 3 votes. That would probably enable us
> to see lots of oddities and rarely seen titles.
Well, to answer your question, there are 1,851 movies with just one vote,
1,115 with two votes, 364 with three votes, and 306 with four votes. Most
certainly, the 1 and 2 vote films contain many erroneous titles. (You
wouldn't believe some of the titles I get sent :-) I always add a film to the
database, even if I've never heard of it and I've can't find it in Maltin,
because no harm is done. Four other people have to recognize the title
to put it in the report.
Arcane trivia: of those films on the report, there are more movies with
6 votes (255) than any other amount.
You might also like to know that two people have been locked out of
the rating system due to attempts to stuff the ballot box and/or vote
for films that don't exist. I periodically insert fake titles on the
ballots as a quality control. If you vote for one, I'll send e-mail and
ask how you came to see that film (after all, I might have hit on a real
film). Happily, this happens infrequently, since most people are honest
and don't get so hung up about a rating service that they feel compelled
to pervert it.
--
John Locke
> I have one weakness when it comes to watching films repeatedly: the films of
> Alfred Hitchcock, which account for over half of the aforementioned 12. I
> watch
> his movies in a regular cycle, and the *only* film I've seen more than 10
> times is my favourite, "Vertigo" (13).
That's a little spooky, seeing "Vertigo" 13 times. I'd recommend seeing it
again soon. Did you ever notice how "Vertigo" begins and ends with the
same joke?
I've seen "Friday the 13th" twelve times. (Not really, but someone had to
say it.)
A friend of mine was at a Zoetrope party in the early '80s. He told someone
he'd seen "Apocalypse Now" thirteen times. He received a minor ovation and
a free copy of the soundtrack album. It was a lie, though. He'd only seen
it six or seven times by then. I've seen it 10+ myself.
Other movies in the 10+ category:
The Big Sleep
Casablanca
Mothra
Citizen Kane
Rebecca
Wizard of Oz
Maltese Falcon
Winchester '73
The Godfather
Laura
Some recent ones have made it over 6:
Tin Men
River's Edge
The Stunt Man
GoodFellas
They don't always have to be good movies. I disliked "Against All Odds"
when it played in the theater, but ended up watching it over and over on
cable. Can't explain it except to say that it's not boring. Like when
Alex Karras finds them doing it in a Mayan pyramid in secret Mexico. What
timing.
John
Mark R. Leeper
> > Incidentally, I notice I'm the only member of the 2.5K club :-).
> Actually, I'm somewhat surprised that Mark Leeper's name was *not* on the
> top-ten voters list. I can only figure that he's not voting at all;
Thank you for that. Actually, I have never voted here. Basically it
has been a matter of not taking the time. There is only so much time I
have to devote to film. Besides, my opinions are idiosyncratic enough
you probably wouldn't want me voting. I would throw things off ;-}
Mark Leeper
...att!mtgzfs3!leeper
(908)957-5619