Notes From Up High

I recently decided to buy into the Internet Movie Database’s resume service as part of a coordinated marketing effort for Explorations Solutions, Inc. Despite my obsession to lock up ‘motorbikematt’ as a login at just about every site I can get my hands on, I oddly never signed up for an IMDB account. In doing so, I discovered something extremely cool: the My Movies list. IMDB offers a simple function to flag movies in their database to post in your own personal profile.  My neurotic self immediately saw some data analysis potential: What if I could analyze my movie viewing habits over time? Could I discover some unforseen insight into my own psyche based on the shape of the chart? Could people be identified as compatible or not based on these metrics? Could statistics be run on large numbers of charts to show trends in a population?

Driven by own “Beautiful Mind” like excitement, I proceeded create my personal profile of all the movies I could remember seeing. I started off with the easy, early flicks, like Tron, the Goonies, Dark Star, E.T., and Bambi. Then I clicked the obvious franchises like the Three Stooges, James Bond, Star Wars, Star Trek, Indiana Jones, etc. Then I started searching my favorite actress & actor’s filmographies (Clint Eastwood, Marlon Brando, Gene Hackman, etc) and clicked away.

After an untold number of hours and a hand cramp, my brain was exhausted enough to be satisfied that I had THE LIST of approximately ALL 450+ movies that I’d seen in my entire life. Given that no dataset sits un-visualized in my world, I immediately processed a chart in Excel, which is displayed below:

Premiere years of movies I remember seeing 1920-present

So, what does this all mean? I am not sure I can make any insights into the structure of my brain, but I can immediately spot some trends that are worth nothing:

1. Either I have a bad memory, or movies weren’t worth a dam in the late 70’s
2. The years where my movie attendance was at it’s greatest, I was not in a relationship.
3. The outlying peaks, especially in recent years are indicative of movie festival viewing
4. I spent way too much time making this chart.

There are some other patterns that are worthy of analysis…but I will save them for a future discussion.  Just to mention a few weaknesses for the record: the chart does NOT indicate when I saw a movie, just it’s release date. For instance, I saw DeNiro in Taxi Driver, a movie that came out before my birth, when I was in my late 20’s.  Secondly, every time I look at the My Movie list,  I remember another movie to add to the list.

What I may do is color code the films in a way that further refines the data (such as Studio release, independant, etc) but all that when I have more time.