DELIBERATIONS OF A MOVIE BUFF: TIPS TO AID CHOOSING A THRILLING CINEMATIC EXPERIENCE
Everyone loves a great movie experience. Have you ever paid to watch a movie and realized you made a grave mistake? It definitely stings! When looking through a menu to pick the experience to indulge, what goes through your mind within those milliseconds?
MOVIE RATINGS
Unlike the pertinent cliché, “Do not judge a book from its cover”, Ratings are used as a quick evaluation during selection of movies. There are many platforms, the popular ones including Rotten tomatoes, Fandango, IMDB and Metacritic. This article chooses to concentrate on one of them. As debunked here in this great write up, IMDB ranks among the best platforms. In the near past, the assumption that IMDB was too lenient in its ratings had been etched in my mind during my frequent hunts to consume the best cinematic masterpiece in a conscious effort to quench the ever relentless boredom. Data insights in the recent years have helped us to get better perspectives on the parameters that should be associated with great movies.
This article solidifies the fizzling thought- that IMDB is a lousy platform- and at the same time will help you make quick assumptions tailoring into consideration different work Profiles. This write-up is focused on IMDB ratings of 5043 movies across 100 years, the data file can be gotten here.
The theory that the best place to look for the rating of a movie should be a platform whose distribution resembles a Gaussian curve (simply known as the bell curve) is explained here. The kernel density curve on the histogram above represents the distribution of the Movie ratings which goes further to highlight this conclusive statement.
SAMPLE SPACE
To understand why some Genres might look different in these visualizations, it is important to show you the final distribution after filtering to remove null data. I also focused on the Movies whose Gross and Budget greater exceeded a million dollars reducing the total sample space to 3314 movies. The plot below shows the movie distribution across the data sample space. The genre “Romance” had the least amount of movies at the final stages while ACTION had the highest count.
THE BUSY CINEPHILE
The lack of time as a result of busy schedules, tedious jobs and life basically, robs people of enjoying long movies during week days causing them to fixate on how quick the weekend would come. A sharp fix would be watching series but there are people who would rather prefer the satisfaction of finishing movies rather than hang on the thorns of suspense, waiting for the release of the next episode of a series.
Here is a way out, When presented with the option of choosing from an array of movies, there is a greater chance of picking a shorter movie from the “Animation” genre than the others.
The visualization above portrays my statement. To know the time range each genre falls in, observe the overall position of the box layouts. An outlier (abnormality) in the comedy genre falls below the 50 minutes mark but overall, Animation movies have the shortest duration, residing between 75–85 minutes. Enjoy a great cinematic experience within the short time you have!
On the flip side of the coin, if you got extra time to spare, all genres are a go with Crime, Western, Biographies, Drama and Action genres averaging minutes about 105 minutes ( I hour and 45 minutes).
THE PENTAGON
Like football coaches, Directors are poised with the responsibility of ensuring that what goes on behind the scenes transcend into a masterpiece. This section belongs to the directors with the best averages. Without doubt, a movie directed by any of them should be watched.
The experiences between the five differ and the movie genres they direct also vary. Sergio Leone , Tony Kaye, Ron Fricke, Damien Chazelle and Christopher Nolan — in this order — have the best averages. They have 60+ films between them and proved over and over again that they can create masterpieces. Sergio Leone is deceased but he left his footprint and will always be remembered as the Creator of the spaghetti western genre.
THE FREEMAN
In the highest ever-rated movies by IMDB, An actor took part in more than one of the top-four.
Morgan Freeman acted in The Shawshank Redemption (9.3) and The Dark Knight (9.0), Both which are exceptional movies. If he is in the cast, don’t hesitate on that masterpiece!
FINAL STANCE
At the end of the day, what a person looks for in movies vary greatly and are guided by personal Preferences. Media hype, Awards catalogues and some other factors come into play. Human instincts are sandwiched between these factors. This article gives a few tips on some ways out and at the same time reminds you that IMDB is a reliable platform. I wish you all the best in this war against boredom.
