Best Movie of the Year So Far

What is the best movie I’ve seen in 2017 so far? Martha Marcy May Marlene. I know what you are thinking — “wait, what? That movie didn’t even come out this year! Close tab.” True, but before you abandon me I’m not going to attempt to defend my choice. While this critically acclaimed movie did make the top of the list for at least one AP critic in 2011. I’m not sure I even liked the film to be honest. While best movie of the year so far for me— it is also the worst because my list is only one deep. What’s more interesting is why it is on the list at all.

Media Log

Whenever there is something interesting or important to me, I am probably tracking it in a Google doc or sheet. I keep a log of what I watch in any given year. I worked in the entertainment industry for awhile so I rationalized that it was for work. I could look back at all the movies I watched year over year and come up with year end rankings and maintain any lunchtime conversation credibility.

When I left my role making cartoons, I stopped tracking for awhile and since Netflix decided to send me Martha Marcy May Marlene recently I wondered how did this happen and whether it was a good use of time.

Entertainment Utility

If you have any exposure to economics you may already be familiar with the term utility.

Utility is a term used by economists to describe the measurement of “useful-ness” that a consumer obtains from any good. Utility may measure how much one enjoys a movie, or the sense of security one gets from buying a deadbolt. https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Principles_of_Economics/Utility

Just as I keep a Media Log of what I watched, I have a Media Queue of what to watch next. Logistically I can probably only watch an average of a movie a week, so how should I choose which 52 movies to put in my queue? Random chance and circumstance? That wouldn’t be very rational.

I could just ask a friend whose opinion I value but individual tastes may vary widely so I haven’t quite found that well-tuned curator I can trust.

Critics

Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic have easily searchable best of year lists. I can quickly go back to the previous year and take the top 50 movies based on critic reviews and audience scores. The dataset is not perfect, if such a thing ever exists, so I did have to be careful to insure a large enough p-value when there were only a handful of reviews.

Opinions are cheap though and some reviewers may be biased by extreme views in order to get attention.

What about money?

Box Office Mojo has a handy chart of box office gross. The more money the public is willing to spend on a movie must be a good indicator that it may be worth my time.

The masses are not always right in electing representatives for government for safety and life critical decisions so would I trust the same group to entertain me? How about the Academy Awards?

What about professionals?

It’s pretty straightforward to look for Best Picture but outstanding performances by an actor or set designer may not directly translate to a great movie. My lists are populated based on nominations across each category for the Academy Awards.

Presumably between box office earnings, critical reviews, and professional recognition the top 52 movies can bubble to the top of the heap. This also means I should wait until the end of the year to fully assess the final rankings.

Spoilers

How do I measure the success of my selections? The enjoyment I get may come from learning something new, escaping for a couple of hours, thinking about the world differently, feeling an emotion, etc. and each individual experience can be different for different moods.

As it turns out, I haven’t watched a movie in awhile — I was too busy making the list of what to watch next.