I’ve spent my whole Saturday, minus some lunch, putzing around with my spreadsheet, manually adding the country of origin and Original Version languages. When I got to June, I realized I forgot to log one of the Star Trek movies I saw over the summer so now my pie chart is wrong.
Sigh.
The IMDB lists the country of origin as every country where funding came from. For example, Zoolander showed up as “Germany and USA”, because they took some cash from MFP Munich Film Partners GmbH. It most emphatically is not a “German movie.” Howards End is also listed as “Japanese”, I assume for a similar reason, even though it is very clearly and thoroughly British. I have taken some liberties in my spreadsheet.
“Language” is a similar thing and silent films are considered to have no language. Hello? They are filled with written words. In the case of Atlantis, the cards were written in both Danish and English (German Amazon Video wrote a modern German translation over the English words; thanks for nothin’, guys). The only truly “no language” film I saw last year was Farmageddon…and it wasn’t really. The signs and labels were in German.
I’m still trying to tease out how many different countries are represented, how many movies I saw in Original Version, why do I think Finnish movies are Norwegian, but Danish movies are Swedish…. Oh, sure, I can manually count all these things, but I’d rather hack through it with formulas so I can prove to myself that I still can.
Fun thing from my dataset: Movies listed as being US movies, with no other countries throwing in money, have a lot of different languages in them.
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