After my overview of time and place was published, my boss called me into a meeting, told me that calling “sitting with my ass on the couch” “sad” was rude and defamatory, and invited me to offer a clarification: Sitting with my ass on the couch, where I provide a warm squishy cushion for my cat, is my highest purpose in life. I cherish every minute of it, and I should be doing it more.
Thank you, and please don’t bite my face.
January 2023
Now that that’s out the way, a look at genre. Obviously, films can have multiple genres–an animation can also be a comedy and a mystery and a family film–but the IMDB lists them alphabetically, and I find this approach unhelpful because it is difficult to determine the main category without looking at each film individually.
My 207 films had a total of 602 listed genres. The good news: they were comma-delineated. The bad news: I am really bad at parsing strings in LibreOffice Calc. Further, the colors on the pie graph repeat; it is not obvious if “Thriller” or “Drama” is the bigger green slice, so I had to make a table.
January 2023
The most interesting thing, I think, is that every genre had four or more entries. I don’t think of myself as liking “musical films” but films about musicians are most decidedly non-bogus.
Also unhelpful is the seemingly arbitrary definitions employed by the IMBD, and how those definitions changed over time. I can watch 1930s horror, where the bodies are dismembered off-screen, but 21st-century explicit-torture-and-gore make me physically ill. And I wouldn’t have called the German film about the Satanist sacrificing teenage boys in exchange for immortality “Fantasy” (I don’t always get to pick the films); that genre needs unicorns or talking cats.
So, because there are a hundred better things I should be doing instead, I tried to give each film a descriptor.
It’s impossible.
Next I tried to organize them by “theme” or “distinguishing feature”–vampires, mobsters, cowboys, Commies–and that is taking a very long time. Off-hand, there are five Batmans and two Godzillas; one Kung Fu and one Shakespeare.
I would like to start a new spreadsheet with actors and directors, but I would also like to spend those seventeen hours watching movies, or maybe stitching something. Hrm.
