Category: Tools

Automated Movie Marathon Scheduler Back Online

I was delighted to discover today that movie madness, an automated movie marathon scheduler, is back online (after having been broken for some amount of time). Movie madness automatically generates thousands of possible movie marathon schedules for you, based on current movie theater listings, movies you want to see (and movies you don’t want to see), and other parameters (like whether you are willing to miss part of the beginning or end of the movie).

So, for example, if I wanted to catch the maximum number of movies possible at the Emagine theater tomorrow, but I didn’t want to see nonsense like Dolphin Tale 2, then Movie Madness has about 7000 suggested schedules for me, with this schedule being the top suggested:

Seven movies in 15 hours, with a maximum break time of about 20 minutes. Not too shabby! Bonus: the tool even seems to have been enhanced since I last looked at it to include the Rotten Tomatoes score of each movie shown.

Disclaimer: I still don’t endorse the site’s attitude (“Movie theater tickets are expensive! That’s not fair! Solve the problem by consuming the product but not paying for it!”), but I endorse the utility of the tool.

Using Outlook as a Movie Marathon Scheduler

I’m looking for the perfect movie marathon scheduler tool. I currently use an Excel spreadsheet. This spreadsheet does a fine job, but I still yearn for a drag-and-drop style interface, which can magically import movie information from IMDB, use that data to create an accurate schedule, and then share that schedule quickly and easily via the web.

If I didn’t have a demanding job, 2.5 kids, and a house to maintain, I would build this magical system myself! However, all I have available to me is a few minutes here and there to see if the tools at my disposal can be used for more efficient movie marathon planning.

I own Microsoft Outlook 2010, and it occurred to me that perhaps sliding around appointments in a calendar isn’t just for business purposes. So, I started exploring what it would take to make it a movie marathon scheduler.

Pros and Cons to Using Outlook as a Movie Marathon Scheduler

Here’s a quick summary of what I found.

Pros:

  1. It’s easy to zoom in and out to make big or small adjustments in the schedule times.
  2. It’s easy to rearrange your schedule using drag-and-drop.
  3. It’s easy to visualize the schedule.
  4. It’s easy to export the schedule to e-mail or Microsoft Word.

Cons:

  1. There is no easy way to create an appointment by entering movie runtime in minutes.
  2. There is no out-of-the-box method to share your schedule via a website, social media, etc.
  3. Other than e-mail and Microsoft Word, there aren’t many nice data export options.

Still interested? Want more details? Here are the steps I took to set it up.

Setting Up a Movie Marathon Calendar In Outlook

  1. Go to the calendar view in Outlook, right-click and select “New Calendar”
  2. In the Ribbon near the top of your screen, ensure the “Day” view is selected (as opposed to “Week” or “Month” view).
  3. In the little calendar in the upper-left of your screen, select the both the start and end days of your movie marathon. This lets you see the entire movie marathon schedule at a glance.
  4. While working on the schedule, you can zoom in and out of your schedule by right-clicking the timeline shown on the left of your screen, and selecting how big or small you want your time scale.

The screenshot below highlights what you should see, and how to see it.

Setting Up a Movie Marathon Calendar in Outlook

If you prefer to always work in a particular time scale, you can set whatever you like as the default.  Right-click anywhere in your calendar, select “View Settings”, press the “Other Settings” button, and select the default time scale you would like (5 minutes, 30 minutes, 60 minutes, whatever).

Creating a Movie Marathon Schedule in Your Outlook Calendar

  1. Create a new appointment for the movie you would like to schedule.
  2. For the subject, type in the name of the movie
  3. For start time, select any arbitrary start time
  4. For end time, manually type a time of day, based on the starting time plus the minutes of movie runtime.
  5. In the description, type in whatever you like to describe the movie. I like to copy and paste movie summaries from IMDB.
  6. Save your appointment, then drag it around in the schedule to find a timeslot that works. Zoom in to a 15-minute time scale to easily schedule movies to start on any quarter hour.

How to Publish a Movie Marathon Schedule Using Outlook

  1. For a quick printout of start and end times, select View => Change View => List, then print the result.
  2. To export to e-mail, select Home => E-mail Calendar (this export is great! It is a beautifully formatted, clickable, and provides multiple levels of detail – see image below!)
  3. To export to Microsoft Word – Outlook does not offer this as a feature. However, if you select “E-mail Calendar” and copy and paste the content into Word, this works just fine.
  4. To export to Microsoft Excel – select File => Options => Advanced => Import / Export. Then select “CSV” or “Excel 2003”. This offers no frills, but gets the date, start time and end time of your movies into Excel.

Movie Marathon Schedule E-mail

Conclusion

After taking a thorough look at Outlook, I might use it to assist with the scheduling of my next movie marathon. Rearranging the schedule by simply sliding the movies around sure is handy, and syncing an Outlook calendar to a Google calendar for sharing is doable. But that is the subject of another article.

Movie Recommendation Engines

I’m always on the lookout for excellent new movies to include in my movie marathons, so I was delighted to learn that movie recommendation engines are a thing. Not only are they a thing, there are a bunch of them out there. Some are built into video-on-demand services, like Netflix. Some exist as stand-alone services, like Jinni.

The current consensus is that Jinni is the best movie recommendation engine out there. Jinni gets up to speed on your taste preferences quickly by importing movie ratings from other social media and video-on-demand accounts. I liked this feature since I’ve already rated plenty of movies on Netflix and Facebook. I don’t want rate them all over again.

Once Jinni knew what I liked, it produced an “Entertainment Personality” for me. I am bemused by the visualization of this entertainment personality:

John Oleszkiewicz's entertainment personality

Should I be worried that “Cynical Couple Relationships” is way up there on my interest list? I can click to find out! It turns out Clerks, Office Space, and Desperate Housewives are representative samples of this category. Damn. You got me there Jinni. I like all of those!

You can enter in free-form search text to find movies that match your mood. I found it far more effective, and fun, to use their database of common tags to search for interesting movies. Take a look at these intentionally goofy searches I created (taken straight from their provided search tags) and the result:

Combining unlikely strings of adjectives is good for a laugh, but has Jinni given me some useful recommendations? Unfortunately, not yet. My personalized recommendations so far are all things I have already watched (example: Lord of the Rings) or are on my to-watch list (example: Pan’s Labyrinth). Jinni gets kudos for correctly guessing what I would like. But I haven’t found something surprising in the results yet.

For now, I think I’ll continue using friends, family, and critics lists to find movie marathon candidates.

Movie Marathon Scheduler for Movie Theaters

I had a great time at my first 24 hour movie marathon in a real theater. But you know what would have helped? A movie marathon scheduler. When you have 18 different movies playing throughout the day at various times, any tool that help you schedule out your own personal marathon sure would have been helpful.

I recently found TheaterTag.com. Its interface is slick and simple – you enter in your zip code, pick a theater, pick what movies you want to see – and bang – a fill-in-the-blanks schedule is created for you. You just slide around the movies you want to see until you create a schedule that works for you. Here is a screenshot.

A sample movie theater marathon schedule.The only drawback is that TheaterTag does not automatically generate working schedules for you. This was a feature of the Movie Madness movie marathon scheduler. Movie Madness automatically generates a large list of possible movie schedules, based on your search criteria. Well, it did anyway – it apparently hasn’t been updated since 2007 and doesn’t work these days.

Regardless, I don’t miss this feature much. I think it is more fun to manually create your own schedule. It helps build the anticipation!

So next time I have a movie marathon in a theater, I’ll be using this tool to plan it all out. I might even use it to plan an extended visit to the theater. I’ve never actually seen more than one movie at a time in a theater before (excluding the one 24-hour marathon)! I think it would be fun to just take a day off sometime and just watch movies all day. No work, no chores, no obligations – just entertainment!

One disclaimer though – I do not endorse theater hopping. If I spend a day at the movies, I’m paying for the experience. Cheating the theater out of money just isn’t my cup of tea.

Movie Marathon Theater Scheduling Tool

When I recently did an in-theater 24-hour movie marathon, I worked out my viewing schedule by hand, trying to maximize the number of movies I could see without overlapping them. It was labor intensive and kind of boring.

I guess I should have done my research first – Movie Madness.org could have done that for me automatically! This tool puts together every possible combination of viewing schedule, then sorts by schedules that are maximally efficient (i.e. most movies you can see, given the viewing schedule) based on your parameters (i.e. are you willing to overlap movie start/end times a bit? What movies should you include/exclude?).

I find the viewpoint behind the site kind of lame (“Stick it to the man and theater-hop for free! Its okay because big companies don’t deserve to make money because they charge us money for goods and services that we enjoy consuming! And that sucks! It should all be free because we say so! Blarg!”) But, they put together a simple and easy-to-use tool, so there you go.