Hollywood Nights Movie Marathon 2014

The Children’s Leukemia Foundation of Michigan is holding their 15th annual Hollywood Nights 24-hour movie marathon at Emagine theater in Novi, Michigan. I attended the Grand Rapids version of the event last year. I didn’t think I’d be able to attend this year’s event, but some last minute changes in plans freed up my weekend!

This is a charity event (like a walk-a-thon, but with less walking) and a week doesn’t leave much time for fundraising. So – if you’d like to help out children with leukemia (you aren’t in favor of child cancer… right?) here is my personal fundraising page for the event. 100% of the funding is spent helping Michigan families and $0.83 of each dollar donated goes to patients and their families. I’ll be fronting the $100 minimum donation, and getting matching funds from my employer – so Children’s Leukemia Foundation of Michigan gets $200 off the bat.

Even with short notice, however, writing this weblog has given me some tools for quick movie marathon organization. I’ll use my favorite automated movie marathon scheduler as soon as showtimes are available, and I’ll be packing my movie marathon survival kit. I’m looking forward to trying disposable toothbrushes for the first time – because that is just science in action right there!

I’ll be blogging the experience and posting photos (and video?) shortly after the event. Looking forward to it!

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.

Video Game Movie Marathon Playlist

I mentioned in my last video game movie marathon post that you could spend 24 hours just watching video from the Final Fantasy XIII trilogy of video games. That got me wondering. What other video games “movies” are out there on YouTube? Which have stories worth watching? Which come with no annoying nerd commentary?

Lists of Video Games With Great Stories

The internet has some opinions on what video games have the best stories. Two sources seemed to be helpful the most helpful.

The first is the WatchMojo video embedded below. This video takes you on a visual tour of video games recognized as having great stories.

The second was this article from geek.com. It not only identified video games with great stories, it provides YouTube videos directly in the article. Nice!

The Video Game Movie Marathon Playlist

Based on these two sources, I created a YouTube playlist containing the “movie editions” of 23 unique video games, clocking in at 114 hours of content. That’s 4.75 days of video game movie watching. For reference, Breaking Bad is 2 days and 14 hours. That’s just half the time of this playlist.

Factoring in a good eight hours of sleep per day, that is seven days of video game movies! Now there’s a movie marathon!

I’ve embedded the playlist below for your clicking pleasure. I’ve already started with the first movie, The Last of Us, and have been enjoying it. Good luck, and happy watching!

Video Game Movie Marathon

Video games don’t seem to translate very well to movies. Rotten Tomatoes’ list of the 25 “best” movies adapted from video games has exactly zero movies rated “fresh”. And boy oh boy, some of the “best” are also some of the absolute worst cinema has to offer.

For this reason, a video game movie marathon may be ill-advised. The funny thing is, some video games are so rich in story, character, and special effects, it’s a shame they need to be “adapted” to a movie format in the first place. The first video games that come to mind are the Final Fantasy series of games.
Nintendo Power - Final Fantasy GuideWith completion times of 40 hours and up, players spend a lot of time in just a single Final Fantasy game. A lot of this time is fighting monsters, but a lot of this time is also getting to know the characters and driving forward the storyline. While monster-fighting is fun, it always seemed like a shame to me that the story couldn’t be replayed on “auto-pilot”, so to speak, to relive some of the plot.

Thanks to YouTube, it looks like I need not worry any longer. People out there with a lot of time and video editing skills have composed “movie” versions of video game play-throughs. They are called Let’s Play, and there are entire archives of them.

So, getting back to Final Fantasy, a quick search reveals three YouTube movies playing through Final Fantasy XIII, Final Fantasy XIII-2, and Final Fantasy XIII-3 (as an example – there are others). Even edited down to remove all monster-fight scenes, these movies are about eight, seven, and nine hours long, respectively. Collectively, they total 24 hours and 47 minutes of content. It’s a movie marathon in just three YouTube videos!

I’ve embedded each movie below for your convenience. The next time you have 24 hours to spare, and don’t want to invest brain cells in learning how to control characters, manage items, or defeat monsters, this is the movie marathon for you!

Final Fantasy XIII


Final Fantasy XIII-2

Final Fantasy XIII-3

Photo by bochalla