Quick Links: Report from a Godzilla Movie Marathon

Remember how I said a while back that the Shōwa Godzilla series would make for an excellent 24-hour movie marathon? Well, the fellas over at Flickering Myth did it! It clocked in at a brutal 26 hours and 6 minutes, and it wasn’t just Tokyo that was devastated:

The other side of the coin is that, perhaps watching 15 movies in a row is just too much. Speaking to co-founder Jon yesterday he said that if we’d split this marathon into two, he may have enjoyed it a bit more than he did. I’m inclined to agree. I don’t think we’ll be doing one of this length again…Perhaps if my co-founders had seen each film individually this could have been a different story, but as it stands I didn’t convert them to the kaiju way of cinema.

These guys have had six other respectable 12+ hour movie marathons too. I’ll have to check out their other reports from the front lines.

Quick Links: Summer Movie Marathon 2013

A little over a year ago, I attended the Hollywood Nights 24 hour movie marathon at Celebration Cinema North in Grand Rapids. Crazy coincidence – this guy had a spontaneous in-theater movie marathon only a week after I did.

I thoroughly approve of his rationale of why he did it (“because it’s there!”). From his article:

It was interesting to see how people responded to the notion of seeing five movies in theatres in a single day. My initial instinct was that it was madness, an opinion shared by many others; others thought it wasn’t a big deal, remembering Oscar marathons or film festivals where they sat in theatres for just as long if not longer. What everyone could agree on, however, is that it’s decidedly abnormal, which is why I jumped on the chance to attempt it once I realized it was temporally possible.

I also enjoyed his observations on the practicalities of the marathon and his general observations on culture through the lens of 2013 movies.Give his article a read when you get a chance.

Image by Miles McNutt

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.

Hollywood Nights Movie Marathon Returning In October

Children’s Leukemia Foundation of Michigan is holding their annual “Hollywood Nights” 24-hour movie marathon at the Emagine theater in Novi, Michigan on October 10-11th, 2014.

I had a great time at the 2013 Hollywood Nights Movie Marathon in Grand Rapids. I heartily recommend attending the marathon in Novi if you can. Bonus: the Emagine theater in Novi has luxury seats and cocktail service!

I’m not so sure I’ll make it, what with the birth of my third child in the same timeframe. So if I don’t make it, tell me how it went!

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.