Category Archives: Movies

Remaking the Classics

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Get it?

I think someone could remake Spartacus as a present-day story of a huge conglomerate, corrupted by its greed, and how it crushes an attempt by some employees to split off and form their own company. The Roman Senate becomes the board of directors/senior management, who like to make the junior employees (or interns) try and complete projects while competing with each other for resources. The loser gets a really bad evaluation and it kills his chance for advancement. A worker nicknamed Spartacus comes along with this wonderful idea and wants to break off and form a new company. He starts winning employees over to him in an attempt to break away, but HyperMegaCorp deems his idea to be their intellectual property and sends their army of lawyers after him.

The end is where the CEO wants to fire Spartacus personally, but all the rebellious employees claim to be him, so he fires everyone. But Spartacus’s idea survives, uncontrolled by the company.

Name that Conundrum

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I had a vague notion of the quandry, and now know that it has a name: the Napoleon Dynamite problem, and it’s throwing a monkey wrench into a Netflix competition to improve their recommendation engine, i.e. the algorithm that tells you if you likes movie X, then you should check out movie Y

“Napoleon Dynamite” is very weird and very polarizing. It contains a lot of arch, ironic humor, including a famously kooky dance performed by the titular teenage character to help his hapless friend win a student-council election. It’s the type of quirky entertainment that tends to be either loved or despised. The movie has been rated more than two million times in the Netflix database, and the ratings are disproportionately one or five stars.

Which means that there aren’t really reliable indicators to tell anyone of they’ll like the movie. I wonder if anyone has applied chaos theory to explain the bifurcation. Or maybe it’s just acausal.

(I couldn’t get through more than 15 minutes of N D — it’s not my brand of stupidfunny, or maybe I just wasn’t in the right mood)

via kottke

Worst … Idea … Ever

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Worst Idea Ever: Ridley Scott is Directing Monopoly

Ridley Scott is now OFFICIALLY attached to direct a big screen movie based on Hasbro’s popular board game Monopoly. Corpse Bride/Monster House scribe Pamela Pettler has been hired to write the script. Scott had been developing the project with plans to produce since June 2007.

Whaaaa?

I’m having a hard time imagining the scene where the doggie rolls doubles to get out of jail.

Who You Gonna Call?

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EPA Shuts Down Local Ghost-Entrapment Business

Citing unsafe practices and potential toxic contamination, the Environmental Protection Agency shut down a small ghost- entrapment operation in downtown Manhattan today, and had four of the business’ spectral-containment specialists arrested in the process.

According to EPA agent Walter Peck, employees of the company—located in an old fire station in the Tribeca neighborhood of New York—had repeatedly refused to grant him access to their storage facility, which posed a health hazard to the surrounding community.