It's Rishi

Among other features, IMDB allows users to rate movies. What I’ve noticed for the past several months is that nearly every movie inevitably starts out with a massive number of 10 ratings.

How do you explain the following?

At first glance this rating breakdown exhibits a common phenomenon in user ratings: many users rate the extremes. In this case that would be 1 and 10. However, if you look at most rating breakdowns on IMDB, there is no such polarity. Only a heavy bias of 10 ratings.

Another theory might be that the people who are first to see a movie and rate it online are generally those who are most enthusiastic about the movie. Thus, it is natural that the ratings of their users would be irrationally high.

Yet another theory is, of course, that those involved with marketing the movie are gaming the ratings. IMDB is massively popular site (almost 20M uniques per month according to Compete.com) and many movie-goers use the site’s movie ratings to decide which to see. Moreover, even if a movie studio didn’t intend to game ratings, they are almost forced to simply to keep pace with other movies that do have people gaming its ratings. Anyways, this is just a theory. No proof.

More to come…

A friend of mine just sent me a link to the website of a new indi film “Palo Alto”. The movie takes place in, you guessed it, my hometown Palo Alto, CA. The American Griffiti esque story takes place on the last night of Thanksgiving Break for four college freshman who who grew up in Palo Alto. The creators of the movie are all college students at USC and UCLA who as you also might have guessed are Palo Alto & Menlo Park natives. Even though the movie is a total grassroots effort, the cast does include Ben Savage, some past and future cast members of the “O.C.”, and Tom Arnold (pretty random huh).

“Palo Alto” official website
“Palo Alto” on IMDB

“The era of the blockbuster is so over. The niche is now king, and the entertainment industry – from music to movies to TV – will never be the same.” says Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine.

Mr. Anderson has written an article that clearly articulates a trend in media that you and I have observed over the past few years but since it has been gradual, it may not have struck you as being as dramatic as it truly is.

Let’s look at some facts:

• Twenty-one of the all-time top 100 albums were released in the five-year period between 1996 and 2000. The next five years produced only two
• Time spent listening to the radio is now at a 12-year low, and rock music is among the formats suffering the most.
• The average top 25 blockbusters in any given year so far this decade have accounted for 5 percent less of the total box office gross than in the 1990s, even as they’ve cost 57 percent more to make.
• Today’s top-rated show, American Idol, is watched by just 18 percent of households. During the ’70s, American Idol wouldn’t even have made it to the top 10 with that kind of market share.
• the number of weeks the average best-selling novel remains at the top of the list has fallen by half over the past decade.

OK, enough with the facts. Read the article

I don’t know why it took me so long to finally watch The Aviator, but I finally did and what a treat. I never realized how truly remarkable a man Howard Hughes was. He was “at times an aviator, an engineer, an industrialist, a movie producer, a playboy, an eccentric and one of the wealthiest people in the world”. Hughes was not only a dreamer but he, on many occasions, resolutely risked his entire fortune (and on a few occasions, his life) to realize his dream. I think the best adjective I would use to describe him is fearless. His sheer will power and determination to conquer everything he touched is absolutely inspiring. The Aviator is really a phenomenal tribute to a phenomenal man.

If you haven’t seen the movie, I recommend you do so. In the meantime, read more about Hughes in his Wikipedia article. It’s a shame he never wrote an autobiography as I’m sure that would have been one fascinating read.