Leonard Richardson's Blog, page 9

Direct Observation of the MST3K-IMDB Effect

The MST3K-IMDB effect, first hypothesized in 2011, is the effect on a movie's IMDB rating caused solely by its having appeared on Mystery Science Theater 3000. A bad movie isn't made any worse by being on MST3K, but MST3K shows movies in the context of a fiction where they're an instrument of torture. You can model an episode of MST3K as a negative advertisement, designed to make the viewer feel negatively about a movie they'd never heard of before. The MST3K-IMDB effect measures the 'success' of the negative ad.

Previously, the MST3K-IMDB effect could only be observed through its gravitational tug on one movie out of a director's oeuvre. But in 2017, Mystery Science Theater: The Return took movies that for years had laid obscurely on IMDB and turned them into "MST3K movies". Thanks to my trusty 2015 IMDB data dump, I'm in a position to compare the ratings of all these movies before and after they were on MST3K, providing the first direct images of the MST3K-IMDB effect.

First, here's my control group: a comparison of the 2015 and 2018 ratings for some random movies that weren't on MST3K:TR. As you can see, IMDB ratings for old movies are normally very stable, not changing by more than a couple percent over three years. The trend is generally positive, though the sample size is too small to say whether that means anything.

Title
2015 rating
2015 votes
2018 rating
2018 votes
Percentage change in rating

Night of the Lepus 3.9 2782 4 3484 2%
Embryo 4.9 824 5 1052 2%
The Ninth Configuration 7.3 3486 7.2 4893 -2%
Gorgo 5.5 1846 5.6 2479 1%
O Fantasma (2000) 5.9 1859 5.7 2449 -4%
They���re A Weird Mob 6.6 550 6.6 686 0%

My methodology: the first two movies in that list are the sort of thing you see on MST3K. The Ninth Configuration is a more highbrow obscure film. Gorgo was on MST3K a long time ago, so presumably the MST3K-IMDB effect is already priced in. The last two are movies of MST3K-level obscurity chosen at random.

Now, the moment I've all been waiting for, the experimental group. This table compares the 2015 and 2018 ratings of the movies that appeared in the first season of MST3K:TR. I've also included the rating of the MST3K:TR episode itself, as well as the number of votes IMDB used to calculate each rating.

Here, the percentage change in rating is due to the MST3K-IMDB effect. This is the percentage of a movie's previous rating that it lost just by being mocked on MST3K.

Title
2015 rating
2015 votes
2018 rating
2018 votes
Percentage change in rating
MST3K:TR episode rating
MST3K:TR episode votes

Reptilicus 4 1599 3.6 2962 -10% 7.8 498
Cry Wilderness 5.2 37 2 877 -62% 8.3 819
The Time Travelers 6 753 5.1 1682 -15% 7.4 256
Avalanche 4.2 594 3.7 1352 -12% 8 261
The Beast of Hollow Mountain 5 509 4.2 1182 -16% 7.4 230
Starcrash 4 2946 3.9 4699 -3% 7.7 235
The Land Time Forgot 5.7 3085 5.7 4558 0% 7.4 197
The Loves of Hercules 3.2 349 3 787 -7% 7.2 181
Yongary 4.3 592 3.9 1102 -10% 7.8 201
Wizards of the Lost Kingdom 2.6 502 2.6 1037 0% 7.8 187
Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II 1.8 297 1.8 716 0% 7.4 168
Carnival Magic 3.8 120 2.4 463 -37% 7.2 167
The Christmas that Almost Wasn't 5.5 204 3.8 541 -31% 7.1 148
At the Earth's Core 5.2 2276 5.2 3410 0% 7.2 134

The MST3K-IMDB effect is real, but it's not a constant force like gravity. In the control group we saw movie ratings vary up and down, seemingly at random. With MST3K:TR movies the trend is clearly down. But for five of the fourteen movies we see no effect, or an effect so small that it could have been due to chance.

I wasn't expecting this result! I don't see a pattern in the five movies that lack an MST3K-IMDB effect; they aren't the best-rated movies or the worst, they weren't in better- or worse-rated episodes of MST3K, they aren't from a different time period than the others. Sometimes MST3K just doesn't change peoples' opinion about a movie.

But sometimes it does. Take a look at Cry Wilderness, which lost over half of its IMDB rating due to being on the highest-rated by episode of MST3K:TR by far. It went from a regular bad movie to being Manos-level. Part of this is just that its pre-MST3K rating of 5.2 was taken from a very small sample of just 37 votes—the kind of super-obscure film I usually omit in IMDB analyses. But two other movies—Carnival Magic and The Christmas that Almost Wasn't—also have very large rating shifts.

Here's the closest I can come to a unified theory of what happened to those three movies. I took the number of post-2015 votes for each MST3K:TR movie and divided the post-2015 change in IMDB rating by that number of votes. This gives a guess at an incremental per-person MST3K-IMDB effect. So, every time someone saw a movie on MST3K and then rated the movie, we can say its rating went down by an average number of stars.

For most of the movies this number is zero (people gave the movie the same rating as if it hadn't been on MST3K at all) or infinitesimal (a lot of people voted and the IMDB rating went down a little bit), on the order of -1.0*10-3 stars. But three stand out. For Cry Wilderness the per-person MST3K-IMDB effect is -3.8*10-3 stars. For Carnival Magic it's -4.1*10-3. And for The Christmas that Almost Wasn't it's an amazing (relatively speaking) -5.0*10-3 stars.

So in a sense the negative ad campaign against The Christmas that Almost Wasn't was the most successful one here. That was the episode that got people the most riled up against the movie they'd just watched. But that movie's IMDB rating didn't go down as much as Cry Wilderness's, because the Cry Wilderness episode got more people to actually go vote the movie down.

But beyond those three movies, the per-person MST3K-IMDB effect is a lot smaller. What's the difference? Are those three movies unusually MST3K-compatible? Are those episodes meaner? It probably has something to do with the content of the movie, since the two Wizards of the Lost Kingdom movies have identical MST3K-IMDB effects of zero. Beyond that, I don't know.

Obviously there is no real propaganda campaign; no one set out to lower these obscure movies' ratings by making fun of them on Netflix. But I think this is a natural experiment showing what can happen to ratings and metrics even when the stakes are very low and no one has malicious intent.

Bot Muse

I finished reading through Seeds #2 and the last article was a treat: "Popular Visual Descriptions of Early Generative Systems" by James Ryan, a survey of illustrations used in 1950s and 1960s media to convey the concept of generative art. Lots of botniks taking jobs from beatniks, but the best bit is the wind-up muse of the "computer poet", taken from an old New York Times article:

Dinosaur Space

I've been slowly reading through Issue #2 of Seeds, a zine created for 2017's Procjam, and I just encountered the fabulous page 81, where Elle Sullivan shows off the amazing Dinosaur Generator. It parameterizes dinosaur anatomy to explore the space of plausible dinosaur bodies.

A follow-up project, THE tinySAURUS GENERATOR, brings cute pixel dinosaurs to Twitter. I like the dinos, I like the detailed explanation, and I like the technique of having multiple templates, instead of trying to make one uber-template covering the entire creative space.

The Crummy.com Review of Things: 2017

For many years now I've published a feature titled "The Year in 2017" and come up empty. But I'm happy to report that we've just completed a year that was chock-full of 2017. Enjoy, and here's to a 2017-ful 2018!

Film

I saw fifty-three films in 2017, and twenty-six of them (plus one short) were good enough to be immortalized in Film Roundup Roundup. Of movies I saw for the first time in 2017, here are my top ten:


Get Out (2017)
Miracle Mile (1988)
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)
Logan Lucky (2017)
Hidden Figures (2017)
Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi (2017)
Coco (2017)
Cops and Robbers (1973)
The Teacher (2016)
Trafic (1971)

In particular, Get Out and Miracle Mile are just what we need right now: rom-coms that turn into horror movies.

Literature

The Crummy.com Book of the Year is Democracy for Realists by Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels, a survey of the political science literature that aims to figure out what is actually going on in peoples' heads when they vote.

Other highly recommended books I finished this year:


The Broken Road, a posthumously released title by Patrick Leigh Fermor that closes out his incredibly purple walking travelogue.
How Not to Network a Nation by Benjamin Peters
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
Sourdough by Robin Sloan
SPQR by Mary Beard
Deep Undercover: My Secret Life and Tangled Allegiances as a KGB Spy in America by Jack Barsky (cf.)
Dungeon Hacks by David L. Craddock

Games

Not a lot of games played this year. I think the only new board game I played in 2017 was season 2 of Pandemic Legacy. We're not even halfway through the year and at the moment I'm really angry at the game, so not the best time to ask me for my opinion.

The Crummy.com Game of the Year is "Streets of Rogue", obtained through a Humble Bundle. It combines the combinatoric item explosion of Nethack with the immature mayhem and actual explosions of "Grand Theft Auto". It feels like the best possible VGA DOS game.

Also highly recommended: "Flinthook", "Oxygen Not Included", and "XCOM 2" (but only with the War of the Chosen DLC, which makes it an expensive proposition). I played "Frog Fractions 2" for a few hours, loved the creativity and the ZZT framing device, but when I stopped playing it I didn't pick it up again.

Bots

The 2017 bot situation is complicated. I put all of my bots on botsin.space, a Mastodon instance devoted to bots. (I also moved my main social media presence to botsin.space, using Twitter only for announcements.)

To help me out with the move I wrote a really neat framework called botfriend, which makes it easy to run some bot code on a schedule and publish the result to Mastodon and/or Twitter. I ported all my bots to this new system and got rid of a ton of duplicate code.

I even wrote three new Mastodon-exclusive bots:


Mashteroids, a simple port of the Mashteroids feature on crummy.com.
The Supreme Bot, which remixes transcripts of Supreme Court oral arguments.
Fusion Bot, a Steven Universe fan bot and an extremely rare situation where a Markov chain is thematically appropriate.

I think botfriend is really useful if you manage a lot of bots, and pretty easy to get set up if you're familiar with Python, but I haven't polished it or done a big promotional push, because my big initial impetus was to stop the situation where each new bot I create makes Twitter a more interesting deathtrap. Once I got to that point, I decided all of my spare time should be devoted to finishing Mine. So there haven't been any new bots for a while, and doing a proper rollout of botfriend is a project I'm putting off until after this novel is done, just like other fun things like buying a Switch and playing a bunch of Mario.

Other accomplishments

I gave a couple talks early in the year at Penguicon but I think my best talk of 2017 was Behold, mortal, the origins of robotfindskitten... at Roguelike Celebration.

The Library Simplified team and I made a lot of progress towards creating a new library ebook ecosystem, though not as much as I'd hoped. There are now libraries in Maryland and California in the SimplyE system, and we've got code contributions coming in from outside NYPL.

I wrote four short stories in 2017: "Plain Sight", "Two Spacesuits" (probably the best one), "The Unicorn Cleanse", and "Continuity". No sales!

Situation Normal is still out to publishers. Mine is well past the halfway mark and I hope to finish a draft in the next few months, after which, botfriend, Mario, etc.

I saw the solar eclipse from Nashville, which was a lot of fun.

I kept my weight more or less under control in 2017, with the happy result that I recently bought a heavily discounted topcoat to deal with the winter chill, and unlike what happened eleven years ago, the topcoat looks pretty good on me. However, yesterday I wore it with a light-colored sweater and just like in 2006 I looked like a slob who had stolen someone else's topcoat. The difference being that I'm now in my late thirties and I don't care as much.

Film Roundup Special: Miracle Mile

Way back in June I saw Miracle Mile (1988), and loved it, but didn't really review it because my recommendation is that you go in knowing nothing except that it's a very dark
horror movie. Now it's been six months and I'm going to talk about it, so skip this post if you want to try going in cold.

Miracle Mile evokes the fear its protagonist is feeling by making the experience of watching the movie congruent with Harry's plot arc. As he flails around looking for a loophole in
the end of the world, you're flailing around trying to figure out what kind of movie this is and how to watch it. The normal plot components from a zombie
movie—the vehicles, the weapons, the hyper-competent Denise
Crosby—are shown and then taken away. Landa (Crosby) leaves our
protagonist in the dust and Harry spends the rest of the movie trying to
catch up with her. Of course, it doesn't work, and even if it did,
it's far from clear that Landa will live much longer than Harry. This
is the nightmare where you try things and none of them work.

It is also my personal nightmare. I grew up in the Los Angeles of
this movie and my
father's postcards: Wilshire Boulevard, Fairfax, the La Brea Tar Pits. It's a
place of bright lights and high contrast: malls
frosted in neon, sunsets
and fountains. Film
noir shows the corruption beneath this bright facade; Miracle
Mile allows us to believe the facade, shows the blossoming of
love, and then just blows it all up.

This is what to be afraid of
in 1988, and now. This thing we've built could just go away, forever,
in moments, for no reason at all. The bad things in
other movies are just metaphors for this.

The worst part in Miracle Mile isn't even the nuclear
explosions; those are the gravestone on a civilization that has already
collapsed. It collapses in minutes, like, when Harry's in the bathroom
or something. There's a pretty good comic miniseries called "Memetic"
which covers the same ground but also introduces a lot of body horror,
so YMMV.

In a normal emergency people will band together and help each
other, but Miracle Mile says that in the apocalypse all bets
are off. This Prisoner's Dilemma will not have any further iterations,
so you might as well go out with one last Defect. Despite it all, a
few people choose Cooperate. It does no good, but at least they die
well. That's what passes for hope in this movie.

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today

Way back in the nineties, after it was clear that News You Can Bruise was an ongoing concern, I had the idea that on December 20, 2017, twenty years after the first "notebook entry" that could be called a blog post, I would write an entry with a Sgt. Pepper's reference in the title. This idea thrilled me, more for the glimpse it gave me of the future than anything else. But I was never so thrilled that I, say, set a reminder to make this post, or figured out anything to put in here besides the title and "wow, twenty years, huh?"

So, I missed the deadline by a week and I still don't really have anything to put in here apart from that title joke, which I now find corny, but I'm doing this anyway as a promise kept to my earlier self. This is the 7905th post to News You Can Bruise, and it's not even the least interesting one!

Christmas Movie Counterprogramming

There are Christmas movies, movies that aspire to fill viewers with
the Christmas spirit. And then there are movies that are set
during Christmas but would rather do something else with your
time. The canonical example of the first type of movie is It's A
Wonderful Life (1946); the canonical example of the second is
Die Hard (1988).

If you're sick of watching It's A Wonderful Life every year,
then mixing it up with Die Hard might be nice, but once you
open that door you've got a lot of additional possibilities, and
watching Die Hard every year just to stick it to Capra fans is
silly. As a public service, I've used IMDB data to find the top-rated
'Christmas' movies for use in your holiday counterprogramming.

I used an IMDB data dump (see postscript) to find every movie
tagged with the christmas keyword, excluding documentaries,
movies with 'Christmas' or 'Holiday' in the title, and movies in
Wikipedia's "American
Christmas Films" category. I went through what remained and picked
out films that were set as a whole over the Christmas holidays or otherwise had a pervasive Christmas element—a
lot of top movies like Goodfellas and Full Metal Jacket and Citizen Kane seem to only have one memorable Christmas scene. Here are all the
matching films with an IMDB rating of 8.0 or higher.


The Godfather (1972)
The Apartment (1960)
Pel��sky (1999)
Pl��cido (1961)
Jagten (2012)
The Thin Man (1934)
The Lion in Winter (1968)
Twelve Monkeys (1995)
The King's Speech (2010)
Ma nuit chez Maud (1969)
In Bruges (2008)
C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005)
Brazil (1985)

If I wanted to watch a movie that fits this niche it would
definitely be The Apartment, and The Godfather is kind
of a marginal case, so I'm pretty happy with these results.

Postscript: unfortunately, IMDB changed their data format
recently to a format that is a lot easier to parse than what they had
before, but which is missing important pieces of information like
movie ratings and keywords, which makes a project like this impossible and renders the dataset as a whole nearly devoid of interest. It's been a fun ride, IMDB data
dumps. From Ghostbusters Past to Worst Best Picture to The MST3K-IMDB Effect to You Can't Be Serious to I Should Be In That Spoof to Where's that Golden Age? to Worst Episode Ever, the old, hacky, IMDB
dumps from an FTP site have provided me with quality data and my
readers with much entertainment.

But we all knew it was only a matter of time until someone at
Amazon said "Wait a minute..." and had a meeting with someone at
IMDB. So from this point on, all of my IMDB projects will use the last
full IMDB dump I got, for Ghostbusters Past in early 2015.

How Game Titles Work: 2017 Update

In 2009 as I was writing Constellation Games I researched how game titles work on a rhetorical level. I published my results as a six-part series of blog posts: 1 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. This post is a summary of that post and a bringing it up to date for 2017, based on a talk I gave at Penguicon in March. (Slides are here.)

In my 2009 research I discovered a basic tension: games are works of art, so there's a tendency to name them like movies, but in our society games are packaged and sold like laundry detergent, so there's a tendency to name games like detergents.

Different game-makers resolve this tension differently. In the early days, games were named after real-world activities, or about the very act of playing a game mediated through a computer; otherwise, it was difficult to get people to understand what was going on. You don't see that much anymore; nowadays it's common for games to have names that resemble (in formal terms) the names of 19th-century novels, laundry detergents, episodes of TV shows, or rock albums.

But all games have two things in common: the second person and the present tense. A movie can be the story of something that happened to someone else long ago, but a game is always the story of what you are doing right now to complete the feedback loop. So most games are named in the second person present tense, e.g. named after your character within the game.

I originally had to figure out How Game Titles Work because for my story "Mallory" I spent a long time making up titles for six fictional classic arcade games, and despite all the work I was unhappy with the results. The final draft of Constellation Games mentions thirty-three fictional human games, plus thirty-five games made by space aliens from various alien cultures. Since cultural artifacts are created and named by people embedded within that culture, I had to figure out the underlying rules for games so I could apply those rules to the various extraterrestrial cultures. I also worked this process in reverse: came up with a weird game and used it to figure out what kind of culture would create that game.

I decided to update the series because one of my conclusions in 2009 was that shareware games in the 1990s, and indie games generally, have better titles than contemporaneous big-budget games. Since 2009 the indie scene has exploded, so I decided it was time to take another look and see how naming techniques have evolved.

I used the MobyGames API to get the names of all games published since 2009, and went through them looking for interesting names. Although AAA titles still have boring names, indie games have dramatically expanded into more artistic naming spaces. It's now fairly common for a game to have a title that's not in second person ("Papers, Please", "This War of Mine"). More frequent than in 2009, but still not common, is a game whose name is not in the present tense ("Gone Home", "Thomas Was Alone"). The games themselves are still second-person-present-tense, but their titles play with tense and person to zoom in or out emotionally.

Even more common, though, are games whose names transcend synecdoche to convey the mood of the game rather than referencing specific elements: "The Flame in the Flood", "No Man's Sky", "Sir, You Are Being Hunted". An older example of this is "Grim Fandango" and I think this quote from a Tim Schafer interview provides some insight into the naming process as well as the function of a game's name:

"The original title, when I was pitching it, was Deeds of the Dead.. The Last Siesta was one [working title]. Dirt Nap I think was in there somewhere..."

"And then I finally came up with the name and was like, 'I'm so smart! This is the best name ever!' I remember I ran out of my office and I told someone... [a]nd they were like 'That's terrible. You'll never sell a game called Grim Fandango. What does that even mean?' But I've always loved it... I mean Grim Fandango just as a metaphor for what? For life or death depending on how you're looking at it."

Schaefer starts off with punny titles, like you would see in the title of a TV episode, and genre references, like you would see in the title of a film, but he settles on something evocative, like the title of a modern novel. "Deeds of the Dead" sounds kind of goofy, "Dirt Nap" sounds more hard-boiled. "Grim Fandango" evokes grandeur, tragedy, and inevitability.

In my talk I performed some close readings of really good game names, and if you post your favorites in comments I'll do the same here, as I did in the comments to part 5. I want to close with an example from 2009: "Just Dance". This is different from every other title I've encountered, because its job is to convey to a game-averse audience that this isn't "really" a game at all! Other game titles make you play a character or perform a job, but here you just dance! C'mon, give it a try! A very friendly title.

Behold, mortal, the origins of robotfindskitten...

I wrote a thirty-minute talk for the Roguelike Celebration about good old robotfindskitten. Then I saw that I only had a fifteen-minute timeslot to deliver my talk, and I cut it way, way down. As you might expect, that made the talk a lot better; what had started out as a kinda rambling history was boiled down into an exploration of what it means for a game to be good.

Here's my transcript of the talk as prepared for delivery: Behold, mortal, the origins of robotfindskitten...

I went through a lot of archival material to write this talk and I was planning on putting a bunch of the stuff I cut in this blog post, but... I'm pretty happy with the talk as is and there's only a couple pieces of extra material I feel a strong need to share with you.

First, I put up the original DOS binaries and all the source code I could find for the very first version of robotfindskitten, from 1997. I also included the C++ source code for a student project I did a couple months before rfk, which in retrospect probably acted as a dry run for rfk.

Second, I just wanted to highlight the message I wrote in the docs for the 1999 Linux release of rfk: "I like this program a lot. It's fun without being violent."

Second, this sequence of Nethack-related files I had on my BBS (which I ran from 1993 to 1996). This was useful for establishing when I obtained Nethack 3.1.1, a factoid which itself turned out not to be very interesting.


SPOILER.ZIP Size: 22,125 | A complete walkthrough of Nethack! Very
Date: 01/31/94 DL's: 1 | handy!

HACK311.ZIP Size: 749,285 | Nethack! The biggest, most feature-packed
Date: 03/01/94 DL's: 14 | Rogue clone ever!

NETSPOIL.ZIP Size: 129,059 | New versions of the Nethack Spoilers!
Date: 10/27/95 DL's: 7 | Everything you need to know.

NHDECODE.ZIP Size: 4,294 | A handy thing that translates the rumor &
Date: 11/09/95 DL's: 1 | oracle files for Nethack.

I called roguelikes "Rogue clones" back then. (A bit later, I described Angband as a "Nethack clone".)

(Bizarrely, the description file inside SPOILER.ZIP says "A complete walkthrough of Netrunner! Very handy!" They are Nethack spoilers, though. Maybe my co-sysop Andy wrote that description and had Cyberpunk 2020 on his mind.)

August Television Roundup

Yes, here is is, the monthly accounting of all the television I watch. I sure do watch a lot of television.

Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Return (2017): Very comforting. Does a great job of recapturing the original show, by which I mean the Joel show. It's laid-back, more often enjoying the cheesiness of the movie than ripping into it. That is, it's clearly on the Cinematic Titanic branch of the phylogenetic tree as opposed to the RiffTrax branch. I'd actually rate these riffs higher than the Joel-era riffs. There was a lot of Baby Boomer nostalgia in the old shows, and most of the new show's riffs take the present day as their jumping-off point.

No real problems, but I frequently got confused who was talking in the theater because the voices are kind of similar. Thank goodness for closed captions!

Full disclosure: I backed the Kickstarter so my name is in the credits with everone else. I'm the only "Leonard"!

The Great British Baking Show (2013????-2015????): I don't even know which seasons of this show we watched. PBS renamed the show and renumbered the seasons, and the IMDB episode guide just says "Pie", "Cake", "Biscuits" over and over for each year. Anyway, I've never watched a reality show before, and I wouldn't have watched this one except I was promised there's no yelling and the contestants are all nice to each other. And it's great! Really soothes my nerves after a long day of whatever I do all day.

My fave: contestants who use idiosyncratic slang like "get a wiggle on".

Angels In America (2003): We're in the middle of this one so no review yet, but a) it's really heavy, b) it looks like Meryl Streep is going to play a different character in every episode and I'm not sure what that does, dramatically speaking.

Tune in next month, when we'll have the new Twin Peaks, maybe?

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. Every month, Television Roundup presents the Film Spotlight, a listing of the films I saw that month. Of course, films, with their 98-minute running times, cannot compete with the many hours of entertainment that television provides. After all, one of your puny Earth "films" is but a single episode of MST3K. Nevertheless, we honor these bite-sized morsels of entertainment below.



Trafic (1971): I'm glad that at the 2000 Academy Awards this film finally got the recognition it deserved. It's a goofy ride, doesn't drag like Playtime sometimes does, but also never feels like it's saying something Important.

The Enchanted Desna (1964): a.k.a. "Zacharovannaya Desna". Lots of really beautiful photography and the kind of episodic, slow-moving plot that lulls me to sleep. Some nice Tom Sawyer bits in the flashback. There was some audience tittering at the Commie propaganda at the end, but I'm stunned by the imagery and still trying to figure out what it was saying. That's a lot of concrete, comrade. We're damming up the river you grew up on? And that's a good thing? But man, what a huge dam we're building. I'm overwhelmed by man's totally non-hubristic ambition! Maybe I should ask my doctor if communism is right for me. It's a weird mix of "I had to put this in" and "I'm being ironic" and "I really believe this" and "I'm a filmmaker from a different culture from Leonard and I use emotional cues differently".

Cherry 2000 (1987): I went into this movie knowing nothing except it was by the director of Miracle Mile, and it seemed kinda sleazy. And... both of these are true. It's got the beautiful 80s L.A. aesthetic of Miracle Mile, science fictionified into little oases of yuppie or suburbanite heaven, surrounded by very drivable desert. Tons of cool eyeball kicks, especially in the first thirty minutes.

It's also sleazy, and meta-sleazy in how comfortable it is with its sleaziness. The relationship between human and sexbot could have been done a lot better. In fact, I think I did it better, in Constellation Games. Making Cherry into a real character could have made Cherry 2000 really good. When she's a toaster, the movie is real predictable.

In Miracle Mile you think you know what kind of movie you're watching, and then you are WRONG, and that jolt disorients you, and you never recover because the movie keeps throwing you smaller twists. In Cherry 2000 I knew the major plot points as soon as the secondary lead was introduced, and throughout the movie I generally knew what scene was going to happen next. Events and characters happen because they're what happens in this kind of movie. You could cut this movie into a Macgyver episode and hit the same points.

Overall, a missed opportunity. Also, you stick a memory chip into an abandoned robot and it powers up? Shouldn't it also need... power? Lots of hardware/software problems in this movie, is what I'm saying. It's nitpicky, sure, but those details are where the better screenplay could have come from.