The Fredösphere

I wanted badly to comment on this post over at 2Blowhards but I was prevented from doing so for some reason.  So I'll post it here.  The post and comment thread described various algorithms for culling movies quickly when flipping through them at the DVD store.  The post was an excellent excuse for me to mention something that I've been noticing for a while now.  Read the post, then imagine the following as one of the comments:

Gil is on the right track: there is no longer any excuse to be using other movie-selection algorithm now that collaborative filtering is available.  (I recommend Movie Lens.)

But to answer the question, I hate what I like to refer to as the ol' Hierarchical Head Size movie poster.  The cheesy painting where the top stars have huge heads, and all the other actors (or, in some cases, sheep) in the movie peer over their shoulders with heads sized according to how much they were paid. Its a reliable sign the movie is a middle-of-the-road, big studio, focus-grouped ending, super-safe, five-credited screenwriters kind of movie. (Although, I admit the first Star Wars movie poster suffered from Hierarchical Head Size, and I loved that movie--but in retrospect the artwork obviously doesn't belong, what with Princess Leia's slinky pose, don't you agree?  Yet, later [earlier??  Gaah!] installments of the series definitely do deserve the Hierarchical Head treatment.  Oh, and speaking of Star Wars posters....)

Labels: movie