Bang for Your Butt

Tangent One
I'm a bit of amateur stat geek. I pay close attention to the weekend box office results, as evidenced by the summer box office games I've devised and such. I play (and win!) fantasy football every year, much to the disdain of a certain Mrs. Fletch, and I dive into analyzing the prior year's stats every July/August in preparation for the upcoming draft(s). I'm a baseball fan and am familiar, if not an expert, with terms like OPS and VORP. I spend all day in Excel and/or Access.

You get the picture.

Tangent Two
If you've read reviews here for some time, you've probably seen me rant a time or twelve about the length of some films these days. Sam Raimi's insufferable 139-minute Spider-Man 3. Gore Verbinski's 169-minute (!!!) third Pirates of the Carribean movie. Even great films like Paul Thomas Anderson's 158-minute masterpiece There Will Be Blood could stand to have a little fat lopped off the top. In my world, movies should not be shorter than 85 minutes and should not be longer than 120 unless there's a really good reason; if you can't tell your story in two hours (give or take a few minutes), then I just might have a problem with you, and my butt most certainly does.

Tangential Combination
So anyway, sometime over the last few days, someone asked me if I was going to see Public Enemies. "I dunno, probably" was probably my answer; the trailer looks ok and all, but I just had this bad feeling about the Johnny Depp-starring, Michael Mann-directed crime saga.

And then I realized what the problem was. Mann doesn't make bad movies - after all, his 11 features have an average IMDb rating of 7.3, just below Steven Spielberg's 7.4. But damned if his movies aren't long as sh*t, and they seem to have been getting longer as his career's gone on. Have a look:

Movie	Rating	Length
The Jericho Mile	7.5	97
Thief	7.2	122
The Keep	5.7	96
Manhunter	7.2	119
The Last of the Mohicans	7.7	112
Heat	8.2	171
The Insider	8.0	157
Collateral	7.8	120
Ali	6.5	157
Miami Vice	6.0	134
Public Enemies	8.7	140

It should be noted that the score for Public Enemies is artificially high (as most new releases on IMDb are) and will likely be below 8.0 by Monday.

Short story long, what I longed for was a metric that told me whether a movie was worth the toll it took on my butt. Not to say that any movie literally bothers my butt to sit through, but you know what I mean - even during a movie like the aforementioned There Will Be Blood, you'll probably find yourself stealing more than a few glances at your watch, wondering just how close to the end this thing is. Or maybe you're sick of 3-hour movies that all but guarantee a trip to the restroom and some missed plot points.

A large factor in deciding what movies I want to see is who is directing, so I figured this metric would work better if we could look at a director's body of work and assign a figure, in the end deciding whether or not they are a Friend of Your Butt (FYB) or an Enemy of Your Butt (EYB). (Before we proceed, please head over to the gutter, lean over, and pick up your mind from it. Thanks. Jerk.) Then, when director X has a new film that comes out, we can look at his/her Butt Score to help determine whether or not it's worth it to see their film in the theater or to maybe wait for a time when a pause button and/or restroom is but a few paces away. But how to quantify that accurately...

In the end, the best solution is sometimes the simplest. To determine a single film's Butt Score, all you do is take the length (in minutes) and divide it by the IMDb rating. I realize IMDb rating's might not be the best judge of a film's value, but a) it's close enough and b) so long as the same scale is used across the board, the results should keep their integrity (integrity, ha ha). Again, let's use Mann as an example:

Movie	Rating	Length	Butt Score
The Jericho Mile	7.5	97	12.93
Thief	7.2	122	16.94
The Keep	5.7	96	16.84
Manhunter	7.2	119	16.53
The Last of the Mohicans	7.7	112	14.55
Heat	8.2	171	20.85
The Insider	8.0	157	19.63
Collateral	7.8	120	15.38
Ali	6.5	157	24.15
Miami Vice	6.0	134	22.33
Public Enemies	8.7	140	16.09

The lower the Butt Score, the better. A great example of this can be seen with The Jericho Mile and The Keep. They clock in at 97 and 96 minutes, respectively (identical), but thanks to a much better rating, Jericho has an impressive 12.93 Butt Score. Of the 69 films I've looked at thus far, the average is 17.37, and only nine were lower than 12.93. Here in the infancy of this metric, the determination of a director's FYB/EYB rating will depend on where their body of work falls in relation to that average score; to do this, I'm taking tossing out their highest and lowest Butt Scores and averaging the rest. Michael Mann, as is turns out, isn't as bad as I might have thought, thanks to the high quality of his work, but the survey says that he is still an Enemy of Your Butt, with a Combined Butt Score of 17.88.

So that's the crux of it. I figure I'll use this brilliant/awful new metric as the springboard for a new feature where I occasionally inform you on the Enemy/Friend status of a topical director. In the meantime, here are a few other bodies of work:

Quentin Tarantino

Movie	Rating	Length	Butt Score
Reservoir Dogs	8.4	99	11.79
Death Proof	7.3	90	12.33
Kill Bill, Vol. 1	8.2	111	13.54
Kill Bill, Vol. 2	8.0	136	17.00
Pulp Fiction	8.9	154	17.30
Inglorious Basterds	8.3	148	17.83
Jackie Brown	7.6	154	20.26

Combined Butt Score: 15.66
Quentin Tarantino is a Friend of Your Butt

Michael Bay

Movie	Rating	Length	Butt Score
Bad Boys	6.5	118	18.15
The Rock	7.2	136	18.89
Transformers	7.4	144	19.46
The Island	6.9	136	19.71
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen	6.6	150	22.73
Bad Boys II	6.2	147	23.71
Armageddon	6.0	150	25.00
Pearl Harbor	5.4	183	33.89

Combined Butt Score: 21.58
Michael Bay is a Enemy of Your Butt (which is the least surprising news I've heard all day; Pearl Harbor had the highest Butt Score of any film I looked at...by far. 2nd worst was Armageddon...)

Wes Anderson

Movie	Rating	Length	Butt Score
Rushmore	7.8	93	11.92
The Darjeeling Limited	7.3	91	12.47
Bottle Rocket	7.2	91	12.64
The Royal Tenenbaums	7.6	110	14.47
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou	7.2	119	16.53

Combined Butt Score: 13.19
Wes Anderson is a Friend of Your Butt (of the six directors I looked at, Anderson had the best CBS. Rushmore placed 4th overall, with Rob Reiner's This is Spinal Tap the clubhouse leader with a scant 10.25 Butt Score. Kudos, Rob Reiner...and irony.)


So...I'm insane, aren't I? Be honest.

And then...

Fletch's Film Review: The Darjeeling Limited

They say that familiarity breeds contempt.

I wouldn't go that far when describing Wes Anderson's fifth feature, The Darjeeling Limited, but I will say that familiarity, with not only Anderson's style but with his repertoire of actors, breeds...well, exactly the feeling that Anderson's films usually give me: nostalgic melancholy (or is that melancholic nostalgia?).

This is all a long way of saying two things. First, that, Anderson needs to branch out or change some things up lest he be deemed irrelevant in the near future, and second, that the audience's familiarity with Owen Wilson (and his suicide attempt), star or co-star in four of the five Anderson features, lends a certain sadness to the film, not to mention serving as a giant distraction.

Primarily, though, it's that Limited feels as though it's been done before, and by Anderson. Personally, I love the group of actors (and the choice of music Anderson uses) that includes Jason Schwartzman, both Wilson brothers, Bill Murray, Anjelica Huston, et al, but when so many of them are together (and even sharing some of the same dynamics from the earlier films), Darjeeling is put in a handicap prior to the first frame being shown. Toss in a few slow-motion "meaningful" walking/running scenes set to early punk/Britpop, and you have the recipe for a film that looks a lot like something you've already seen. (However, at the risk of sounding like a hypocrite, I must add that this outing felt a bit minimalist, almost like Anderson-lite, and could have benefited from more of his signature obsessive attention-to-detail. There are a few instances here, like the father's luggage that is fought over by the three brothers, but that's about it.)

Despite the way this must sound, I did enjoy The Darjeeling Limited and would like to see it again. However lacking it may be in originality and story (there isn't much of one), it makes up for it in a number of ways, from the writing to the setting to the likability and charm of its three stars (Brody is a welcome addition, though isn't given much to work with). Additionally, there are some surprises - Wilson's real life events notwithstanding, there is a heavier emphasis on emotion, manifested mostly in an extended sequence involving an out-of-nowhere tragedy and a flashback showing the brothers prior to their estrangement.

In the end, though, your familiarity with Anderson's work with probably most reflect your take on Darjeeling. Namely, the more you've seen (and presumably liked), the more disappointed you'll be this time. Conversely, if you're a relative newcomer, you just might notice more than a grizzled veteran would, as we are no doubt somewhat immune to his filmmaking wizardry. And if you never liked his work before? Well, you probably won't like this, either.

Fletch's Film Rating:

"You seem a decent fellow. I hate to kill you."

And then...