Tuesday, May 30, 2006
Didn't sleep well last night, not because of the heat (the house had largely cooled down from the low 30-degree heat of the previous day by the evening), but because some idiot in the area with leftover fireworks from Victoria Day decided to set them off at the time I normally head to sleep. And just when I had settled in, Erika came back at 2am from what turned out to be a 4-hour practice session with the new orchestra she is playing with.
So I spent my sleepless hours finishing off a rough cataloguing of all my movie DVDs. As of this morning, barring anything that may have slipped behind the TV, I have a total of 99 movies on DVD. That's not counting any TV-specific DVDs, or anything that could count as aimed at the kids (which may well be an equal or greater number).
For the heck of it, here's my list:
TITLE | DIRECTOR |
A Day at the Races | Sam Wood |
Adaptation | Spike Jonze |
Æon Flux | Karyn Kusama |
Amadeus | Milos Forman |
Amélie | Jean-Pierre Jeunet |
Animal Crackers | Victor Heerman |
Artificial Intelligence: AI | Steven Spielberg |
Austin Powers in Goldmember | Jay Roach |
Big Trouble in Little China | John Carpenter |
Black Mask | Daniel Lee |
Blade Runner | Ridley Scott |
Bless the Child | Chuck Russell |
Brazil | Terry Gilliam |
Broken Flowers | Jim Jarmusch |
Cast Away | Robert Zemeckis |
Chicago | Rob Marshall |
Cinderella Man | Ron Howard |
Cold Creek Manor | Mike Figgis |
Cold Mountain | Anthony Minghella |
Constantine | Francis Lawrence |
Cowboy Bebop: The Movie | Shinichirô Watanabe |
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon | Ang Lee |
Cutey Honey | Yasuchika Nagaoka |
Dark City | Alex Proyas |
Donnie Darko | Richard Kelly |
Duck Soup | Leo McCarey |
Ed Wood | Tim Burton |
Edward Scissorhands | Tim Burton |
Elephant | Gus Van Sant |
Elizabeth | Shekhar Kapur |
Enter… Zombie King | Stacey Case |
Finding Forrester | Gus Van Sant |
From the Earth to the Moon | Michael Grossman, David |
Gangs of New York | Martin Scorsese |
Gattaca | Andrew Niccol |
Ghost Busters | Ivan Reitman |
Godzilla 2000 | Takao Okawara |
Good Night, and Good Luck | George Clooney |
Gun Crazy | Joseph H. Lewis |
Half Baked | Tamra Davis |
Henry V | Kenneth Branagh |
Hero | Yimou Zhang |
Horse Feathers | Norman Z. McLeod |
House of Flying Daggers | Yimou Zhang |
I Heart Huckabees | David O. Russell |
I, Robot | Alex Proyas |
Kill Bill: Volume 1 | Quentin Tarantino |
Kingdom of Heaven | Ridley Scott |
Kung Fu Hustle | Stephen Chow |
Lost in Space | Stephen Hopkins |
March of the Penguins | Luc Jacquet |
Master and Commander: The Far Side of | Peter Weir |
Millennium Actress | Satoshi Kon |
Minority Report | Steven Spielberg |
Monkey Business | Norman Z. McLeod |
Monty Python and the Holy Grail | Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam |
Monty Python's The Meaning of Life | Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam |
Murder, My Sweet | Edward Dmytryk |
Mystery Men | Kinka Usher |
Ninja Scroll | Yoshiaki Kawajiri, Kevin S |
Out of the Past | Jacques Tourneur |
Phil the Alien | Rob Stefaniuk |
Primer | Shane Carruth |
Revenge of the Pink Panther | Blake Edwards |
Road to Perdition | Sam Mendes |
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead | Tom Stoppard |
Serenity | Joss Whedon |
Shakespeare in Love | John Madden |
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow | Kerry Conran |
Solaris | Steven Soderbergh |
Star Trek: Nemesis | Stuart Baird |
Star Wars: Clone Wars | Genndy Tartakovsky |
Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Si | George Lucas |
Super Size Me | Morgan Spurlock |
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Acro | W.D. Richter |
The Asphalt Jungle | John Huston |
The Aviator | Martin Scorsese |
The Brothers Grimm | Terry Gilliam |
The Cocoanuts | Robert Florey, Joseph San |
The Day the Earth Stood Still | Robert Wise |
The Fifth Element | Luc Besson |
The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly | Sergio Leone |
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy | Garth Jennings |
The Ladykillers | Ethan Coen, Joel Coen |
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou | Wes Anderson |
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the | Peter Jackson |
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers | Peter Jackson |
The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra | Larry Blamire |
The Matrix | Andy Wachowski, Larry W |
The Matrix Reloaded | Andy Wachowski, Larry W |
The Matrix Revolutions | Andy Wachowski, Larry W |
The Merchant of Venice | Michael Radford |
The Rookie | John Lee Hancock |
The Set-Up | Robert Wise |
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold | Martin Ritt |
Topsy-Turvy | Mike Leigh |
Touch of Evil | Orson Welles |
Volcanoes of the Deep Sea | Stephen Low |
Young Frankenstein | Mel Brooks |
Of late, the prices have really started to fall on used DVDs, the local Blockbuster selling off a good selection of semi-recent titles effectively at two for $20, and the local Rogers outfit has an "okay" selection of similar titles at three for $24. Since I almost invariably end up returning videos late, the cost to buy is comparable to renting with a late fee (or re-stocking fee, however you look at it). And I often end up watching titles more than once, so its makes (some) economic sense.
When compiling the list I just found that it was easier to find out such info as the date and director by looking up the movie title's entry in the Internet Movie Database -- much easier than squinting at the often teeny text on the DVD box. I don't always agree with IMDb's listing or the order of genres for each movie, but I snagged that info as well for sorting purposes later. In case I want to do further data mining some day, I added the IMDb link for each entry as well, though I didn't add it to the listing shown here).
Most of the titles are of relatively recent vintage, but the earliest dates to 1929 (The Marx Brother's debut "The Cocoanuts"). Turns out that my favourite director (going by the count of DVDs I own of his work) is Terry Gilliam. There are also a number of real oddball movies in this listing, some of which are personal favourites of mine ("The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra", "Buckaroo Bonzai", and the Criterion edition of "Brazil" come to mind), and some are gifts from Bill of things I wouldn't have gone out to get for myself ("Godzilla 2000", Jet Li's "Black Mask", and "Enter... Zombie King", which even the IMDb hasn't classify into any known genre as yet).
A good candidate for a MySQL database, which I may get around to some day. For now, until I throw in more data (such as leading actors/actresses awards won, a personal rating, etc), will just keep the data in a spreadsheet file.
Here's an interesting thought: how much drive space would this collection take up? 99 movies times 4.76GB per disk (conservatively) adds up to 473.22 GB -- well within the range of some of the 500GB hard drives that are beginning to appear in the market. With only minimal compression one could likely shave a hundred GB or so from that total. I already have all of my CDs ripped at a high bit rate and placed on a hard drive, but in another year or so it should possible to do something similar with my movie collection
Postscript: I subsequently found out that the fireworks that started all of this was actually a film crew shooting down at the waterfront. No community notice went out as far as I know that there would be fireworks...
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