The Movie Slot Machine: 12 Random Movies, One Specific Viewer
"May has 31 days… May has 31 days... May has 31 days... May has 31 days..."
That's been my mantra since pulling up the newly re-tooled Movie Slot Machine's selections for May. Out of the 12 movies it has chosen for me to watch this month, three of them combine for a longer running time than the other nine put together. I was tempted to monkey with the results, but after April's flu-riddled, lazy final week, I figure a movie-workout might help me clean out the remaining toxins. It's certainly a compelling and provocative schedule, and evidence that my engineers have successfully fixed the Movie Slot Machine's earlier predilection for spewing out uninspiring choices.
Here's how I changed the Movie Slot Machine prior to May's selections:
Previously, I had four separate criteria for choosing movies: my personal watchlist of interesting movies, a crowd-sourced roster of notable actors, a crowd-sourced roster of notable directors, and a variety of curated movie lists from sources such as film festivals, awards organizations, prominent critics and other groups.
I combined all of these previously separated criteria — as well as adding in 20 Flickcharts from last year's Peer Review project — into one long list of 230 film-filtering rules.
I ran this one omnibus list through Random.org twelve times, each time assigning the top rule to one of the twelve slots in May's schedule.
Once a rule was assigned to each of the 12 slots, I located the highest-ranked movie that I hadn't seen (usually according to Flickchart's global rankings, with a couple of exceptions) which fit that rule.
Here are the rules and movies that were allotted to each of May's 12 slots:
Director: Alfred Hitchcock / Spellbound (1945) — I watched a lot of Hitchcock's classics in the late 1980s and have been slowly revisiting them. I can't recall anything about Spellbound, which is the highest ranked Hitchcock on Flickchart that's not on my own chart.