Book Review: Great Flicks By Dean Simonton

Attention conservation notice: Review and notes from a book discussing an academic topic that will likely only interest you insofar as it generalizes to other topics, unless you are both a huge stats and film nerd.

I'm fascinated by movie ratings and what they tell us about: 1) the best ways to use rigorous methods to study the quality of a subjective output, 2) how variable people's assessment of quality are, and 3) how people conceptualize their own opinion in the context of everyone else's. Dean Simonton is a giant in the psychology of creativity, and I loved his book Creativity in Science. So, as soon as I saw this one, I clicked "buy it now" on its Amazon page. 

My typical gripe against academic investigations of movie ratings is that they discount imdb.com, a huge resource with millions of data points, segregated by age, gender, geographical location, on an incredibly rich array of movies. So, soon after buying the book, I searched in the Kindle app for "imdb" and found very few results. This predisposed me to disliking it. 

A few of my other gripes: 

1) It takes awhile to get used to Simonton's academic writing style. 

2) The book takes few risks stylistically. Each chapter feels like it could be its own separate article. Thus, he does not take full advantage of the long-form medium. 

3) When he discussed a few of the measures (such as the correlation between different award shows), I felt that there was some issues with his account of the causality. Surely there is some, non-negligible probability that people take the ratings of others' into account when they make their own judgments. He mentions this sometimes, but not enough for me, and ideally he'd come up with some creative way to try to get around it.

4) Finally, there are a few typos. I actually like seeing typos, because it makes me think that I am learning from a more niche source that others are less likely to appreciate, but YMMV.

By midway through the book, Simonton had won me back to a large extent. His analyses of his data were very well-done and he supplies tables so you can look at the regression coefficients yourself. And there are many good nuggets, such as: 

- the best predictors of higher ratings are awards for better stories (e.g., best screenplay and best director), as opposed to visual or musical awards

- having individuals on the production team who play multiple roles (such as writer, cinematographer, and editor all at once) makes the film more successful, presumably due to creative freedom 

- some amount of repeated collaboration over multiple films with the same individuals, but not too much, is optimal for winning awards (i.e., there is a trade-off between stimulation and stagnation) 

- higher box office returns are inversely correlated with success at awards shows

- the typical film is unprofitable; "about 80% of Hollywood's entire profit can be credited to just a little over 6% of the movies"  

- the curse of the superstar: "if a star is paid the expected increase in revenue associated with his or her performance in a movie then the movie will almost always lose money" (this is because revenue is so positively skewed) 

- divides movies into two types: those that are extremely successful commercially, and those that are extremely successful artistically (people often use the former to subsidize the latter) 

- negative critic reviews have a more detrimental impact than positive reviews have a boosting effect on box office returns

- on ratings, critics and consumers have similar tastes, although consumers' tastes are more difficult to predict, presumably because their proclivities are more diverse

- for a consumer, the most important factor for whether they will watch a movie is its genre (#2 is word of mouth) 

- dramas do worse in the box office, better at the awards shows; comedies are the reverse

- PG-13 movies make the most money; some romance, but no actual nudity, is best (and lots of action but no gore) 

- on average, sequels do far worse in ratings and awards than the original movies

- the greater the involvement of the author in an adapted movie, the less money it will make (they interfere more and might care more about "artistic integrity" than making money) 

- directors tend to peak in their late 30s; they have more success in their late 20s than their late 50s, on average

- divides directors into two types: conceptual (innovative and imaginative; think Welles) and experimental (technical and exacting; think Hitchcock)

- conceptual directors express ideas through visual imagery and emotions, often leave behind one defining film, and decline quickly

- experimental directors emphasize more realistic themes, slowly improve their methods, and their best films often occur towards (but almost never *at*) the end of their careers

- female actors make less money than their male counterpoints, and the best picture award correlates much better with best male actor than best female actor

- awards for scores are much better predictors of a film's quality than awards for songs

All in all, this book is far from perfect, but it is likely the best full-length treatment of quantitative movie ratings available. If you are interested in the topic, and occasionally find yourself doing things like browsing the rating histograms on imdb, then this is essential reading. 

GATCACA

In many American states it is legal to screen and select on the basis of sex, for non-medical reasons. In fact, a 2006 study (see below) found that 9% of [preimplanation genetic diagnosis] procedures carried out in [in-vitro fertilization] clinics in the U.S. were performed for this reason. Other reasons include screening for an embryo with the same immune type (“HLA type”) as a current child who is ill and requires a transplant of some sort. Screening for these “savior siblings” was done in 1% of PGD procedures. And 3% used it for a reason I personally find jarring – to specifically select embryos with a mutation causing a genetic condition. This is usually in cases where both parents have either deafness or dwarfism and they want their child to be similarly affected. This gets into the political movement objecting to society labelling conditions as “disabilities”. I can sympathise with that to some degree – more for some conditions than others – but I think, if it were my child, I would still rather he or she could hear.

That's Kevin Mitchell, discussing GATTACA, an entertaining sci-fi movie with a respectable 7.8 imdb rating. Spoiler alert, the premise of the movie is that at some point in the future there will be strong stratification of people into two classes, the "valids" and the "invalids", based on whether they had healthy traits selected for via preimplanation genetic diagnosis.

It seems to me highly unlikely (<0.01%) that a nightmare scenario of this sort would actually occur. One of the main reasons is because of the large plurality of values among parents, as seen above. A prevailing reason people have kids is to propagate a form of themselves into the future, and in many ways it defeats the purpose when you select against certain traits or even perform some sort of genetic engineering.

The other reason is something we know now better than we did 15 years ago, when GATTACA was released. And that is that DNA doesn't actually explain all that much of physiology and behavior--there are also strong epigenetic effects as well as stochastic effects of gene expression. 

What Makes Phrases Memorable

For 1000 movies, this study compared lines included on imdb's memorable quotes page to those that were not. People who hadn't seen the movies were able to pick the correct one 78% of the time, although, caveat lector, that's with only n = 68.

What features allow this above chance classification? The authors suggest 1) distinctiveness (i.e., a lower likelihood of coming from samples of standard English text), 2) generality (fewer personal pronouns, more present tense), and 3) complexity (words with more syllables and fewer coordinating conjunctions like "for" and "and").

Interestingly, their best support vector machine only correctly classified examples 64% of the time, so either the human data is somehow biased, or there are plenty more subtleties for machines to learn before they can best us humans in recognizing literary wit. 

Snub City At The Oscars

Of the Best Picture nominees, The Artist is currently the highest rated on imdb, at 8.4, though it will drop. A good comparison is Avatar, because both movies are technically adventurous, and they both have terrifyingly trite plots.

The main difference between Avatar and The Artist is that the latter is about the past, triggering nostalgia, whereas the former is about one possible version of the future, and is thus discomforting. This is why The Artist will win Best Picture and Avatar didn't come close. (No movie set in at any point in the future has ever won the award.)

But of course, the best movie of the past year is A Separation. The fact that it wasn't even nominated just showcases the Academy's striking anti-foreign film bias.

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It is obviously very fun to hate on the Academy, and there are many good reasons to do so, but as imdb user Fish_Beauty reminds us, this year is highly unlikely to go down as the biggest black mark of all time. Here are the lowest rated Best Picture winners:

Around the World in Eighty Days (1956) 6.8/10 9,106 (which won over the amazing The Killing)
The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) 6.7/10 5,177 (which won over High Noon)
The Broadway Melody (1929) 6.4/10 2,459
Cavalcade (1933) 6.3/10 1,421
Cimarron (1931) 6.1/10 1,739 (which won over the best silent film ever, City Lights)

These are truly embarrassingly bad films.

The Best Movies Of 2011

In reverse order: 5) Hugo (not bad, but fragmented and too long, e.g. they could have cut out the station inspector storyline, which relied upon sadly hackneyed deterministic developmental psychology), 4) HP7P2 (technically stunning, but Radcliffe just doesn't do it for me), 3) Drive (I do sympathize with the "too violent" critiques, but I loved the pacing), 2) Warrior (I'm slacking), and 1) A Separation (still not out in my area).

All in all this has been a down year for offerings on the big screen. Currently there are only 5 movies in the top 250, and that number will surely drop as they come out on video and the attrition of time does its damage. I predict only 3 movies from this year will still remain on the list come this time next year. Compare that to 7 for 2009 and 8 for 2010. Hollywood needs to stop investing so heavily in sequels!

Zuckerberg On Reward And Interest

He discusses The Social Network here. Precisely what he says is that Hollywood "can't wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things." And... trigger the applause lights.

The reality is somewhere in the middle. To intimate that making facebook was totally intrinsic, which he in fact intimates, is going too far--social esteem from the Peter Thiels and Sean Parkers of the world had to be a motivating factor. But murky middle grounds are much harder to convey in a movie or sound bite. Harder to convey in a blog post, too.

Is Toy Story 3 The Best Movie Of All Time?

Yesterday it was #8 and currently it is #7 on imdb's top 250 with a weighted average of 8.8. But on its own page it has an unweighted rating of 9.3, meaning that it is currently getting killed on the top 250 due to a low total number of votes. So, if it maintains the score once it has around 100k votes, its weighted average will approach its unweighted average asymptotically and it will take the reigns from Shawshank as The Greatest Of All Time.

However, such an upset is very unlikely. For example, look at the current demographic breakdown:

You'll note that the movie is doing really well with voters under 29. But right now the under 29 bracket represents 78.5% of total voters, and that number is going to drop. For example, if you look at the demographics of Toy Story One and Two, the under 29 bracket only has 51.9% and 49.0% of the overall totals, respectively. Also, US voters are likely to become the minority, which should further push the score down.

But the main problem is that right now, Pixar fanboys are much more likely to have seen the movie, and they are also more likely to enjoy it and rate it high. Once more average moviegoers join the party, they will curb some of the hype.

To give some perspective, The Dark Knight had a 9.6 on its own page and a 9.5 weighted average when it had 69,000 votes. But even The Dark Knight fell out of the top spot less than a month after it came out, and is now #11. So, you expect a rise for the next few weeks, and it may even take the top spot for a very brief time, but then it should fall fairly fast. I'd bet below #15 by this day next year. Toy Story 3 is cute and endearing, but it is certainly not the best movie of all time.

Watching The Top 250

Late last night I finished watched my last of imdb's top 250 movies. As of today, I have watched every damned movie on the list. It's been a wild ride. And since Toy Story 3 comes out this weekend, I need to get a post up documenting the occasion while it's still technically true.

So... thanks to everyone who works at imdb and spends hours configuring their database. In particular, thanks to the nerds who suggested that they run their ratings data through a bayesian filter, whoever you are. Thanks to my mom and dad for subsidizing my video rentals and for not complaining when I was monomaniacal about the netflix queue two summers ago. Thanks to the workers at the reserve desk of the Vassar library, who were kind enough to waive a few late fees for a starving student. Thanks to everyone who ever sat through a weird old movie with me over the past four years. Gratitude. Finally, a shout out to all the playa haters, who never thought I'd make it here. What now, haters?

Among the subset of movies that I watched specifically due to my quasi-compulsive need to finish the list, my faves were On the Waterfront, The Killing, The Seventh Seal, Dial M for Murder, Kind Hearts and Coronets, M, Manhattan, Mulholland Drive, The Ox-Bow Incident, The Thing, Touch of Evil, and Yojimbo. These movies tend to be funny, short, and don't spell out too much for the audience. The movies that I tended to like the least were ones that seemed to be popular for political reasons, like Crash or Gran Torino.

All in all, the top 250 is undoubtedly violence obsessed. Every one of the current top 25 movies has violence as a major crux of the plot. And of the top 100, only 9 movies do not fit this criteria: It's A Wonderful Life, Citizen Kane, Forrest Gump (arguable), Amelie, Wall E, Spirited Away, Elephant Man, All About Eve, and The Apartment. In that sense they are nothing like my daily life.

My quantitative vote history on imdb is here. There is one useful site to track your own progress on the top 250, which, should you choose that path, you can find here. I warn you, it may not always be easy. There will be times you'll want to give up, times when you'll forget why you devoted a precious slice of your time to such a desolate and inhuman list in the first place. All I can say is, get busy living, or get busy dying.

The "Old Shit Was Better" Effect In Action

Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland has largely flopped on imdb--7.0 with 25k votes and likely to fall further. Maybe it will even drop to below average (6.7) territory! But also in the past week, his 1990 movie Edward Scissorhands has been making a surge. It's on the top 250 (albeit #250 exactly) for the first time I can remember, and I've been following this thing for about three years. Anyway, if I'm right and if this generalizes, it suggests that it is not only time but actually the contrast of recent bad work that makes an artist's "old shit" look so appealing.

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It's such a sad state of affairs that I've been reduced to putting expletives into neutral-distancing scare quotes. My high school self would be like, ashamed.

Ironic Process In Hurt Locker

At one point in the movie, the camp doc / mental health provider tells one of the soldiers that he has "got to change the record in [his] head. You gotta start thinking about other things. Okay, Stop obsessing... Right now."

Did anyone else start laughing at this? Even if you haven't heard of the ironic process theory that attempting to directly suppress thoughts makes them more persistent, surely you can assume that the soldier has already tried to not think about his obsession (dying) on his own. Instead of this course, some sort of cognitive behavioral therapy would likely have been much more helpful.

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Hurt Locker is currently rated an 8.0 overall on imdb. 17k US voters have given it a 8.3 average, and 37k non-US voters have given it a 7.8 average. It does best with voters under 18, who give it a 8.6 average. So, does it make you like the movie more or less to know that younger people tend to like it the most?

Brain Uploading in Avatar

Noah Hutton already wrote an in-depth review of the neuroscience of Avatar, so I'll focus on just the brain uploading part. Would it be possible to lie down on a surface with electrochemical capabilities and somehow transfer the human mind from the cellular substrate to another form of substrate?

The Tree of Souls would need to be able to communicate with the neurons in the human's original cellular substrate at a high level of precision. There are two ways that the tree could achieve this. One would be to have some sort of biological scanner that could read at the nanometer scale in the x, y, and z directions. This would need to include penetration of at least the length of the average brain (6 inches) in the z direction. But this strikes me as highly implausible. What could possibly function as the vacuum and the electron gun?

Instead, it seems more likely that the tree would need to directly probe each of the ~ 86 +/- 8 billion neurons and ~ 85 +/- 10 billion glial cells. Perhaps by stimulating each of the brain cells individually and measuring its response curve over a number of iterations, the tree could reverse engineer a model of all of the relevant properties of that cell. In order to include learning and memory the tree would have to detect the NMDA receptor density of hippocampal neurons. It is hard to say what other details of each cell the tree would have to detect. Perhaps it would need to detect some sort of regional mRNA expression or measure of epigenetic changes to the histones and DNA of each cell. It's even possible that the tree wouldn't have to go down to that level at all and that a map of all cortical minicolumns could do the trick.

Once all of the relevant properties of the original human brain were known, the tree would have to transfer these properties to the Na'vi substrate. Since it's unlikely that the Na'vi have the same type of micro unit (the cell) as humans, this might be sort of challenging. But since most people who study the topic conclude that it'd be possible to upload the human brain in some sort of silicon substrate, there is likely to be a way to accomplish this task.

With the benefit of human technology like SSTEM (pdf) and computers, a solution to this task would be a lot easier to design. We're not so far away...

The Real Top Ten Movies of the Aughts

Using imdb's Bayesian scores:

10) The Departed, 2006. Factors: Star-studded cast with DiCaprio, Damon, Nicholson, and the elder Sheen combining to star in 7 other top 250 movies, plus Scorsese has directed 4; stole its plot from Infernal Affairs, another top 250 movie; some hilarious scenes, especially ones including Walberg and Baldwin; legitimate plot twists. Ratings-wise does well across the board and picks up the female vote. Have to assume that the love story angle helped it there.

9) Amélie, 2001. Factors: Very cute and romantic, with the rare female protagonist; French so more explicit than you might expect; flat out dominates the female vote, especially 18-29, but doesn't get betrayed by the male vote like Beauty and the Beast does.

8) Wall-E, 2008. Factors: Fits well into current technophobic apocalyptic dogma; sweet beginning with no dialogue; "fun for the whole family"; refreshingly short. Surprisingly, rated rather poorly by those aged 45+, especially females, who give it a measly 6.1.

7) LotR: Two Towers, 2002. Factors: Best fight scene of the decade in the last scene, with Legolas pulling off the coolest moves. Not surprising that males under 18 give this one the highest rating.

6) Memento, 2000. Factors: Sick topsy-turvy plot; eminently rewatchable; Chris Nolan directed (he kills it on imdb); confusing for non-movie watchers making it an "insiders club"; street cred for having a solid psychological basis (see patient HM, who also learned to do mirror writing); and great ending.

5) Avatar, 2009. Factors: Innovative 3D presentation; fits well within current environmental dogma; James Cameron directed (he quasi kills it on imdb as the director of 2 top 250 movies). This is a controversial pick as the rating is inflated because it just came out and the score will probably fall quite a bit. Wasn't sure what to do so it remains here for now.

4) LotR: Fellowship of the Ring, 2001. Factors: Best visuals of the trilogy and a rather scary scene when the hobbits first hide from the dark horses. Does quite well with females considering it's so action oriented--females 18-29 give it the highest ratings of any cohort.

3) City of God, 2002. Factors: Lots of violence and a long winding story with a sympathetic narrator. This movie went viral--countless people listed it as their favorite movie for a while in the mid-2000s. Of course the conformity theory makes no exceptions and now the public has generally cooled on it. But, the respect remains.

2) LotR: Return of the King, 2003. Factors: Visually impressive, plus a huge nerd following. Could have easily dissapointed (see Star Wars VI) but did not. Very polarizing, though, with 5.2% ratings of 1.

1) The Dark Knight, 2008. Factors: Heath Ledger's posthumous performance guarantees goosebumps; Chris Nolan directed (see #6); Batman Begins was top 100 so it has a strong pedigree, Christian Bale starring (he's in two other top 250 movies); and round two of a trilogy so execs OK'd the ambiguous ending. The perfect storm. Did not drop as much in score post-DVD as I thought it would, with demonstrated staying power into the next decade.

No Such Comparison

It's natural to implicitly compare one's expectations of a given situation to the actual situation. But hard as it may be to differentiate between the two, comparing one's a priori expectations to the current situation is not a good proxy for comparing the current situation to other possible situations.

This fallacy is committed all of the time. It happens in movie ratings, college social life (in my experience people's expectations of college are way inflated), travel, etc. Basically, it occurs in any situation in which people only have access to a limited number of data points and in which expectations are liable to deviate wildly from reality. Without access to other data points, it's hard for an opinionated person to avoid making this comparison. That is why one must be vigilant about it, and ultimately admit the possibility of bias.

When evaluating something, I try to be as much of a blank slate as possible. That's why, once I know that I plan on watching a movie, I don't watch the trailers, and I don't like hearing about it beyond a simple like / not like which, candidly, I make every effort to ignore. That is why watching the top 250 is so money--I don't have to even think about what movies to watch. The other day I was watching Rosemary's Baby (#221) and for the first 15 minutes I thought it was a romantic comedy. Nope!

The Plaintive Children Assumption

The erudite Anthony Lane deconstructs yet another phenomenon in his recent review of Star Trek:

Here, in other words, is a long-range backstory—a device that, in the Hollywood of recent times, has grown from an option to a fetish. I lost patience with “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” once we learned of Willy Wonka’s primal trauma (his father was a dentist, and forbade him candies, so guess how he reversed that deprivation?), and, likewise, with “Batman Begins,” from the moment that mini-Bruce tumbled into a well full of bats. What’s wrong with “Batman Is”? In all narratives, there is a beauty to the merely given, as the narrator does us the honor of trusting that we will take it for granted. Conversely, there is something offensive in the implication that we might resent that pact, and, like plaintive children, demand to have everything explained.

Many recent movies (i.e., Slumdog Millionaire) do seem to have a deterministic developmental psychological bent to them. Basically if there is any scene with the main characters as children in it, I would be willing to bet that those experiences will have an outlandishly large role in forming the character's personality as an adult. This is especially odd considering recent research like The Nurture Assumption, which suggests that the causal power of childhood experiences on adult personality is generally overrated. But perhaps Hollywood has not caught on, or Hollywood does not think that the majority of the populace has caught on. Regardless, I'm not yet snobbish enough to say that this actually offends me, but it is somewhat annoyingly predictable.

Burn After Reading as a Microcosm

"We will learn an enormous amount in a very short time, quite a bit in the medium term, and absolutely nothing in the long term." - Jeremy Grantham on the 2008 financial crash.

One can interpret most Coen brother movies in a multitude of ways, but I keep thinking about how their latest effort can relate to our society's current woes. The characters assume that people "above" them know what they're doing when they don't, they think that events happen for a reason when they are random, and their initial rash decisions are exasperated by further rash decisions.

What did we learn, America? Hell if I know. I guess we learned not to do it again.

The Real Best Picture

Much hoopla has been made about Slum Dog Millionaire winning Best Picture at the Golden Globes and the fact that it currently has a 75% chance of winning the top prize at the Oscars as well. Lost in all of the scuffle is the fact that the people have already decided on the best movies of the year, via imdb.

The Dark Knight is the best movie of 2008. It has a rating of 9.0 out of 10, while Slumdog Millionaire has only an 8.7 out of 10. The Wrestler is next with an 8.7 as well (position on the top 250 breaks the tie), followed by The Curious Case of Benjamin Button with an 8.5, Gran Torino with an 8.3, and Milk with an 8.1.

The number of votes on each of these movies is astounding. Each of the movies mentioned has well over 10,000 votes. The Dark Knight has 332,333. That's more than the population of the Bahamas!

Who cares what some snobby industry insiders think? The Oscars are an anachronism, having been replaced by the will of the people.

Why imdb matters -- our time is scarce

There are perhaps an infinite number of possible criticisms of imdb espoused in everyday conversation. I'll address more of these in future posts, but first, the most common criticism: Why is imdb necessary at all?

If you google "how many films have ever been made?" you get a few search results, like this wiki answers, of people asking the question. But of course nobody knows the answer for sure. That's because there have been a *&#-load of movies made in the last 100 years, and there is no way that any one man or woman could watch every one of them.

So, you need a way to filter out the trashy movies before you waste 90 minutes of you life. Like that time you watched "Surf Ninjas of the South China Sea"… or were you trying to forget about that?

It's true that you could rely on the opinion of experts like Enert and Doper. But many of these soulless men spend their days locked in ivory towers obsessing over what angle their thumb should be oriented in. What makes you think that your tastes will be the same as theirs?

Instead, your best option is to harness the wisdom of the crowds and watch movies based on imdb's ratings. Yes there are biases in these ratings, and I'll address some of them in future posts. But overall there is no system that can match imdb's massive amount of opinions, and it is this critical mass that cancels out many of the biases that affect individuals.

And what about respecting the artists? As cinemaphile Tyler Cowen explains in Discover Your Inner Economist,

We must ignore the carping of the sophisticates. Well-educated critics may claim that pictures cannot be ranked, value is multidimensional or subjective, or that such talk represent a totalizing, colonizing, possessive, postcapitalist, hegemonic Western imperalist approach. All of those missives are beside the point. When it comes to the arts, dealing with the scarcity of our attention is more important than anything, including respecting the artists.

It may sound harsh to not watch a movie simply because it only received an average rating of 6.4 out of 10. But our time is scarce, and we live in an unfair world. We must either adapt to the evolving landscapes or be crushed under the unforgiving winds of change. Respect yourselves, and Godspeed.

Comparing men and women's taste in movies

One way to do this would be to compare imdb's top 50 movies as voted on by females versus imdb's top 50 movies as voted on by males. You may complain about differences in sample size, since there are about 10 times more votes by males than females on imdb (why is that?). But with 10,000+ votes on most of these movies by females, I would still prefer these scores to any other measure.

Movies much higher on the female list: The Lord of the Rings (#4, 6, and 12 as opposed to #14, 20, and 31 on the overall list), Gone with the Wind (#11 vs #167 on overall list), Amelie (#14 vs. not on the male list), The Pianist (#17 vs. #56 on overall list), Pan's Labyrinth (#22 vs. #61 on overall list), Finding Nemo (#24 vs. 152 on overall list), The Notebook (#24 vs. not on the overall list), Beauty and the Beast (#34 vs. not on the overall list).

Movies much higher on the male list: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (#4 on male list, not on female list), Seven Samurai (#11 on male, not on female list), The Matrix (#25 on male list, not on female list), Se7en (#27 on male list, not on female list), Apocalypse Now (#31 on male list, not on female list), City of God (#18 on male list, not on female list).

I am truly amazed that the Matrix is not on the female list, since it probably has a high weight given that it is such a highly watched movie. Plus... Keanu Reeves! Females only give it a 8.3, and a 7.6 by females under 18, which is weird to me. But then again I'm not female.

If you are looking for biases in the top 250, this would be a good place to start, since there are so many more males voting on imdb than females. There is a clear trend on the male list toward movies with more violence, and a clear trend on the female list toward movies with more mushy stuff.

A prototypical "rational" man in 1950's Sci-Fi

The Day the Earth Stood Still probably has the most stereotypically "rational" man of all-time in its main character Klaatu. Let's go through the checklist:

1) Rudimentary social skills, replete with the inability to complete a coherent sentence. (Check)
2) Exceptionally proficient at mathematics. (Check)
3) A strange lack of any kind of emotion even when displaying some emotion would be highly beneficial to what he is attempting to accomplish. (Check)
4) Attributing poor collective decision-making to the individual stupidity of all persons involved. This is a common error, and it fails to take into account basic principles of the real world, like game theory. (Check)
5) A poor grasp of the market system. (Check--He traded a handful of perfect diamonds for two dollars!)

I don't know why so-called rational people in fiction are so often boring, lifeless, and stupid. The reality is that you don't have to fit any of these stereotypes to be rational. Indeed, all of them except #2 would probably be harmful to your success in the real world.

I will add the caveat that technically he is not a man but instead an alien who looks exactly like a man. And don't get me started on the odds of this happening through convergent evolution.

Empty Promises and Broken Dreams

I'm getting closer and closer to my goal of watching imdb's top 250. After watching Paths of Glory last night, I have 99 movies left to go. When I reported this happy news to a few friends of mine at breakfast, their response was "what are you going to do when you finish watching them?" They believe that my life will be empty.

You know the saying that it is better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all? My response is sort of along those lines. I would argue that their lives are empty now, and they will continue to be empty later. True, my life might lose some sense of purpose once I finish them all. But as for now, it's all glory. And I'd rather get an offensive foul going in strong than pull up for a fade-away any day.