Shadowlessness

After having lost it for a couple of years(!) I found the IMDB data files again! You can start from here and get the Gzipped text files from an FTP mirror.

Oh, so much data! Sweet sweet data! My “Sprunger” is fully tumescent!

Paul Graham has written an interesting piece on academic credentials and their value in predicting a person’s performance, vs. her actual performance. He touches on many interesting points, some very familiar for me and us; some less familiar and more intriguing. It’s a must read for almost anyone and anywhere!

Paul Graham is an old-time hacker, now turned venture-capitalist. Most of his writing, including this one, is about the life of startups and the markets in which they thrive. But if you think of it from the education perspective, you (or even I) may reach interesting solutions to the “credentials madness” that is the trend here and now.
As a failed outcome of a deeply and typically flawed education system myself, I may not be the best person to criticize it. Although the flaws in our education system is well-known to me and others, so much so that some may argue that we have stopped trying to find real problems and have confined our views to clichés, I haven’t given much thought to the practical solutions. If nothing else, that would be an interesting thought experiment.

I just updated my list and uploaded the list here. I also added a permanent link in the “links” section on the side of this page.

More than 150 titles added, among them a few really good ones. I’ve decided to put the list somewhere fixed. I don’t know why I posted it to the blog like idiots in the first place. My movie collection contains more than 1150 titles and its size is close to 900GiB!
Oh! Here’s the link.

I postponed the update for so long because I was developing a new set of tools to generate a better database of my movie collection. The code is half finished still, and other commitments have come up in my life. I hope I can get back to it soon.

I do get asked sometimes to recommend movies to people. That’s a really hard thing to do. Of course, I can recommend many films off the top of my head, but would they like them is entirely another matter. This list here is in the former spirit. I’ve considered several factors in recommending these specific movies for. I have all of them in my own collection. I like all of them very much myself. Many are quite unusual and not mainstream. Most of them are newer films (past decade or so) and they amount to a very round and straightforward number. Here are the 64 movies I believe everyone should see at least three times:

1. 2046
2. Abre Los Ojos
3. American Psycho
4. Avalon
5. Battle Royale
6. Blade Runner
7. Brazil
8. Crash
9. Dark City
10. Dekalog
11. Dogma
12. Donnie Darko
13. Elizabethtown
14. Equilibrium
15. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
16. Fight Club
17. Gattaca
18. Godfather, The
19. Great Expectations
20. Heat
21. Hero (Ying Xiong)
22. History Boys, The
23. Inconvenient Truth, An
24. Interview with a Vampire
25. Kingdom of Heaven
26. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang
27. Machinist, The
28. Man on Fire
29. Matrix, The
30. Memento
31. Monty Python and the Holy Grail
32. Nineteen Eighty-Four
33. Notting Hill
34. Oldboy
35. Pan’s Labyrinth
36. Pay it forward
37. Pitch Black
38. Pulp Fiction
39. Rashomon
40. Requiem for a Dream
41. Reservoir Dogs
42. Revolver
43. Ronin
44. Scent of a Woman
45. SE7EN
46. Seven Samurai, The
47. Serendipity
48. Serenity
49. Sin City
50. Soylent Green
51. Spartan
52. Spirited Away
53. Star Wars
54. Strings
55. Sympathy for Lady Vengeance
56. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
57. Thank You For Smoking
58. THX 1138
59. To Kill A Mocking Bird
60. Trois Couleurs
61. Twelve Monkeys
62. Unforgiven
63. Usual Suspects, The
64. V for Vendetta

I would be delighted to read your comments on these movies, and any recommendations you might have. Please share with me and the rest of the people (the 2 or 3 other people!) that might see this post and your comments.