genres

The Movie Easter Egg Bunnies (Cross Talk Ep. 21)

Posted on by Tim Kuefler

Just in case you didn’t already know this, Easter eggs are complex things.

Yes, Easter eggs are also sometimes called Paschal eggs, but that’s not what I wanted to surprise you with creative cuties.

Easter eggs are decorated eggs used to symbolize fertility and rebirth, and in Christianity they symbolize the empty tomb from which Jesus resurrected.

And that’s not the surprise either. Also, Easter eggs can sometimes be chocolate eggs or plastic eggs filled with treats, but again, not where I’m going with this.

The definition that I’m thinking of, and which often applies to art (film in particular) is where an Easter egg is an intentional inside joke, a hidden message, or a secret feature of a digital piece of work.  So yeah, whoever came up with this name obviously took it from the tradition of the Easter egg hunt, but it’s moreso about referencing that which is NOT obvious.

And in light of the upcoming holiday, this episode of Cross Talk is brought to you by Easter.

Eggs And Christmas Movies

This is an eggsellent episode dear readers. And I’m #sorrynotsorry for the bad joke.

But today we discuss the films which are riddled with easter eggs, and spoiler alert, the horror genre, directors with large catalogues, yes I’m looking at you Steven Spielberg), and big movie companies like Disney are great proponents of this staple of culture. You’ll also be happy to know that one of my favourite films has some great easter eggs in it, and we’ll spend some time righting wrongs when it comes to cameos being considered easter eggs themselves. So what is the topic today? Well I hope it’s clear by now, but we’re looking at examples of movie easter eggs, and their effect on film watching.

We seriously had a lot of fun each doing research and then coming back to the couch to hash out what we uncovered. But I think my personal favourite was one that you’ll find in the ever popular Christmas movie – Gremlins.

Bet you don’t know what I’m talking about, because both Chris and I were shocked to uncover it ourselves, and we’ve seen this movie countless times. This is epside twenty one of Cross Talk. Let’s toss some eggs around!

With that shared, I’m looking forward to sharing some further insights on genre defying films this month on Cross Talk, plus my Easter specific post, and most importantly, the set up for a brand new weekly show called Watch Culture.

But what did you think of the episode? Were you impressed by Chris’ big list of horror movie easter eggs? What about that tidbit from The Departed? Or Fight Club? We could have listed hundreds more, but these were some of the really fun ones. So I have to wonder, would you have suggested something different? We want you to join in on the conversation and let us know what you thought!

Please comment, subscribe, and share this video with friends. As always, be excellent to one another!

Tim!

Bad To The Bone (Cross Talk Ep. 7)

Posted on by Tim Kuefler

Bad content abounds. Man, does it ever.

The funny thing about bad content is that sometimes people enjoy it even more than good content. Actually, maybe amusement is a better way of looking at it. People are amused by some obviously horrible things.

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Filmdom is riff with examples of this too though, it’s not just a thing in music.

Well, give us some examples timotheories!

The Room, Troll 2, Road House, Showgirls, Batman &Robin, Battlefield Earth, Anaconda, Splice, and Howard The Duck are all poorly conceived movies. And that’s just a small sample of the options available to us. If we really started to dig into genre specific examples I could easily come up with 100s of films that don’t cut the mustard.

Which is why we decided to focus mostly on action movies in this week’s Cross Talk episode. And we didn’t want to just go on a rant about action without making a big deal out of it, so for the first time EVER, we are pleased to introduce K. G. Singh! Singh is our resident action movie expert; he practices martial arts and is a screenwriter to boot, so you know he has the goods to back up his claim.

Now you’re probably wondering what the topic is for today, if we called in an action expert. Ever heard the expression “that movie is so bad it’s good” dear readers? Well, we recognize that there is a difference between a bad movie versus a movie that is so bad that it becomes amazing. And so, Episode 7 of Cross Talk arrives at your digital door.

The challenge comes down to recognizing the elements of quality, intent, emotions, authenticity, and motivation. Of course subjective experience factors in too, which is why this is an episode you won’t want to miss! And if you have an interest in movies like Sharknado, Mortal Kombat, and RoboCop but don’t know where to slot them on the spectrum, all the better.

I’ve included a direct link to the full video for you here, but as always (and conveniently apt for today), the real action is just below for your convenience. Otherwise, please sit back and enjoy Episode 7 of Cross Talk!

I’m out of theories for now, but please check back tomorrow for an album about avalanches and wildflowers. It should be a good one! Please comment, subscribe, and share this with friends. We want to hear your feedback!

Tim!

Olé, Olé, Olé, Olé… Olé… Olé (Goal Setting)

Posted on by Tim Kuefler

In December of 2014, I wrote about a longstanding goal of mine and efforts I had made to set it up so I could eventually achieve it!

That goal was The Watch List.

I’ve referenced this goal a few times on this blog, because it’s a fun topic and seems a little silly, but mostly because it directly ties in with my bigger and longstanding goals of writing about the connections between pop culture, human behaviour, and living a successful life (which I’ve slowly been sharing with you, but will continue to build on as we go), I decided it was crucial to become a proper cinephile in order to contribute to the conversation.

Hence I went through the effort of visiting lists of the most popular as well as the most critically acclaimed movies ever made and committed to watch the best of the best.

The conditions I set up for myself were to sample from every film genre known to man, and use IMDB as a reference point for genres – 22 of them to be precise.

I removed movies that I had already seen from the lists, and created my own list to avoid duplicates. How I accomplished building this master list was by identifying all categories for each movie as I added it, that way when I would move on to another genre and look at the top 10% or top 25 movies if the genre was smaller, I didn’t add a movie twice or three times by accident.

Now The Watch List makes just a little bit more sense, right?

Today I want to share with you some developments in this project and a particular component of timotheories – Theatrical Tuesdays. Theatrical Tuesdays is my opportunity to either review a play or piece of theatre I’ve recently watched, a film which is currently in movie theatres or a movie that has been released on Digital HD, DVD and/or blu-ray.

I am choosing to do this for a few reasons.

  1. I want to stay on top of culture as it happens,
  2. It’s important to provide you with my perspective on it
  3. This forces me commit to the practice of viewing new content as it comes out, rather than just watching or purchasing what I am comfortable with when I feel like it

Some of you dear readers might think that this is an easy process and does not take any effort on my part – trust me when I tell you that it does. I have to commit to being available once a week within a certain window of time so that I buy the film (and often the album for Melodic Mondays), and then committing to a window of time to watch the film, and finally setting aside the time to write about the film.

This means I need to maintain discipline and say “no” to certain activities OR prepare posts well ahead of posting time so that I am consistently releasing these posts on schedule. As a consequence, my personal film collection grows by at least 1 film a week. Which is cool, but doesn’t necessarily guarantee I am watching a film that fits into those top rated lists, especially because the content on webistes like IMDB are curated over weeks of time and the top movies aren’t necessarily in said list exactly when they are released.

And this process also fights with my progress on The Watch List. Which is why I only watched a handful of movies from the list in 2015.

Another challenge I face with completing The Watch List is that I purchase blu-rays en masse during Boxing Day, Black Friday and during closeout sales or special events where movies are on sale. At those times I am buying releases I missed over the course of the year and movies I want to add to my collection.

With those types of purchases (bulk buys, not weekly review buys) I have decided to file the movies away once I’ve opened them and watched them. That way I’m not only collecting, I am also making use of my purchases. Because of this method of collecting, my collection is currently sitting at about 650 movies, and approximately 350 of those are blu-rays.

Now you are probably wondering how many movies I own but have yet to watch correct? 89 of them.

One week has already passed in 2016, which leaves me with another 51 weeks left to watch those 89 movies – if I want to stay ahead of my bulk purchasing habits and have fresh inventory for 2017. So that means I need to up my game.

But that’s not what today was about, today was about sharing with you what is going on. You’ll have to wait until Sunday to see how I’m going to address this issue.

What a tease, am I right? It is Timely Thursday after all! So leave some comments, tell me what your goals are for 2016, and how you are personally impacting the arts. I wanna hear what you have to say!

Until next time, I’m out of theories for now!

Tim!

Encoding Culture (The Watch List)

Posted on by Tim Kuefler

Last week on timotheories (I’ve always wanted to do that), I wrote about archetypes, common sense, motivation, and how watching films can help in learning about human behaviour (see my post, Motivation and Movies). This week I am going to get a little more personal and write about one of my longstanding goals that has become both a great effort and a great help in staying motivated to glean more from the world around me.

Before I fill you in on my goal, I am going to speak to the activity known as list making. List making is an ancient practice that I would argue goes as far back as the beginnings of the written word, and I may be generalizing, but I think we would be hard pressed to find proof to dispute that matter… And if someone does, then I have no problem withdrawing this statement, but I hope its worth the time, effort, and energy to said person to prove me wrong!

Moving right along.

There are lots of uses for lists – examples can include breaking up projects into tasks, prioritizing chores, planning out our days, keeping an inventory, arranging items in a particular order (ex. Top 10), putting together playlists, bookmarking information or for sharing with others, among other uses. In brief, lists are an awesome method to organize information in such a way that we can digest life more easily.

So what is my goal you ask, dear readers? Well my goal is to watch approximately 1100 movies within a 2-3 year period. I’ve decided to affectionately call this project The Watch List, because I think that this title succinctly wraps up the purpose of the list.

Now you are probably wondering, “well how did you come up with this list Tim?” And that is a very good question as there are thousands of movies out there and I don’t necessarily want to watch them all, but I do want to view those movies that have cultural significance, cult status, or a combination of both.

I decided to start my list by visiting the most straightforward of places, by looking at IMDB’s Top 250 list. For those of you who are unfamiliar with IMDB, it is also known as the Internet Movie Database, one of, if not the most, popular movie websites on the Internet. And according to ebizmba.com, it receives approximately 115 million unique monthly visitors each month.

I’m not going to delve into detail about what movies are on the Top 250 list, otherwise I wouldn’t have given you a reference link above. I highly recommend you check it out if you are interested in an amazing cross-section of film, but some of the highlights include The Shawshank Redemption, The Godfather: Part II, Pulp Fiction, Schindlers List, Inception, and The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Going through that list initially, I determined that I had already seen more than half of these movies, but what I didn’t immediately recognize upon first glance is that IMDB also indexes films based on a group of 22 sub genres. Examples of these genres include, action, comedy, drama, film-noir, musical, sci-fi, and western.

The more I started to dig the more excited I got though. And so the idea finally hit me in a way I could articulate, why not look into every single sub genre and start writing down all of movies I hadn’t seen? That way I would expose myself to genres I was less comfortable with like war, film-noir, and biography. But that would also mean I was sure to run into some movies more than once, and so I set myself up to the task of creating a Google docs spreadsheet that could house all of the movies, and I could then search by title, decade, year, genre or a combination thereof by taking advantage of the filter command available in Google spreadsheet. Below is a screen cap of what my list looks like. I might get around to sharing it at some point, but this should do the trick for now.

Screen Shot 2014-12-09 at 10.20.51 PM

I have colour coded the list for myself so that I can remember what movies I’ve watched over a certain period of time, as well as identifying which movies are available at the Edmonton Public Library or on Netflix. Lets face it, it would insane for me to buy such a great volume of movies right out the gate, but that is something that I may get around to, once I start rating the films myself, but lets stick with baby steps for now.

And that’s all the theories I’ve got this week – until next time. But please let me know what you think of my list, and if you have any ideas of how to improve upon it or if you want to know what the list is made up of, leave a comment or send me an email!

Tim!

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