Colored Films

You can download basic movie data from imdb. I do so every few years, most recently about six months ago. Every once in a while I do some exploratory analysis.

datasets.imdbws.com has the files

Here's an example line from the tab separated value title.basics.tsv file:

tt7811018	movie	A Yellow Animal Um Animal Amarelo	0	2020	\N	115	Drama,Fantasy

In field order: you've got an identifier, a media type (other types include short, tvSeries, tvEpisode, video, etc), an English title, an original title (might be the same as English), a flag for "is an adult" title, a pair of years (start and end, for which movies only have the first one, while tvSeries will have both), runtime (in minutes), and comma separated list of genres. Even Les Vampires, the serial film for which the first part was broadcast November 1915 but the last in June 1916, is a movie with a start year of 1915 and no end year.

tt0006206       movie   Les Vampires    Les vampires    0       1915     \N      421     Action,Adventure,Crime

Les Vampires at Wikipedia with episode release dates

But that digresses from my project.

$ zgrep "^tt[0-9]*${tab}movie${tab}' title.basics.tsv.gz | wc -l

703671

Just over 700,000 movies in the list.

$ zgrep -E '^tt[0-9]*${tab}movie${tab}An* (Black|Brown|Violet|Purple|Blue|Green|Yellow|Orange|Red|White)${tab}[A-Z][a-z]*${tab}' title.basics.tsv.gz |wc -l

27

Just twenty-seven are "A (Color)" (or "An Orange"), and you've probably heard of none of them. Note that I'm looking for just a single word, no-hyphens, after the color.

FWIW, I used the eight colors of the basic Crayola crayon pack as the basis for picking the colors to care about, then added white. They label one of them as "Violet (Purple)", so I used both color names.

Lots more with "The (Color)":

$ zgrep -E '^tt[0-9]*${tab}movie${tab}The (Black|Brown|Violet|Purple|Blue|Green|Yellow|Orange|Red|White)${tab}[A-Z][a-z]*${tab}' title.basics.tsv.gz |wc -l

1115

And more still with no article:

$ zgrep -E '^tt[0-9]*${tab}movie${tab}(Black|Brown|Violet|Purple|Blue|Green|Yellow|Orange|Red|White)${tab}[A-Z][a-z]*${tab}' title.basics.tsv.gz |tee /tmp/colors | wc -l

2642

What colors are common? Mostly black:

$ for color in Black Brown Violet Purple Blue Green Yellow Orange Red White ; do
        printf "$color${tab}"
        grep -c "${tab}$color " /tmp/colors
        done

Black   950
Brown   16
Violet  11
Purple  53
Blue    370
Green   132
Yellow  83
Orange  31
Red     556
White   440

All of this was inspired by a movie titled Black Tuesday (1954)[*], so now let's look at the days of the week here:

$ for day in Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday ; do
        printf "$day${tab}"
        grep -c " $day${tab}" /tmp/colors
        done

Sunday  5
Monday  3
Tuesday 2
Wednesday       1
Thursday        2
Friday  20
Saturday        1

And I'll look at those titles. The ones with null (\N) for year are a bit sus:

$ zgrep -E '^tt[0-9]* movie${tab}(Black|Brown|Violet|Purple|Blue|Green|Yellow|Orange|Red|White) (Sun|Mon|Tues|Wednes|Thurs|Fri|Satur)day${tab}' title.basics.tsv.gz | cut -f 3,6

Black Friday    1916
Black Friday    1940
Black Tuesday   1954
Black Sunday    1960
Black Sunday    1977
Black Thursday  1974
Black Friday    2001
Black Friday    2004
Red Thursday    2003
Black Friday    \N
Black Friday    \N
Black Friday    \N
Black Friday    2020
Black Friday    2021
Yellow Saturday 2021
Black Friday    2021
Blue Monday     2021
Black Friday    \N
Black Friday    2021
Black Friday    \N
Black Sunday    2010
Black Sunday    \N
Black Tuesday   \N
Blue Wednesday  2023
Black Friday    2015
Blue Monday     2016
Black Sunday    \N
Black Friday    \N
Black Friday    2017
Blue Monday     \N
Black Friday    \N
Black Friday    \N
Black Friday    \N
Black Friday    \N

[*] Film noir about an escaped con: Black Tuesday (film) at Wikipidia

Film historian and critic Alain Silver said of the film, "When society at large is threatened, the psychopaths presented tend to be of the most violent ilk, as if to justify social repression by exaggerating the threat. Edward G. Robinson as gangster Vincent Canelli in Black Tuesday... exhibits a sadistic bent rivaled only by James Cagney in White Heat."

Black Tuesday and White Heat. Color theme detected.

For some reaon, I always has a highly diverse "recently viewed" list at imdb.

Vinegar Syndrome

Taking its name from acetate decay of old film stock, Vinegar Syndrome is a company that specializes in finding, restoring, and releases on home media films that get overlooked by other conservationists. Things like blue movies, drive-in quality B-films, exploitation titles, and things made outside the studio system.

Vinegar Syndrome

I like what they do, even if I don't want all of their titles. I have purchased a few discs from them. Their "Reviver" label, specifically to fund film restoration, has had two releases so far. They are titled on the website "One" and "Two".

There's no listing of the movie titles on the disks. I purchased "Two" as a pre-release knowing only it had two titles on it both filmed in the same non-US country. Now, post-release, they still don't list the titles. I guess I should have expected that, because "One" was post-release at the time and still didn't have the title.

For the record, "One" has Boots and the Preacher (1972) (imdb page) some shorts and related special features. The "Two" has Paradise of Terror (1965) (imdb page) and The Horror from Beyond (1965) (imdb page). So far I've watched Boots and Paradise.

Boots was considered a lost film until Vinegar Syndrome rescued it. The film has a rambling investigation into a small town murder at a church affiliated radio station. It's hick-ploitation with country music and corrupt small town stereotypes. We first see the sheriff waking up in bed with a prostitue at the local whorehouse. It's not high art.

Paradise, on the other hand, is art. Filmed in the Philippines and never released, this is a story of a military assisted evacuation for unstated purposes of a US government official from some unspecified Asian country in the midst of a conflict. Their plane is hit and everyone parachutes out. Then begins a story that's something like Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972) if it were a 84 minute Vietnam war film. Truly a delight.

But there's no mention of title on website that sells the disc. I find it hard to tell people "Yeah, this film is good, you should watch it" when you can't go to the Vinegar Syndrome website and find the disc by searching for the title. Even once you have it in hand, the slip case, both sides of the reversible box art insert, and even the disc silkscreens don't identify the contents.

There's a little bit of text on the box insert, clearly visible are the words "To Claim Bride" but the text seems to be a newspaper piece unconnected with the film. The silhoutted woman in front of a window with horizontal blinds is a still from Paradise of Terror. That "2" is the only title it has.

In short: I like what Vinegar Syndrome has done, but I wish they would drop the secrecy now that's released.

Chappie (2015)

Chappie is the third film from Neill Blomkamp, and his second set in South Africa. (The aliens as Apartheid allegory District 9 (2009) was the first.) This one started out reminding me of a SA "Robocop" (1987), with but with robot humanoids (instead of cyborgs) and a remote piloted "Moose" taking the place of the ED-209 robot, then the stories diverge.

There is a large corporation building machines for crime fighting, and the C-staff are very driven to boost sales to police forces. A software engineer is very interested in a project to make the robots self-aware and fully "intelligent" but he gets nixed for business reasons. So he steals a robot intended for recycling after getting damaged and installs his software on it anyway.

"Chappie" is the name that robot gets.

In a parallel story, some drug dealers whose business has been impacted by robot police, have a plan to kidnap an engineer from the robot manufacturer in order to get an advantage on the robot cops. They grab our AI focused engineer while he has the stolen droid in his car. (The core pair of drug dealers, at least core to story, are played by the duo from South African zef-rap-rave group Die Antwoord. They sort-of play themselves, using their stagenames as character names and Die Antwoord style art around their lair.)

As Chappie first starts to learn, the learning is shown as an accellerated human baby might pick up things. Imitation, discernment of items (eg a wrist "watch" pointed out) in a complex settings, learning that people lie from experiencing it, etc.

These are important innate skills of humans (and probably other mammals) that have no parallel in the present AI tech world. Large Language Models (LLMs) like Chatgpt do not have innate immitation. They do not have feedback loops to learn deceit from observed contradictions. They do not have acces to empathy to feel bad for hurting people, or people just hurt.

The movie glosses over how the robot got these traits, and I think the AI advocates in the modern tech world have glossed over the importance themselves. Throwing a bunch of structured text at a matrix generating program fails to consider how a matrix would identify text visually, how human brains are wired for grammar natively, how humans adjust their learning based on day to day activities (and not just structured "training").

By failing to understand how computers store data, the movie script just has the robot learn like a huan. By failing to understand how humans actually learn, techbros imagine stored data is learning.

After that the movie just becomes fantasy, to me.

Side note: I remember before this came out how famous the band Die Antwoord had become, and watching it I started to wonder, "what became of them?" So I looked at the Die Antwoord Wikipedia page and, "oh my", "oh dear", and "yikes".

Chappie at imdb

Deathstalker

One of the more notorious Roger Corman productions is the 1983 film Deathstalker. This was marketed as a swords and sorcery movie but it's a primarily a tits and ass film around a swords and sorcery story with a smattering of weak comedy.

When we first meet "Stalker" he has just met a band of hideous looking men (monsters?) who are trying to steal the loot, and kidnapped woman, off a thief. Stalker kills all the monster-men, then thief, and then tries to force himself on the woman. Over the course of the film, he calls himself Stalker and others call him either Stalker or Death Stalker.

The title character is not morally ambiguous, he's morally odious. To call him an "antihero" would be a whitewashing of the term. The exploitation is thick, every woman under 30 in the cast is there to show skin. The named two women stars were best known at the time for modeling, one in Playboy. The other, Lana Clarkson, only really became famous with this role. (Later she would marry Phil Spector and be killed by him.)

The story is weak, the special effects so-so, the costumers emphasizing the beefcake of the male stars and sex appeal of the female. But the camerawork is good and the stars are good to look at.

In 2025, a remake has come out. This one is executive produced by Slash (of Guns'n'Roses fame). The cast is much smaller, and no one flashing tits or ass. This time it is clearly a swords and sorcery comedy.

Here we meet Deathstalker, an ex-military man who now is an independent thief looting battlefields, and finishing off some of the wounded for their bounty. Later in a bar, the patrons talk of him and share his name with the audience.

The story has some vague similarities, but most specifics differ. The cast is a lot smaller, and the sets are not as impressive. The new one has a lot of good practical effects, a rarity in this day and computer age. For all of the lack of actors, this wastes no opportunity for a good practical detail.

The story makes more sense now and Patton Oswald lends his voice to the main comic-relief sidekick. The names of every character except Deathstalker and the witch Toralva differ. In both stories Toralva explains the some magic artifacts and sends Deathstalker on his way.

There's still a plot significant amulet and sword, but in 1983 Deathstalker gets the sword and then looks for the amulet, which the wizard Munkar has. With the amulet, Munkar can't die. With the sword, Deathstalker can't be killed.

In 2025, Deathstalker gets the amulet during his battlefield thievery. He discovers he can't get rid of the amulet and Toralva tells him it goes with whoever killed the last owner. The wizard Necronemnon is out to get the amulet, and is willing to kill for it. Deathstalker needs to find the special sword which is the only thing that can kill the wizard.

The newer movie is a better story, with better creatures. It has a lot more gore than the original and none of the eighties sex excess. It also is a lot smaller.

Deathstalker (2025) at imdb
Deathstalker (1983) at imdb