Which movies to watch when you have already watched all of the good ones?

R
Movies
Author

Johannes Titz

Published

March 23, 2022

Who does not love movies? After watching the usual suspects such as the IMDB-Top-250 (https://www.imdb.com/chart/top/) and movies from famous directors (Coen Brothers, Kubrick, Nolan, Jarmusch, Ritchie, Tarantino, …), I have no idea what to watch. There are simply not that many good movies despite the industry producing hundreds of movies every year.

But I just found an interesting youtube video of Quentin Tarantino, where he lists his Top-20 from 1992-2009: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y4vII7-8o0

Let us check the IMDB-ratings for these movies via R and create a watchlist.

First, let us load tidyverse:

You can get the data from https://datasets.imdbws.com/ and then need to merge ratings and basics:

df_ratings <- read_tsv('title.ratings.tsv', na = "\\N", quote = '')
df_basics <- read_tsv('title.basics.tsv', na = "\\N", quote = '')
df_ratings <- df_ratings %>% left_join(df_basics)

Now, the more interesting part. Let us search Tarantino’s recommendations and do some data wrangling.

quentin <- c("Battle Royale", "Anything Else", "Audition", "Blade", 
             "Boogie Nights", "Dazed and Confused", "Dogville", "Fight Club",
             "The Host", "Joint Security Area", "Lost in Translation",
             "The Matrix", "Memories of Murder", "Supercop",
             "Shaun of the Dead", "Speed", "Team America: World Police",
             "Unbreakable")
df_quentin <- xfun::cache_rds(df_ratings %>% filter(primaryTitle %in% quentin))

df_quentin <- df_quentin %>% 
  filter(titleType == "movie",
         numVotes > 1e4,
         startYear >= 1992 & startYear <= 2009) %>%
  arrange(desc(averageRating)) %>% 
  select(primaryTitle, averageRating, startYear, runtimeMinutes, genres)

The xfun::cache_rds is only to save time for knitting the Rmd-file.

And the final result sorted by Rating:

dt <- DT::datatable(df_quentin, style = "default",
                    options = list(pageLength = 20),
                    autoHideNavigation = TRUE)
dt

The top 3 movies according to the rating form IMDB are actually already in the IMDB-Top-250 list. So you have probably already watched Fight Club and The Matrix. Also Shaun of the Dead, Lost in Translation and Speed are fairly popular. But the other ones I have not seen yet.

Update: After watching some of these movies, I am really suprised how good they are. I especially enjoyed the Korean ones (The Host, Memories of Murder and Joint Security Area). But I would recommend all of the ones I have seen, except for Supercop, which I guess was quite good at that time regarding action scences, but did not age well and does not have to offer much else. I still have to watch Battle Royale.