It's "Guess the Movie" for the Left Side of the Brain!

[captainsblog]

A Friend here posts a weekly "guess the movie game" where he displays fairly famous movie stills, 3-5 at a time, and invites guesses as to what they're from. I almost always recognize a few (frighteningly often one will be from an old film I just watched), stare droolingly at another one or two going, "DAMN! I know that," and usually whiff completely on the rest.  IMDB is no help these days on the ones in the middle category; where they used to display a fairly broad range of famous images, their search engine now gets cluttered up with 8 million eBay and Amazon copies of the DVD cover and little if anything else.

Besides, I'm the verbal one, so often these visual cues are useless anyway. (This is the opposite of how music works for me; I suck at "guess the lyrics" games but can Name That Tune usually in three notes or less if I hear a sound snippet.) 

----

I just realized, though, that I've been playing a different version of Guess the Movie, far more suited to verbal talents, for months now. The credit or blame goes to our local library's online catalog. I can track down a DVD to any or all of its 30-odd branches using its online catalog, but for reasons I Just Don't Get, the search feature does not let you do a title search limited by media type. Thus, I can search "Breaking In" (the movie we most recently watched) by title, but it brings up an unrelated hardcover. If I want to limit the search to DVDs, I can only do it using "Breaking" and "In" as keywords, and all sorts of odd things ensue:

1) Wristcutters (the "breaking" part, maybe?)
2) Rescue Me: The complete fourth season (why not 1 through 3?)
3) Nora's Hair Salon 2
4) Cheers Season 9 (did Norm break his barstool?)

So anyway. If you'd like to try your hand at this nonsense, I'll post the keyword search I just did, including the actual film I was searching for with only its title omitted, and you try to guess it from the faux results I got first.



 Your search for "[name of film] limited by material type "DVD (multi-media)"
found 3 matching records (of 3 retrieved thus far).

   1.  Adventures of Superman. The complete third & fourth seasons in full color [videorecording] / Warner Bros. Television ; Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. ; produced by Whitney Ellsworth.
          5 videodiscs (706 min.) : Distributed by Warner Home Video, [2006] [DVD version]  

   2.   Gilligan's Island. The complete third season [videorecording] / a Gladasya - United Artists Television production ; created and produced by Sherwood Schwartz ; producer, Robert L. Rosen.
            3 videodiscs (ca. 780 min.) : Warner Home Video, [2005] 

   3.  [The one I was really looking for] [videorecording] 
     1 videodisc (161 min.) : USA Home Entertainment, 2000. [DVD version]

Since this is positively evil, I will also reveal that the title in question is two words, alliterative, and sometimes seen hyphenated. And also that the actors, writers and directors have about as little to do with Superman or Gilligan as you could possibly imagine.

Have fun. If that's the word for it.

Comments

[headbanger118.livejournal.com]

My brain just exploded.