Errata is a web journal written by Robert Davis who has neither spent a night in a ghost town nor pulled a turnip from the earth. He doesn't even know if turnips grow in the ground. Perhaps on trees, like candy corn. Therefore, Errata is a non-commercial project.

Observation #1: It may be appropriate, when leaving a movie theater, to say "mysterious."

Observation #2: It may be appropriate, when leaving a movie theater, to say "mysterious" at the top of your lungs. Bring your eyebrows together before you say it. Effective!

Observation #3: Same for books. Even at libraries.

There is a prize for people who correctly guess the thing about Metropolis, Nevada.

Except where the text specifically states otherwise, Errata's vagaries are indicated vaguely and its authors are indistinct in the traditional way of the Internet, except where the authors lay claim to their work. In some cases Robert Davis lays claim to work that is not his own but has been abandoned like so many ghost towns. Except where held presently, fistfuls of dirt are suspended via dispersal, or dispersed via suspension (in the air), and thus their dissolution is their transcendence, or their transcendence is their dissolution. And yet our eyes tear, and our vision is impaired, demonstrating for the umpteenth time that one entity's gain is another's fit of sneezes. Except where indicated, storms shall outlive the clay upon which they rain, unless storms are improperly delimited by their clouds, which dissolve, rather than by their inevitable return. Thus the clay loses, unless the clay is said to own the storm, to use it to make itself heavy, to make itself cling to white garments, refuse dispersal, cake upon the facades of abandoned buildings, and sit like Man [sic] upon the earth where it is pelted by a storm that it owns. In which case the clay still loses, if you ask us.

Some of the above is legally binding and should be considered a mental contract between Errata and those upon whom it acts. The bit about the prize should be considered an overstatement insofar as prizes differ from dirt and prize dispersal differs from dirt dispersal. Please recall that ownership is a weight and, therefore, hope that you do not win the prize.

One day Errata or its representatives will call upon you for a favor. It is expected that you will hop-to without delay.

You may contact Robert Davis by email unless it's about the rock that was thrown in anger. The rock is more properly called a clod. Why do you continue to raise the topic?

2 October 2003

Netflix and Small Movies

An article this week in the New York Times' business section compared the Netflix service with a new, nearly identical service from Wal-Mart.com. I wouldn't bother mentioning the article here if it weren't for a few surprising statistics:

[Netflix's personalized recommendation system] gives life to customer favorites that were not supported by much studio advertising. For example, Netflix points to Talk to Her, a critically acclaimed independent film by Spanish director Pedro Almodovar, which Netflix users gave rave reviews. It was rented more often in its first six months on Netflix than Daredevil, the box office hit with Ben Affleck that received much less positive reviews on the site.

I don't know if it was Netflix's recommendation service that caused this rental behavior, as the paragraph implies, but isn't it interesting that Netflix customers rented Talk to Her, a movie released in the US on 255 screens more than they did Daredevil, a movie released on 3474 screens?

Now, we have to be careful with statistics. (I'm about to read a friend's recommendation, A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper by John Allen Paulos.) You know, maybe relatively more people wanted to wait for the video of Talk to Her than Daredevil. Or maybe Netflix's audience is not representative of the US as a whole (in fact the article says they count 5% of households in tech-centric San Francisco among their subscribers). Maybe any number of other variables — from advertising to the gossip pages — contributed. And note also that Wal-Mart.com claims, in the same article, that its customers are renting Daredevil seven times more often than Talk to Her.

But. Maybe there is a segment of the population who would very much like to see smaller movies but can't because, in most towns, small movies are shut out of theaters. It's an old complaint, I know, but what if a major distributor picked up on this and starting running a "small movie" series in towns that don't usually get them.

By the way, I didn't see either movie, and I know that Talk to Her had a rather large campaign compared to some even smaller movies.

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