Procrastinet

Filmgeek Procrastinetting

filed under: Idle Chatter

I'm a bit snarked at BoingBoing for their intro to this feature, wherein editor Xeni Jardin claims "BoingBoing exists to help you waste otherwise productive time..." After all, that's supposed to be our gig. BoingBoing has all sorts of higher meaning. They are, for example, the best place I know to keep an eye on the evolution of intellectual property rights in a web-based, free-ware society - which sounds dry but will actually pretty much shape the future of pop (and non-pop) culture. (Example: this snippet about the death of the inventor of the video rental store, which points out that in the 70s the movie studios sued Sony for selling VCR's, afraid they would lead to rampant movie piracy. Having lost the suit, the movie studios immediately went broke. Oh, no, wait.)

But I got over the snark as soon as I checked out this quiz. At cinebuff website FilmWise, they apparently have a regular feature where they photoshop the actors out of movie scenes, carefully leaving their clothing, Invisible Man-style, as a quiz to identify the movie. Some intrepid soul has collected 72 of these scenes into an Excel-based auto-quiz.

Check out BoingBoing for the details, including the quirks and foibles. For example, one answer comes out "FALSE" if you put the period at the end of "Mr." And there are a couple straight up typos. Handily, BoingBoing also links to the answers, so you can double-check the automated scoring.

After a couple times through, but without resorting to IMDB, I got my score up to 44. If you want to happily while away many minutes, go take the quiz and, if you're so inclined, post a comment here with your score. Consider the guantlet thrown.

Posted by rjt at March 11, 2005 11:58 AM