Phil Bradley's weblog

Scripts database

Ever need to check the exact wording of a film quote? Take a look at Scripts.com which is a large database of film and television scripts. There are hundreds available, and they include the traditional classics such as Casablanca and Gone with the wind, but also new material, such as the Game of Thrones tv series. I didn't care too much for the font used in the actual scripts themselves, and I think that the format could be improved to make them easier to read. I'd also like to be able to search through the scripts for a particular phrase as well

However, that aside, this is a super collection of scripts, and I am not aware of anything else on the web that's quite like this. It's also part of the Stands4 network of resources which is an instant indication of good quality. This is going to be a good tool for quick reference queries, media studies and so on. 

New film search engine

If you can't remember the name of a film it can be a real nuisance, and it can nag at you for ages. Well, worry not. There's a new search engine called What is my movie and you can simply type in some basic concepts and it will try and find matches for you. I tried several and it found them every time. For example I tried 'gunslinger looking for gold in the American Civil War' and it came back with The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, 'man looking for family in the Civil War' gave me Shenandoah, 'two men on holiday in the lake district' resulted in Withnail and I. You can also try it with film quotes 'all the towns in all the world' came back with Casablanca (the best film ever made).

They say of themselves "Whatismymovie.com is a showcase of the technology of Valossa, which is a spin-off company of the University of Oulu, Finland. We aspire to create a new, descriptive way of searching video content. Our technology understands the contents of video files itself. Ranging from text to pattern recognition, we reach down into data that has not been searchable in the past."

You can help improve the engine by clicking on the buttons for a good or bad match. You can also run searches on Titles, Actors, Directors and Traditional Search. It's not clear to me what that last is, but you can use it! The display of results is really nice - you get a picture of the movie - usually a film poster, a nice abbreviated synopsis, a link to 'more like this' and you can also click on a link to watch the film, which runs an Amazon.com search and returns a price as well. 

It's a really nice engine, and one of those 'Oh, I'll just ask it one more thing' resources that keep you there for hours. Many thanks to Val Skelton for finding this one. 

Character database

I had high hopes when I first saw news of the CharacTour database. They say of themselves "We want to be your virtual tour guide to the world of characters so you can find a new favorite movie, TV show, book, video game, or webcomic." Perhaps it's unfair, but I was hoping for rather more on the side of books, but the emphasis is very much on movies. However, having got that out of the way, it's not a bad search tool at all. You can search for people by name, by profession (librarian is not listed however!), location, time period, ethnicity and so on. Once you have located the character that interests you the site provides a good profile, which is spoiler free, suggestions of other similar characters, where you can find the character (books and movies for example), related characters and user generated comments. 

It gets interesting when you search for real people, who shouldn't in theory be in the database, but they are. So Jane Austen gets her own mention, since she's a character in a movie but there's also a list of other key characters created by her. 

The database is still very small, some 45,000 characters. Consequently there are lots of gaps; Elizabeth Bennet is only to be found in one movie and one book for example. However, this is balanced by the great deal of amusing stuff that is to be found - you can match yourself against different characters by taking a quiz. (Unfortunately I have no idea who the top half dozen matches I got, since I'm not really into modern teenage culture!) You can get quotes, rankings for funny things such as 'characters who we would trust to avenge our death' and so on.

This tool is going to appeal to librarians who get asked about movies, characters, 'oh, can't remember their name but they were in so and so film' etc. Hopefully as more data gets added the resource will become ever more useful, and once it's got a lot of fictional characters in it, hopefully it will really take off. 

Movie recommendation search engine: Funkyflick

Funkyflick is a recommendation search engine that tries to find movies that you'll be interested in based on your likes - or indeed any subject matter that interests you. Type in your search term and Funkyflick will try to locate your interest on Wikipedia, and may well give you lots of alternatives. You do need to scroll down to find exactly what you want, because it arranges results alphabetically. Once you have located your subject of interest, the engine will return films based on that.

I did a search for 'London' for example, and got movie suggestions such as 'Passport to Pimlico', '10 RIllington Place', 'The Blue Lamp', 'Jubilee', and so on. I was then able to filter by genre or era. Each movie is represented by its poster, and there's a flyout dialogue box that tells you more about the film, based on a Wikipedia entry. You may also get a trailer, and you can share across social media.

There are a few glitches; I couldn't subscribe to find out more because the link wasn't working, I didn't like the fact that once you have done a search and clicked on a link, if you want to go back you've got to retype the entire search string again. There's also a daily limit of searches unless you subscribe - not a glitch of course, but irritating.

It's great fun and highly addictive, and certainly helps answer the question 'what film shall we watch this weekend?' They are promising the same service with books, and I can see how Funkyflick could be used by librarians to create 'viewing lists', promote DVD collections, suggest movies based on current news stories, link to things the library is currently promoting (World War One, anybody?) and so on. It's worth a look, and I'll be really interested to see how the book recommendation service comes along.

Zero Dollar Movies

Zero Dollar Movies is a collection of 15,000 movies that are available on YouTube for free. The site indexes only full-length films and no trailers, rentals or partial uploads. The movies are organized by their year of release but you can also use the instant search feature to quickly know if a particular title is available for viewing on YouTube.

Movie mistakes

Goofs, bloopers, pictures, quotes and trivia from thousands of movies A different sort of search engine I agree but a search engine nonetheless. 101,138 mistakes, 8,270 pictures, 6,563 films and 769 TV shows. Simply type in your favourite film and this will rip it to pieces with the mistakes that were made on it. Continuity people seem to be rubbish! In order to get the most out of the site you need to register, and to really get everything, there's a $10 membership fee, but you don't actually need to pay out anything. Just check to see what films are coming up on the tv over the weekend, read up in advance, and stun your loved ones who never realised that you were so observant!

Movieclips

Movie clips and movie scenes. I'm loving this site. Who wants to watch all the boring bits of the films, just to see the highlights? Movieclips just gives you the best clips, for free and legally, which is the important bit. Search by film, subject, actor, or scroll through a list of categories such as 'most popular', 'iconic lines', genre, mood, character and so on. Then watch the clip, and move on. Three hours later you'll realise that it was a bad idea to take my advice and visit the site.

My only gripe is that the clips start and finish abruptly - they're a little poorly edited. There are lots of movies on there, and I only found a couple that were favourites which weren't on there. Go! Explore! Have fun!

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Lux Radio Theater

OK, quick question. Which Hollywood stars have played Rick Blaine in Casablanca? Yes, there's Bogart, but I mentioned "stars". How about Alan Ladd? No, this isn't some strange alternative universe - Alan Ladd did play him, but in Lux Radio Theater which was a classic radio anthology running from 1934 to 1955 on and off. Originally Broadway shows were adapted, but then they moved onto hour long live radio presentations.

Often the original stars reprised their roles, but sometimes they were unable to do so. When they decided to run Casablanca Bogart was overseas entertaining the troops. Alan Ladd stood in for him. Another interesting thing with the Lux Radio Theater is that the studio system wasn't enforced, so it was possible to get actors working together across studio lines, which was quite revolutionary.

About a hundred of these recordings survive, and you can download them and listen to them, interspersed with the original advertisements for Lux soap. Absolutely fascinating; there are some great ones such as the aforementioned Casablanca, but other favourites of mine include The day the earth stood still, The ghost and Mrs Muir, Mrs Miniver, The Maltese Falcon, After the Thin Man, A farewell to arms and Miracle on 34th Street.

These are fantastic recordings, the adverts, the stars, the original crackles and pops... if you've any interest in Hollywood recordings, you'll love listening to these.

Nanocrowd - The movie search engine

Nanocrowd. This is very clever, and I like it. It's a discovery engine rather than a search engine though. Simply type in a film/actor/director that you like, and Nanocrowd will attempt to find others that you like.

I tried 'Withnail and I'. It then brought up a new screen with 'movies most like' (with generally accurate results) and 'movies least like'.  There's a link to 'Tell me more about this movie' which pulls a summary from Amazon. Trailers and previews come from IMDb, as do external reviews/critics. User reviews are also pulled from Amazon.
There's a 'Movie in a nutshell' tag cloud as well.

Finally there is a 'what are you in the mood to watch' option, which is a 3 word 'nanogenre' - for Withnail there were six options, such as 'funny friendship weird' and 'england subtlety emotional'. Clicking on any of those provides a selected list of other films that match the chosen criteria.

Nice resource, with the additional bonus of creating you own 'Mymovies' option to keep tabs on your favourites. If you're into films, this would be a great one for you!

Movie title stills collection

Movie title stills collection. I seem to be looking at a lot of visual stuff recently, and here's another example. Opening and closing credits from thousands of films from 1900 to now. You get the main title and the end (which almost always contains the words 'The End'). Not sure of the value of this one, though it will be of interest to media studies students perhaps, and also people who have an interest in movie fonts.

Unfortunately the only way of searching the collection is by decade and then scrolling through, which is a shame, having said that, it's a one man band operation, so it would be churlish to be too hard on it.