3 Easy Steps to Picking a Movie

Movies are simply amazing. And due to advancements in technology it seems we are overrun with them. So, how can you end the endless search and pick a good movie?

It turns out that each unique movie is nothing but a bunch of formulas, cobbled together to move them along.

My brother, a movie writer and director and faculty member, once told me to watch the movie time lapse because a new act happened every 15 minutes. So, when I wondered if a tense scene was going to come to a conclusion, I would look at the counter (or pause the movie) and see how close I was getting to a multiple of 15. Or if the characters aren't developed in the first 15 minutes, they may well never be.

And, that is the interesting part. The formulaic movie structure extends to plot lines. Don't just trust me, trust Miriam Quick of the BBC! Her story highlights research from the University of Vermont that put forth 6 archetypes after analyzing nearly 2,000 books. They include:

1. "Rags to Riches" characterized by a character's steady rise from bad to good fortune;

2. "Riches to Rags" where a character's tragic fall from good to bad;

3. "Icarus" characterized by a character's rise then a fall in fortune;

4. "Oedipus" where there is a fall, a rise and then a fall again;

5. "Cinderella," which is the opposite of Oedipus and is characterized by a rise, a fall, and then a rise again; and

6. "Man in a hole" where the character falls only to rise again!

Knowing there is a structure to art, I then set on a quest to leverage structure to end the endless search and inform my selection. Uniquely enough, movies are not classified by the plot type identified by these researchers. It may be because they don't want you to know what is going to happen in the movie if well-known genres like "Action" were replaced with "Man in a hole." And so, we must rely on movie genres as a substitute for plot line types.

Knowing this information, I developed a three step process for finding a movie. I encourage you to give it a try.

STEP 1: Assign a Genre a Number

I have three primary sources for movies, you may have more or less. I looked at the genres on those platforms and came up with the table below, where columns are my providers and rows are the genres. I then filled in each box with a number, when a platform had a genre. For example, both Amazon Prime Video and Netflix have an "Anime" genre so it was labelled two, whereas Paramount+ did not so I left it blank. It may surprise you, as it did me, that streaming platforms do not all appear to use the same genres.

Step 2. Grab Some Dice.

No matter where they live in your house - your favorite board game or gambler's gift set - a pair of dice is typically not far away. Me, I use a set that comes in its own box.

After selecting my streaming platform I simply roll the dice! I'll play along with you. I just rolled a 4 and a 1, or a five. Looks like I am headed towards a Documentary!

I roll the dice again and then scroll to the movie that many into the line-up. (You may want to add in another die or two for this part). So, I rolled two dice and got a 10. My finger started to scroll past documentary titles such as "Made You Look" and "The Last Dance" to ultimately arrive at "Operation Odessa."

Step 3. Get Comfortable

Lastly, a step before any movie watching largely overlooked, but critically important, is getting comfortable. Put the dice away, grab your favorite movie snack and get settled in to actually watch a movie rather than scroll through the queue in an endless search for something to watch.

And, hey, if the movie is not good after the first 15 minutes you know it didn't follow the formula. Don't feel bad and suffer through it, just turn it off and roll the dice again!