Salocin

Funding valuable research

What do researchers at top institutions study? Where do your tax contributions go? Well, that bastion of modern intellectual pursuit, Leicester University, has a team working on... wait for it...

One in three people in Britain are suffering from Celebrity Worship Syndrome after becoming obsessed with their idols, according to new research.

 

Extreme sufferers of the newly identified condition admit they would lie, steal or worse if the object of their admiration asked them.

As reported by ITV News and copied (filed) by Ananova. Surely this is a hoax, I hear you say. Nobody would pay someone to write a paper on this! You're right, it's not one paper, it's eight papers.

But this must be an isolated case, the exception that proves the rule, the odd example that has nothing to do with reality! Not so. Not to be outdone, the University of London's very own Sue Clayton has provided us with the formula for the perfect movie...

An academic claims to have discovered the formula for a perfect film and says the closest match for the Platonic form is Toy Story 2.

I always knew Toy Story was better than Casablanca, Cinema Paradisio, Carne Tremula and Jaws, and now I have the equation that proves it.

So the performance of a film can be predicted by comparing it's ingredients with this "ideal" list that Ms. Clayton undoubtedly obtained through some objective scoring method and regression analysis. The target, for those of you thinking of preparing a movie script, is as follows...

Action: 30%

Comedy: 17%

Good v Evil: 13%

Love/sex/romance: 12%

Special effects: 10%

Plot: 10%

Music: 8%

So let's consider this logically for a second. This formula reinforces the popular wisdom that a film that's all action must (by simple subtraction) have no plot. However, it also implies that a film that is 100% plot can have no music, and that for every 1% of music added, the plot must deteriorate (or somehow absent itself) by 1%.

Shows that are 100% about comedy must be 0% about sex, which can only be seen as a bit of a blow to the British sense of humour. Shows that are 100% about Good vs Evil can have no special effects, so there go Star Wars, Face/Off, MI2, etc.

Is anyone else unconvinced? And is this lecturer/film director getting paid for this research?

Posted by nlvp at May 13, 2003 05:08 PM