You know how I know I have great friends? Because they didn't mind being conned into doing another one of these movie drafts.

Last time, we drafted movies from 2009. This time, in honour of my birthday, we drafted movies from my birth year, 1988.

A refresher of the rules:

• The movie's year of released had to be listed as 1988 on IMDb
• At the end of the draft, each player must have one movie from each of these seven categories
  • Blockbuster (for this one, movies with >$100m adjusted domestic gross were eligible for this category)
  • Drama
  • Action/Comedy
  • Sci Fi/Fantasy/Horror
  • Animated/Foreign Language
  • Sequel/Prequel/Reboot/Remake
  • Wild Card (any film can be a Wild Card)
    

As is tradition, the draft order was set randomly and picks were made serpentine-style. At the end of the night, here's what our six teams looked like.

• Person A: Die Hard, The Last Temptation of Christ, Grave of the Fireflies, Bull Durham, Vampire's Kiss, The Thin Blue Line, The Blob
• Person B: Rain Man, Police Story 2, They Live, The Accused, Willow, Dragons Forever, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
• Person C: My Neighbor Totoro, A Fish Called Wanda, Coming to America, Dead Ringers, Dangerous Liaisons, Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack, The Vanishing
• Person D: Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, The Land Before Time, Bloodsport, Stand and Deliver, Midnight Run, Dead Heat, The Dead Pool
• Person E: Beetlejuice, The Naked Gun, Cinema Paradiso, Beaches, Child's Play, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Crocodile Dundee II
• Person F: Mississippi Burning, Akira, Big, Young Guns, Hellbound: Hellraiser II, Return of the Killer Tomatoes, Red Heat

First things first: everyone brought their A game. This was a much closer draft than the last one. People learned from their biffs in the first one, developed boards and strategies, and the result was a killer performance overall.

I had Die Hard as the first movie off the board, so Person A was 100% justified in taking it first. The rest of their draft is very good; The Thin Blue Line was a great wild card pick, and The Blob is a criminally underrated film and also a great last-round pick. There were rumblings among the Committee that Vampire's Kiss was ineligible because it was only released wide in 1989, but the rules clearly state that the year used to determine the validity of a pick the the year listed on IMDb, which in the case of Vampire's Kiss is, in fact, 1988, since it premiered at Cannes that year. Nice try, anonymous GM!

Could B have gotten Rain Man later? Probably. But, as with Avatar in the 2009 draft, it's hard to argue with the reasoning: this movie was an Oscar juggernaut (four wins, including Best Picture) and the highest-grossing film of 1988. Could they have gotten Police Story 2 later? Again, probably, but I see the reasoning. Sequel/Prequel/Reboot/Remake is always going to be thin, so getting in early is a good move. It also allowed B to score mad style points by having a Jackie Chan double feature on their roster when they picked Sammo Hung's Dragons Forever, which wasn't even on my radar.

C came in hot out of the gate, capitalizing on My Neighbor Totoro, which was 2nd overall in my mock draft, falling to third. C picked crowdpleasers with surgical precision in the first five rounds. But dear reader, I have never been as floored or flabbergasted by a pick than when C took a fucking Gundam movie in the sixth round. It was the right place to have a complete and total curveball, and it just knocked me square on my ass. Char's Counterattack wasn't even in the same galaxy as my board, and I have no choice but to respect the move. Getting the Dutch thriller The Vanishing in the last round as a wild card is quite the coup, too.

D's board has strong “weekend at Dad's” vibes. Dad really likes action movies with manly men committing grievous acts of bodily harm against one another, using their guns, their fists, or both. But there are a couple of tapes there for the kids, too. As far as draft strategy goes, getting Midnight Run in the fifth round is fucking highway robbery. How did stay on the table that long. I can't be sure, but I have a theory: most of the GMs in the draft are under 30, no one has cable, and Midnight Run isn't streaming anywhere. A perfect storm for generating a high-value pick.

I think E had a solid draft right up until the end. As I mentioned before, Sequel/Prequel/Reboot/Remake is always going to be a thin category, but surely even horror programmers like Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers or Phantasm II were higher value than the second Crocodile Dundee movie. By their own admission, Crocodile Dundee II was “smooth-brain viewing,” but so's some of that horror schlock I just mentioned. Beaches I get, but Crocodile Dundee II I don't. My suspicion is they wanted to keep it real and only pick movies they've seen, but by their own admission, they've seen “like 100 movies,” so maybe hatedrafting a shitty sequel is a viable way of doing things.

F fooled me. I though they biffed it completely when they drafted Hellraiser II as their SF/F/Horror pick. I even asked them if they were sure. They assured me they knew what they were doing. They did: F went completely off-board and picked the gleefully crass Return of the Killer Tomatoes as their sequel, which while not the steal of the evening (that would be Midnight Run at #28), it was the pick that caused the most hootin' and hollerin'. I don't think F had the best draft, but on the strength of that move and picking Red Heat because like hell we were going to draft an 80s movie year and have no Arnold Schwarzenegger films, they may have had the most fun one.

After the secret ballots were tallied, A and D were declared joint winners. But what do you think? Who won? Who lost?

Here are ten we left on the table:

• Frantic
• Hairspray
• Killer Klowns from Outer Space
• Married to the Mob
• Mystic Pizza
• Oliver and Company
• Scrooged
• Twins
• Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
• Working Girl

#movies #moviedraft

Inspired by the fine folks at the Ringer's Big Picture podcast, I somehow convinced my friends to indulge me and participate in what is likely the dorkiest group activity I have ever suggested: a movie draft.

The goal is simple: create your best possible team of seven movies. There are only two rules: all movies bust the listed as a movie released in the year or the draft (in this case, 2009) on the Internet Movie Database, and by the end of the draft, you need to have one movie in each of the following seven categories:

• Blockbuster (domestic gross >$100 million)
• Drama
• Action/Comedy
• Science fiction/Fantasy/Horror
• Animated/Foreign Language
• Sequel/Prequel/Reboot/Remake
• Wild Card (any movie can be a Wild Card)

Armed with nothing but their wits, our movie GMs duked it out and picked their movies serpentine-style, as is tradition. Here were the results:

• Person A: Avatar, Orphan, The Hangover, The Road, Fast & Furious, Dogtooth, Whip It
• Person B: Star Trek, Coraline, I Love You, Man, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans, Antichrist, Brothers, Up in the Air
• Person C: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Law Abiding Citizen, Sherlock Holmes, Jennifer's Body, Black Dynamite, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, The Princess and the Frog
• Person D: Inglourious Basterds, Drag Me to Hell, Fantastic Mr. Fox, In the Loop, A Serious Man, Valhalla Rising, Universal Soldier: Regeneration
• Person E: Up, Watchmen, Taken¹, Zombieland, The Final Destination, Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, Brüno
• Person F: District 9, Moon, Crank: High Voltage, Dead Snow, Pandorum, Daybreakers, Redline

Now it's time for me to put on my Mel Kiper hat and break down these drafts.

I think A's only real faux-pas was taking Avatar first. I understand the reasoning: it's the highest-grossing movie of all time, just sitting there. But I don't think this movie has fans. Like, Titanic has fans. Other juggernauts have fans. I don't think I've heard anyone talk about Avatar after that awards season. My point is this: I think A could have gotten Avatar in the third round. With everything else on the board, this was not the way to go. I will note that the rest of their draft is very good: picking up The Hangover in the third was good value, Fast & Furious was as good a sequel there was, and Orphan is a movie that continues to be slept on. If A hadn't picked Avatar first, they probably would have won.

B said they were making their first pick with their heart, and I can't blame them. The Abrahms Star Trek was going to get taken eventually, and they wanted it, so they took it. Now, is that sound draft strategy? Maybe, given that the other people drafting, yours truly incuded, are total fucking nerds. I had Star Trek as a second-round pick, but then again, what do I know. I do know this: B made zero bad picks, including a sneaky/clever Sequel/Prequel/Reboot/Remake pick with Brothers (though I would have slotted Bad Lieutenant there to free up the way-more-open Drama category). All in all, if I'm programming a day of TV, I want B's roster, but I'm making sure to bury Antichrist, a movie I was too chickenshit to finish, deep into the overnight.

I have no clue what the fuck C was doing. The writing was on the wall when they drafted the sixth Harry Potter joint (a) third overall, (b) as their blockbuster when the sequels were already thin. And then they drafted Law Abiding Citizen, a diet Death Wish joint I didn't even consider for my mock list², in the Top 10. What the fuck. From this point on, C started to get their shit together. After some deliberation, the Committee accepted that Sherlock Holmes qualifies as a reboot, which was a great morale booster for C after being clowed on mercilessly by yours truly for their first two picks. C then followed that up with three more solid picks, four if you're among those who like Parnassus. I wouldn't know, I haven't seen it, and funnily enough, neither has C. Their draft was like watching a kid ride a bike with no training wheels for the first time: an immediate faceplant followed by tenous, tear-streaked wobbling around the block.

D was given a gift, and that was being able to pick Inglourious Basterds fourth overall. I could have sworn this would have been off the board within the first two picks. Shows you what I know. Was D able to capitalize on the best film of 2009 falling into his lap? Well... that's hard to say. Taking Drag Me to Hell ninth overall seems way early for a movie not all that many people seem to like or even remember, but A Serious Man is great value for a fifth-rounder. For better or worse, I think D was playing a different game than everybody else. It's not that the picks were bad, per se. Their picks were too inside-baseball, too eager to play the knowing video store clerk. What exactly are you gunning for if you pick fucking Valhalla Rising and a Universal Soldier movie made in the 21st century? That's not playing to win, that's playing for yourself.

After round two, I was terrified of E's board. Boom, Up. Boom, Watchmen. Two clean chalk picks, in the right categories and everything. Then, a crack in the armor. E picked Taken third, which snuck by the Committee even though it was an invalid pick. Taken would have been another ruthlessly efficient pick had the year of release been correct. Zombieland, good value as a fourth-rounder. But then, the wheels started coming off the war machine: E took The Final Destination as a horror film, which is a more egriegous, more costly version of B's Bad Lieutenant play. At this point in the draft, even okay sequels and reboots were at a premium, while there were still some pretty decent SF/F/H choices on the board. Starting with round five, E didn't so much shoot themselves in the foot as much as empty the whole clip into it. By taking The Final Destination, they fucked themselved into Underworld 3. And Brüno? Well, that's a movie I really don't like. I don't like that schtick. I kind of wish E would have gone for a troll pick instead.

F's board is the one I have the least context for. I think they took Moon at the exact right point, and for my money, I think Crank 2 was the highest-value sequel in play. Smart, small-ball drafting. Then F started balling out and proceeded to fill their board with three mid-budget European genre movies and topped it off with a dollop of high-octane weeb content. And you know what? I respect it. This was the game D was trying to play, but with no pretense. No critic's picks, no Film Twitter touchstones, just slightly-under-the-radar idiosyncrasy. I don't think F won, but they earned my respect as a GM. And much in the same way that I would take B's roster to program a day of TV, if I were tasked with programming a Midnight Madness-style card for a festival, F's roster is the one I want in my corner.

What do you think? Who won this thing?

¹ This pick was voided by the Committee because, while it was released in America in 2009, the film is in fact listed as being a 2008 film on IMDb. Tough titties.

² If this movie would have been made in 1994, it would be awesome.

#movies #moviedraft