Celebrating our birthday the only way we know how by being sticklers.
A new Cinematrix drops every morning.
you’ve got the option to play past editions in thearchive.
Try our biweekly grid gameTelematrix.
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It seems impossible that weve already gotten a years worth of Cinematrix grids under our collective belt.
One year of trying to remember if that one Kirsten Dunst movie came out in 1994 or 1995.
One year of guessing which Ben Stiller movies were 80% approved on Rotten Tomatoes.
(Great news: Its both!)
Heres to another great year of open dialogue.
Have never been as bad at anything as I am at Cinematrix.
Forget every film Ive ever seen as soon as I open it.
The actor, who does bear something of a resemblance to Jon Lovitz, sadly died in 2011.
One is automatic, which uses an API to pull correct answers from our database provider, TMDB.
To keep the game manageable for us, we give a shot to rely heavily on automatic categories.
we have a subset of manual ones.
For those categories, we go through and collect the correct answers by hand.
No category demonstrates the precariousness of this approach better than Character Name in Title.
It seems straightforward: What are the characters names?
Do any of those names appear in the title?
And yet, youd be surprised at the havoc this one category has wreaked at Cinematrix HQ.
Its a manual category, one that involves two specific challenges.
So theres a basic fact-check element that can be time consuming and occasionally confounding.
(And, more critically, are typically credited as such in the databases we consult.)
The only reason to countThe Godfatherwas due to the slippery slope wed created with the Dark Knight.
Its impossible for us to account for all the ways a character may be addressed.
(Ben Affleck inThe Accountant).
Clarification:The Pink Pantherhasnevercounted for character name in title.
The Pink Panther in the Inspector Clouseau movies is, famously, a diamond and not a character.
Numerals are, by definition, not letters, and thus cannot be either consonants or vowels.
Genre Spotlight
WhatEvenIsaRom-Com?
Rom-com trappings without an actual romantic story line, likeLegally Blonde 2, will not count.
Also, Richard Curtis doesntnotmake rom-coms.ROM-COM.
The Vow(2012):Romantic: yes.
Comedy: no!NOT A ROM-COM.
To call it a romantic comedy feels a bit like missing the point.
But after consideration, we ruled that it does meet our criteria, so:ROM-COM.
Just know that even internally here at Vox Media, there are Sotomayor levels of strenuous dissent.
But it causes some difficulty for our game, in various ways.
The Identical-Titles Problem
We talked about this inClarifications and Corrections, Vol.
And then there are the cases where the same actor is in two separate movies of the same title.
Jamie Lee Curtis is in two movies calledHalloween.
Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, and David Arquette are in two movies calledScream.
Whoopi Goldberg is in two movies calledThe Color Purple.
It wont affect your rarity score, so dont worry about it.
National Lampoons Vacation: 1983 Chevy Chase comedy.Vacation: 2015 reboot ofNational Lampoons Vacation.
Face/Off:John Travolta and Nicolas Cage swap faces.Face-Off:a Canadian hockey movie also known asWinter Comes Early.
Emma:1996 adaptation of the Jane Austen novel starring Gwyneth Paltrow.Emma.
(Original songs, not needle drops.)
Clarification:Only theStar Warsprequels officially have a number in the title
Surprising but true!
Category Spotlight
WhatEvenIsanOscar-WinningDirector?
The category Directed by an Oscar Winner seems pretty straightforward, right?
That means acting, writing, and short-film awards are all eligible.
The two main places this shows up are for Best International Feature and Best Picture.
But because directors are frequently producers on their own movies, sometimes theyll still count.
It even trips up our own staff!
), it had attached folks like Mahershala Ali, Mia Goth, Aaron Pierre, and Delroy Lindo.
If a movie features a cat, but is not about a cat, would that count?).
Second of all, your Halloween parties have gotten WAY too niche.
What do you mean youre@vultures online daily movie trivia game Cinematrix?pic.twitter.com/rje2lykC5b
