2008 Movies Singles Tournament (still on, hopefully)

[No Rules Westbrook]

Yeah, Friday's a decent idea for a surefire way to fit in this tournament, but that's what I was worried about. I think a decent number of people who would quite like to play won't be there on Friday. So, unless Ray feels differently...I guess, we should try to do our best with Saturday and Sunday (with more weight on Sunday).

[DumbJaques]

I too would really like this to happen at CO, but we cant wait 1.5-2 hours after trash to start the SS/P doubles. It will likely need to be much less than that for people to have any prayer of making flights and finishing the tournament. What is the problem with trying to do this at lunch Saturday and Lunch Sunday? Obviously we'd only be able to do like one round Saturday, but the Sunday lunch is longer. Spreading this out over the maximum amount of days seems like the ideal way to do this. Honestly, I'd say do two rounds Friday and two rounds Sunday at lunch (or one Friday, one Saturday, two Sunday Lunch). If that means different people play each day and it's less official and can't exactly "crown" a movie champion, I'd say that's less important than forcing it into a slot that doesn't really exist.

[recfreq]

I'm gonna trim the ques down to < 1.5 hrs. We can't do friday b/c a major player (Susan) will not be there.

[Susan]

Holding this at an inconvenient time on my account is a very silly idea. Run it on Friday if Sunday's going to be a problem.

[No Rules Westbrook]

I agree with Chris. But, it's all up to Ray, it's his tourney. If you want to do a round on Friday, we can certainly do it. A round on Saturday during lunch, probably doable too.

[AKKOLADE]

I can only hope your questions are printed out in your shorthand.

[Mechanical Beasts]

I can only hope your questions are printed out in your shorthand.

otherwise they would b > 1.5 h

[No Rules Westbrook]

I should mention, I guess - that the problem with Saturday lunch may be that some people are jetting off to pick up a quick lunch elsewhere, if they don't want pizza.

[Susan]

Also, if lunch is only 30 minutes, enough of that time will be devoted to acquiring and eating food (even for the pizza-eaters) to make it pretty much impossible (in my view) to run any movie rounds over lunch.

[MLafer]

Congrats to Rom for his decisive victory!

[fizzball]

Congrats to Rom for his decisive victory!

Decisive it was, too. Finals participants included Rom, Lorin, Matts Lafer & Weiner, Magin, me, and I know I'm forgetting someone and am sorry about it. Look for it on the podcast, I imagine.

Thanks to Ray & Yogesh for putting it together, and thanks also to Rom for bringing quality prizes (a collection of WB Gangster films, some loose Hitchcock inc. Vertigo, and Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux).

[recfreq]

This tournament happened, and here're the results.

Congratulations to Rommy Masrour for his win, although Greg Sorenson gave him a run for his money (e.g. winning round 3). The top 7 finishers (making it into the final) in order consisted of Rom Masrour (12 pts), Greg Sorenson (9 pts), Matt Lafer (4 pts), Lorin Burte (4 pts), Matt Weiner (3 pts), and Jonathan Magin (1 pt). Dan Passner, Harry Shearing, and Dren (who left in the middle) also made it into the top division in either round 2 or 3. Most of them, plus some folks in the 2nd division, took home DVDs generously donated by Rom.

The first acknowledgment goes out to Yogesh Raut, who wrote most of the questions, and provided comments to the rest, and finished everything well ahead of schedule. Needless to say, this is as much if not more of an effort on Yogesh's part than mine. A big thanks to Donald Taylor, Arnav Moudgil, Eric Mukherjee, and Evan Nagler for reading and keeping things moving. A huge thanks to Rom Masrour for bringing the prizes. Thanks to Trygve Meade, Chris Ray, and Jerry Vinokurov (as well as Andrew Yaphe and Seth Teitler) for allowing me to step into their time slot to run the tourney. Although it began rather slowly, Donald et al helped us move smoothly thereafter. (Let me know if I forgot anyone.)

Thanks especially to all of you who showed up to play. Yogesh and I can only hope that some of the clues/answers will inspire you to watch/read about/write about these interesting topics in film history, which has a rather enormous answer space.

The questions have been sent to the Stanford archive, but are currently available here:
http://quizbowl.bol.ucla.edu/results/Movies-2008.zip

[edit: fixed link.]

[Matt Weiner]

edit: your link goes to the MLK/Terrapin/Aztlan set, not the movies tournament.

Hey, the tournament was pretty good; the only complaints I had were similar to those I heard from a bunch of other people, which was that the few common link questions were on dumb answers and made it very unclear what they wanted (please do not just list a bunch of movies by "female directors" if you're going to write a tossup on that answer for some reason; use pronouns and phrases such as "one movie by this kind of person...") and that the film theory questions were much harder than the questions about actual films, seemingly ignoring a bunch of easier theory-type answers you could have used.

A couple of people were also confused as to what the ratio of art film to popular film in the tournament was supposed to be and signed up thinking it would be something other than what it was, so I'd suggest making your intentions there more clear if you do this tournament again. In any case, thanks for putting on the set. I had a good time playing it, especially getting a power on "The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies," which I doubt I will have the opportunity to do again.

[recfreq]

I should say that I'm not going to do this ever again, so if someone wants to take over, that'd be great.