Last week, I wrote a column describing the merits of a “short all openers” strategy. I looked at box office data since the arrival of V2, and determined that most traders would be hard-pressed to outperform a “short all openers” strategy. I promptly got smacked in the ass by a weekend where all three films adjusted up substantially. Had I followed my usual reasoning rather than a rule of thumb, I would have held OUTTO and 10HAT long last weekend, although I still would have gotten burned on MATRX, which I just didn’t think could do the business that it did.

However, we must not be like the French army, who get ragged on for fighting the way they should have in their *last* war. One good weekend should not dictate future behavior any more than one bad weekend should. You need to look at the long term trend. It should be noted that if you held all films long this weekend, you just barely recovered your profits if you had held all films long last weekend. However, it now is obvious that my conclusions last week were premature – they were subject to being upset by one big weekend, and in fact, were overly influenced by the death toll from the previous weekend. Had that weekend (with EDTV, DOUG, and MDSQD all adjusting down) not happened, my data would have looked very different. It was my mistake for not noticing this.

I did recalculate my numbers based on this weekend’s data, and now fully half of all columnists I am tracking have a record better than they would have received by shorting all openers.

However, the broader points I made in my column, about tracking your performance, and comparing it to a baseline, is still quite valid. It is still very good policy to monitor your success at predicting openers, and compare it to the performance you would have attained by shorting all openers, or by strictly following the advice of some of the more precognizant columnists (JD, Dano, Dr Evil, Dano, Beavis, and Jimmy Impossible had the best track record of the HSBR and HSJ columnists I am tracking). But do a sensitivity analysis – see how different the results would be if one or two films had gone the other direction. If your results are overly sensitive to a small number of films, you probably need more data before changing your behavior to any great extent.

I do plan on continuing my updates of this, and I am still generally an opener skeptic – I default to the assumption that a film will adjust down.

Mini-Review: The Matrix: I saw this on Friday night in one of the Twin Cities’ few THX theaters (at the Mall of America). I have begun to wonder if I am becoming one of those curmudgeonly film goers. I have seen so many great action films – from the swashbucklers of the 30s and 40s, to the Anthony Mann and Howard Hawks westerns of the 50’s, the gritty urban dramas and Peckinpah films of the 60s and 70s, the James Cameron and John McTiernan action films of the 80’s and to the Hong Kong actioners of the 90s. Given that background, very few action films out of Hollywood entertain me anymore. I see the predictable plot lines, the incongruous one-liners, the stock characters (the partner who dies, the ass-chewing police lieutenant, the wife who is sick of the hero’s job coming first, etc.), and the over-reliance on FX. The latter has really begun to irk me of late. Too many films are amazingly sloppy at creating dramatic tension, building a story, and following internal logic, papering over all this screenwriting laziness with some CGI effects.

So imagine my joy when I saw Matrix. Here was a film which created an original, interesting new universe, and used it as springboard to construct a very servicable plot, clever story execution, and some of the most amazingly choreographed and photographed action scenes I have ever seen. I don’t mean to say that the plot was ingenious – this isn’t LA Confidential – but the plot was *built* well. The rules are established, some questions are raised, the villains are introduced, and the story then proceeds very cleverly, and almost teasingly ( you get hints of what is to come, with scenes of kung fu training for the heroes and scenes of ruthless pursuit by the “agents”, but the film isn’t in a hurry), toward the inevitable action climax, which is a humdinger. The Wachowski Brothers similarly breathed new life into film noir with “Bound”, their last film – another stunningly clever execution of what had become a tired genre. I am very much looking forward to their next film.

The Matrix convinced me that I am not a curmudgeon. I still love good action films – its just that very few of them coming out of Hollywood are anything other than derivitive junk.

virtually yours,

Tom