A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Release Date:
January 1, 2015
Original Title:
Las Vegas in 16 Parts
Ratings / Certifications:
N/A
Runtime: 53
"Each year forty million visitors descend on the Mojave Desert to have an encounter with chance and a timeworn narrative of excess, with the assurance that whatever they do there will disappear into oblivion. The mass media reproduces and celebrates the image of Vegas based on gratuity and transgression. LAS VEGAS IN 16 PARTS proposes a flirtatious dialogue with this collective perception through an aesthetic of appropriation. The film cannibalizes the sheen of the city’s voracious capacity for spectacle: from the 1950s, when atomic explosion tests became another tourist attraction, to the present, when a male stripper turns police brutality into the sensual fantasy of a bachelorette. A documentary about a concrete city, it inversely aspires to be a fiction of an improbable collective fantasy."
Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).
Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).
At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.
Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)
While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:
Regarding profile removals and data corrections:
Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).
Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.
Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.