I Forgot My Mantra is Scott Jackson's webtumblespacelog.

Keeping Track of Movies You’ve Seen?

I like keeping a list of the movies I’ve seen. I started doing it in January last year¹. At first, I used Daytum, but then Daytum got bought by Facebook and the Daytum iPhone app stopped working. Next, I built a dumb mobile website called Miz on Seen (I know, it’s the worst pun) and imported my movies from Daytum. That worked fine, but it’s not great.

This year, I’m looking for a more native solution. Is there a (nice) iPhone app that will let me enter the name of a movie I’ve seen, the date/time I saw it, and maybe a star rating or some notes? I’ve typed words into Google, but I can’t find any.

How do you keep track of the movies you’ve seen?

Some Snippets About Product Placement

Apple doesn’t pay for product placement.

On Meg Ryan using a PowerBook in You’ve Got Mail:

“Our arrangement was simply a loaning of equipment in exchange for exposure in the hands of Meg Ryan,” said Suzanne Forlenza, manager of product placement for Apple.

That’s the same Suzanne Forlenza who’s been in charge of product placement since 1994. There’s a nice old profile on her and her efforts from apple.com (ca. 1999) here:

And then she had her first big hit. “With Forrest Gump, there was no product, just the Apple logo,” Forlenza recalls. “They called up and said, ‘We have a kind of wacky idea — what do you think?’ They wanted to use our letterhead for the part where Forrest Gump finds out he’s become a millionaire because he’s invested in what he thought was a fruit company.” Paramount used the Apple letterhead, and 78,873,439 people saw it.

Moving away from Apple…

Futurepedia (the BTTF wiki, duh):

The product placement department had made a deal with the California Raisin Board, accepting $50,000 to place a reference to raisins in the film. Since raisins do not photograph well, the placement was on a bench upon which Red the Bum was seen sleeping when Marty returned from 1955. “When the California Raisin Board saw it,” recounted [co-writer Bob] Gale, “they were livid,” and the money was refunded.

Fortune, in 1987:

Total number of pairs of Wayfarers that had been sold prior to the 1983 Risky Business product placement in 1983: 18,000.

Number of pairs of Wayfarers sold in 1986: 1.5 million.

Game Design Complete:

[Crazy Taxi] featured a whole load of national chain stores, such as Tower Records, KFC, Fila, and Pizza Hut. The advertising made the city feel realistic and definitely enhanced the gameplay. […] The advertising was totally in keeping with the game, and because there was such a variety, it never really felt like you were watching an advertisement.

From Jurassic Park (1993).

In this scene, the gang have a meal and talk about the park while in the background, slideshows play of future attractions and future features of the park.

This future feature in particular caught my eye.

Just what exactly is Jurassic Tennis?

Wow-uh.

Christopher Walken, in a 2003 Guardian article:

“Sometimes, in a scene, without telling the other actor, I’ll pretend that I’m Elvis. I’ll just pretend I’m Elvis and the other actor will not know. And it’ll make me smile. Or even just smile inside. I’m doing Elvis and this guy doesn’t know I’m doing Elvis. I do it when things are getting stale. I’ll do it to, like, juice things up a little.”

Tell me you can’t imagine Christopher Walken saying that paragraph, word for word. Tell me you can’t imagine exactly how he’d say that. Wow-uh.

From earlier in the Guardian piece:

As a child, he used to cross out punctuation in his textbooks, something he still does, obsessively, with his scripts.

Later, in a 2004 New York Times article:

His bizarro word rhythm and gleeful disregard for punctuation makes even his most banal utterances sound dramatic. At the grocery store, he stared at a plump tomato and then put it back. ”I DON’T. Buy the tomatoes with. The stems. On them. They don’t. Degrade. They go. Down the sink. And into the WATER. Then. They get lodged in the throats of little. OTTERS.”