Who is that guy? He’s so sexy

2011 was all about Ryan Gosling.

Gosling had three prominent movies that all arrived on the big screen: Drive, The Ides of March, and Crazy, Stupid, Love.

Though he’s been acting for 17 years, Gosling began becoming recognized with everyone’s favorite romance, The Notebook, in 2004.

Since The Notebook, he has been in critically acclaimed movies such as All Good Things (2010), Blue Valentine (2010), Fracture (2007) and Half Nelson (2006).  (Box Top Up has all of these titles and Stay.)

In the last several years, the 32 year old star has spawned several adoring blogs including the F*** Yeah Ryan Gosling “Hey Girl” series.

Beyond Ryan Gosling, several other actors and actresses have emerged to become leading men and women worth watching out for:

Idris Elba

Elba won acclaim as the “intellectual” gangster in “The Wire”, an HBO TV series about gangsters in inner-city Baltimore, which ran from 2002 to 2004.

The divide between the small-screen (TV) and the big screen (movies) in Hollywood is wide.  Elba first appeared in Tyler Perry’s Daddy’s Little Girls (2007) and had a minor role in American Gangster (2007) alongside Denzel Washington.

Last year, Elba began taking more prominent roles in Thor and Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance.  This year you can catch him in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Gordon-Levitt had a supporting role in Christopher Nolan’s  Inception and will be working with the director again in this summer’s The Dark Night Rises.   Other notable movies featuring the young actor include 50/50 (2011) and Brick (2005).

Emma Stone

After starring in a smart teen comedy, Easy A, Stone emerged has a rising star with a supporting role in The Help and Crazy, Stupid, Love (alongside aforementioned Ryan Gosling).  She will be in the new remake of Spider-Man and Gangster Squad in 2012.

James McAvoy

McAvoy emerged in 2006 when he won a BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) for Best Actor in a Supporting Role in The Last King of Scotland.  (Forrest Whitaker, the leading male actor, won an Oscar for his performance.)  McAvoy has since  won accolades for his roles in several different genres:

Romance Films

• Becoming Jane (2007)
• Atonement (2007),
• The Last Station (2009)

Action Films

• Wanted (2008) with Angelina Jolie
• X-Men: First Class (2011)

Cartoons

• Arthur Christmas  (2011)
• Gnomeo and Juliet (2011)

Marion Cotillard

After winning an Oscar for Best Actress for La Vie en Rose in 2008, Cotillard has surged with Inception (2010), Little White Lies (2010), Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011), and Contagion (2011).  This summer she will also be appearing in The Dark Knight Rises this summer.

Shopping List

Worth watching?

Our goal is to increase the range of good movies we offer – not just expand the number of titles we carry.  Early on we came across a dilemma:  should we buy bad movies?

Bad movies cost less than good movies.  The latter hold their value over time.  We could have easily increased the size of our library at the expense of quality.   We don’t like to waste money and we definitely didn’t want to waste our customers’ time.  Thus, Box Top Up attempts to focus on quality movies.

We decided not to use our own judgment and to rely on the “wisdom of crowds.”  We typically first review the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) rating of each movie we consider.  IMDb uses a scoring system from 1 to 10; a higher rating means a better movie.  IMDb collects “votes” on each title from all over the world.

Generally, any movie rated below 5.5, we will not purchase that movie.  The primary exceptions to this rule are movies with Christian themes and those with black casts.  We discovered that the voters on IMDb seem to “strongly dislike” both types of movies.  We believe there may be a cultural gap between the pool of global voters and the people who actually enjoy these films.  Thus, we review other sources such as http://www.christian-movies.org and http://www.christiancinema.com.

The other group of movies that we buy yet may not score that high on IMDb are new movies.  It’s hard to fight the Hollywood Marketing Machine.  For instance, the sequel to “Alvin and the Chipmunks” received an IMDb score of 4.1; nonetheless, we still bought it.  We’ll let you be the judge.

As for TV series, we try to select those that have “graduated” past two seasons.  The system for selecting TV series worthy of renewal is brutal.  Every year, dozens of TV series are killed before the end of a full season.  A couple of years ago “Flash Forward” captured my attention.  Unfortunately, its ratings did not match the cost to produce so the network killed it before the producers could reveal what the mystery was all about.    No one will ever have  the closure they tuned in every week for.

Nearly all the TV series we have selected are either wildly popular in their target demographics and/or have received critical acclaim.   Here is a list of TV series that “ended before their time.”

We are always open to suggestions for our library.  To suggest a movie title or TV series, please email us at info@boxtopup.com.

“What new movies do you have?”

Every day I speak with Ghanaians and expats about our service.  Overwhelmingly, it seems, that there is a strong craving for new movies.  This question bothers me for a few reasons.

First,this question assumes that everyone has the same interest in movies; that their interest in movies follows a “normal distribution.”  This is far from the case.  Studies of Netflix and Amazon.com in the US suggest that individuals’ interests actually follow a “long tail” or “fat tail” distribution.  In other words, people have very very different taste in movies.

Second, it assumes they have watched all movies of interest to them to date.  As a  movie buff for decades, I am confident that it’s nearly impossible to have done so.  Every year, something like 200 movies are released in the US per year.  This figure doesn’t include the films promoted in Cannes from France, Germany, Japan, Australia, etc. and which are distributed globally.

Third, it assumes they know what they want to watch.   Watching movies involves discovering what you like and a bit of an adventurous spirit.  After you watch the top 20 movies of a year, you might be thinking, “What else is there?”  Our “Browse Titles” section enables you to search based on what other people like (member rating), genre, and actor.  We also suggest you check out Internet Movie Database (IMDb) for a broader rating of movies.

Instead of asking for “new”, I wish they would ask, “What good movies do you have?”

Many movies are released without the marketing budget of bad movies (I’m talking about you: “The Green Hornet“).    In 2010, two of my favorite movies were “A Prophet” and “Mesrine: Parts I and II” which were released in Europe in 2009 and 2008, respectively.  The first is the story of how a young hoodlum becomes a crime boss after spending time in a French prison; the second chronicles the life of a famous bank robber in France.  Both movies I accidentally discovered and both are in French.  They’re worth reading the subtitles for!

The movie that epitomizes this unfortunate situation of great movie and small marketing budget is “The Shawshank Redemption.”  Released in 1994, it was barely noticed by anyone except the critics.  After floating around on Netflix and Amazon.com for several years, the movie was discovered again and popularized by member ratings.   Currently, IMDb has it rated as 9.2 out of 10.0 by over 700,000 users.  This is the same rating as “The Godfather”, another classic.  (We will be getting it in February 2012.)

We suggest all of our members and our blog readers to consider exploring our library of movies – no matter how old they are.  If you need help with recommendations, please email me at lester@boxtopup.com.