Operation HO HO HO

A quick note: This post was originally published some time ago on DataViz.Love, our old blog. We have moved it here for preservation with the approval of the author(s).

Operation HO HO HO

Having been born in 1987 I think I belong to the golden generation of trash Christmas movies. I remember Arnold Schwarzenegger desperately fighting for Turbo Man at the department store, Chevy Chase lightning up the town with Xmas decorations or Tim Allen turning into Santa Claus with great nostalgia. But my favorite of all is Home Alone 2. Growing up in the 90s meant, that you had 5 videotapes on top and watched them night and day. I still know the whole film by heart and after more than 25 years, and can't get bored of it. To be honest, I saw only a few from the classics in Thrillist's list, but The Apartment stands really close to my heart. I can watch Jack Lemmon drain a bowl of pasta through a tennis racket and stealing the heart of Ms. Kubelik forever. So many films to see, so little time.

The Christmas chess table

A few days ago I saw a small multiple chart combined with a highlighting action on Viz Zen Data. I thought it would be great to try this technique and a Xmas film top list seemed to be a good fit for it. I spiced Thrillist's collection with IMDB data and put together the dataset in a couple of hours. The viz contains two layers on top of each other, the small multiple scatterplot and the color with the film titles under it. With the help of the parameters on the left, you can select to see the Top / Bottom N films by budget, score or runtime. By hovering over the snowflakes the details pop up, and by clicking on it, you can navigate to the IMDB page of the film. Want to switch on to holiday mode? Let's try it out!