Mentioned Letterboxd earlier in the thread. It's become somewhat of a focus of mine lately. One of the things I do most often with friends and family is "let's watch a movie." Significant others we usually end up watching dozens of movies together.
I decided to create a spreadsheet of likely answers to "what should we watch?" so I can prioritize and select more effectively. I tend to be a low openness viewer. I don't watch a lot of movies and my palate is unsophisticated. This effort has been done to try to merge the realistic answer ("let's watch yet another zombie movie") with openness to what good film could be.
My method:
- All movies that I'd score 4/5 or higher (my bar for whether I'd bother watching again) go on the list
- All movies that I naturally want to see (not items that got on the watchlist because I was "supposed" to see it) go on the list
- Here's the big one: starting in 1990 (because the 90s were the best decade for everything), I calculated the top 5 rated Letterboxd films of each year that could be realistically acquired for viewing in modern fashion (streaming available and not through some obscure site I've never heard of).
This last one is more challenging than it sounds because:
- Letterboxd includes non-films, concerts, stand up specials, etc. You have to check entries individually for whether they're a movie.
- Letterboxd includes many films you'd need a disc or some other special means to acquire. You have to check their data entry (which is itself suspect) individually for each film to see if it's even realistically watchable.
- Many additional judgment calls get made (are short enough documentaries movies? What's too short/long to realistically be a movie?).
Then a few rounds of manual data scraping to get good features in the dataset (length, genre, director).
The results, when digested and analyzed, are kind of interesting. You get wide ranges year to year. Sometimes the top 5 you've heard of. Sometimes it's all obscurity. Quentin Tarantino has more films on the list than anyone else, double 3rd place. This method nearly always captures one of his movies in the Top 5 and the few others I've seen and liked or wanted to watch. I figured there'd be more variety at the top of a list like this, even if it is calibrated to mostly my tastes. I think the only movie of his I've even seen is Kill Bill.
Anyway, was a fun and interesting project. If anyone has suggestions for how to make it even more unnecessarily complicated for leisure I'd be interested.
