I watch a lot of movies, and I like about half of them, but I keep maybe 1 in 10* because not that many are worth keeping. And I use two different services to rate movies and receive recommendations now, because - rant, remember - I got sick of Netflix putting comedic movies in “thriller” and “suspense”, or putting “horror” on movies that are actually “drama” or “romantic non-comedy”. So I’ve also started using MovieLens. It’s about as hit-or-miss as NetFlix, but there hasn’t been a miscategory so glaringly stupid that I remember it. I transferred the 800+ ratings on my NetFlix over 3 days of grinding, and while the accuracy seemed to get better, when it was wrong it was terribly wrong. A 2-star guess for Zoolander when it’s one of the 3 comedy movies that I can always laugh it. A 3.5-star guess for Underworld that I rated 0.5 stars. But you can tag your movies with what you liked and disliked about them. And at first I thought this would be fantastic, because I’m in the habit of analyzing the movies I watch so I can recognize what I’m looking for in a movie and describe it to someone else, and get a recommendation, or, in turn, recommend and predict whether a certain movie would be loved or hated. Alas, any user can add tags to a movie, and they are all kept and displayed - though not their authors, which is either a courtesy or a necessity. Because these users are all retarded, imbecilic, underdeveloped morons.
People tag the movie by actor and actress, even though movies can be looked up by them. Anything related to who performs in the movie is a terrible tag because it can be looked up - it won’t be the person who makes the film watchable or likeable; it will only provide the impetus to watch. The movie isn’t good or bad because of its cast, it’s better or worse because of its cast. People tag it with “Ryan’s DVDs” or “DVR collection” or “MT” (whatever that means), or “not as good as the others”, or, less and less unbelievably, “potter” (for the Harry Potter series), or “netflixq” (presumably, it’s on their NetFlix queue). Somebody went through and tagged all the Harry Potter movies with “broomstick” for Christ’s sake. Somebody else is tagging movies with “DVD”. When there’s a way to punch people through the internet, the world will end in violence. There’s also no agreement over the “adapted from:book” / “book adaptation” / “adapted from a book” / “adapted from book” / “based on a book” / “based on book” tags. But the same logic applies here: the fact that it is adapted does not affect its quality - it is the how of adaptation that will make it better or worse. Actors make a film better or worse when they are well cast, not when they are who they are; their quality as an actor makes it more likely that they improve the casting (or not). Paul Bettany could never have saved Legion. Keanu Reeves could never have killed The Matrix.
Tags like “fantasy”, “surreal”, “psychological”, “werewolf”, “magic”, make some sense because they describe the form/structure or the content. Unfortunately, it’s more like a sub-genre, so it’s useful for categorizing movies and aiding the search for specific flavors of movies, but, generally speaking, it does little to convey the quality of a particular movie, or aid in the prediction of how likeable a movie might be. Troy and Alexander are contemporary to each other, are action/drama, based on antiquity, and fall into the “sword and sandal” subgenre that someone thinks exists. Now, even before adding in Brad Pitt, who is a phenomenal actor, there is an obvious difference in the quality, even though they come from nearly the exact same genre; as they should, since Alexander was meant - I’m fairly certain - to compete with Troy. And if you don’t think Brad Pitt is a phenomenal actor, you need to see Kalifornia, Meet Joe Black, The Devil’s Own, Se7en, Spy Game, Legends of the Fall, and Burn After Reading. The first 6 are worth watching, while Burn is the opposite of my sense of humor and I hate it, but Pitt plays distinct characters in all of them. And, yes, his accent is Minnesota-interesting in Devil’s Own, but at least he understands what his responsibility is. Unlike, for example, Michael Gambon.
But back to the tagging. Tags like “hard to watch” mean nothing because there’s no ‘why’ to qualify the subjectivity. “movie to see” is exactly the same, a summary judgment without the specific methods of the movie that produced the judgment. Since the tags can be valued (between ‘like’ ‘dislike’ and ‘neutral’) the subjective judgment is built-in. Instead of “hard to watch” (which was in (wtf?) neutral), “choppy editing” could go under the ‘dislike’ category. It’s a good system with nothing but user errors.
As an example - because I can’t tag every movie or I would never get around to anything else - I tagged Prisoner of Azkaban with “Gambon ignores established character” in the ‘dislike’ category. Because I don’t care about the actor, I care about his complete and total ineptitude when it came to acting like somebody else. Michael Gambon had one responsibility, and that was to act like goddamn Dumbledore. A far more competent and useful actor established a character for Dumbledore over two previous movies, then Michael Gambon comes along and ignores all of it. So, for whatever reason Gambon decided to be a useless shit for the Harry Potter movies, his break with the established character is one of the things I dislike about Azkaban, but the rest are minor in comparison, so, with the low expectations I have for most movies, Gambon’s failure is the only meaningful dislike I have about the movie.
The most important reason for all this rating and tagging and tracking is because I love horror movies. I love horror movies. But I also hate inept, incompetent, shoddy and, overall, unbelievable horror movies. There are maybe 6 good horror movies I’ve seen, ever, and only half of them are supernatural horror, which is what I am trying, wearily, to find. I know the ‘unbelievable horror’ is like using the same concept twice, but since no movies are believable, what I’m trying to say is that if the movie is excessively unbelievable, then I cannot suspend my disbelief enough to be immersed in the story. Anything that helps me find good horror movies is priceless.
I just saw Cigarette Burns and enjoyed it. It, Mouth of Madness and The Ring are all horror movies that I enjoy, and I realized one of the reasons these are so much fun for me to watch. Previously, in my life, I enjoyed Machen’s The Great God Pan much more than Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu, even though I like the Cthulhu mythos so much. The research and clue-gathering of these books, and others like them, is what makes them so enjoyable to me, because it provides a slow build into the viewpoint of human reality as a mere facet of reality. Both Cigarettes and The Ring have the clue-gathering built in, but the genius of them is the visual nature of the documents. A slow pan of a researcher flipping from book to book, or reading and cross-referencing, could only be, I imagine, supremely difficult for maintaining an audience. While it’s dramatic enough for reading (about reading), seeing the same reading is … well. Some event would have to happen, for prolonging such scenes would likely strain the attention of those watching. Thus, having a video as the artifact with the record means it can be shown. Event Horizon does this through a video log and a single vision, Mouth of Madness by dreams during the reading of books, and Cigarettes shows excerpts of a movie, though the entirety is never seen; whereas The Ring does have an entire video, and the analysis thereof. Like the Ct mythos, The Ring’s document is secreted away by its original reader, who perishes because of the things they have seen and experienced. Unlike Ct mythos, and a lot of horror movies in general, The Ring takes place entirely in the context of society. While there are times where characters are alone, they are only isolated once, as opposed to the majority of horror vids that begin by isolating the group of characters on a fringe somewhere. The reason this adds to its awesomeness is that being alone/isolated/away is no longer a prerequisite for the horror to happen. But those aren’t things one can tag very well. “horror in social context”? “research” or “modern research”? Perhaps “slow build”, but it’s the “slow investigation” and “pieced together through clues” that make it thrilling to me. The Ninth Gate does a similar thing, and did it well, but didn’t follow through to a climax.
Well, so I thought the tags were, or, when further developed, will be, a godsend, until I checked some of my highest- and lowest-rated movies to specify my reasons. I figured that, if the tracking program is at all competent, than whenever there’s a high divergence between the predicted rating and actual rating I ought to include some tags in order to provide recourse to the predictive engine. But clearly not, if people are using them to sort the movies by cast, which is already there, or by what format they have the movie. It’s like when I see a group on Facebook dedicated to a particular class year at school; Facebook already does that. So now all these stupid, stupid people are getting in the way of me finding movies that I’ll enjoy watching.
And because I ought to put this down somewhere besides Netflix, here are the ‘horror’ movies I think are the best of the best. I can’t find a link to the list on my profile, but you can friend me here, or just follow the feed of the list here.