Worse yet it seems to think I want to watch the three things that are most popular on the platform.
This indicates that the Netflix UX business is being significantly mismanaged.
I find its algo absolutely rubbish and most of my initial excitement to go watch something with my wife on the couch instantly fades as soon as we face the doomscrolling of finding content to watch.
It's like zapping but worse
Since I added a userscript to see IMDB ratings directly next to the netflix shows it's way easier to find something promising.
I always wonder if people who say this either have very particular interests, or are trying to find specific tv shows/movies and not finding them on Netflix. If you are not set on a particular thing, it seems to me that there is a ton of great content.
That means if their friends are watching stuff on Amazon Prime, then netflix can never meet their needs.
It's got Apple TV beat, I guess, but I wouldn't call that a major streaming service.
[EDIT] Oh and I'd say it's overall worse than D+, for that matter, even though that's basically an umbrella for a few niche services. Like if I could only have one of those two, I'd take D+. And D+ kinda sucks.
If netflix wants to lean in even further, they should pick up rights to produce additional seasons of most of the stuff Warner Brothers Discovery cancelled last year (they're the parent company of HBO and have subpar management, even by Hollywood exec standards).
I have a weird take on this.
Before I started working on my startup, I had a lot of time to watch and even make movies. I typically would watch about ~50-100 films a year. When I was younger, it was even more. I was voracious.
I tend to like indie and art house films, but I'll also enjoy popular fare. I'm not a snob. As long as the choices of the writers, directors, actors, and editors make sense, I'm typically able to assign a rating and slot the film into some kind of tier list.
But I'm always left unsated by the decision envelope.
The film will make its choices, but I always find myself wanting to go in other directions. Sometimes wildly different ones. I feel more like an active participant, critic, or perhaps even script doctor or producer.
When the story beats of a film change, my imagination keeps predicting outcomes along various trajectories. Sometimes I'm a perfect predictor. In these instances, films tend to be full of lazy tropes and are completely unsatisfying. Other times, my predictor is way off. If the dissonance is huge, sometimes I'm also left upset by the departure from expectations. It depends on whether the rest of the work makes sense as a whole.
I can't turn this off. It's always running.
I only see a handful of films a decade that will sit with me for days or weeks. The themes rhyme and have an ethereal logic that transcends me. These are the films that play my predictor like an instrument. Their choices are better than mine. Surprisingly and delightfully so. They reach my soul and change who I am as a person. These are films that I wouldn't change in the slightest. That I wish I could forget and watch again, and again, and again with fresh eyes.
I enjoy film, but I can't stop my overactive analysis. As I've gotten older, this attitude has only deepened. It makes it hard to call watching film entirely passive or enjoyable.
I enjoy the activity, but not always the film. The feelings are fleeting, and I'm left wanting for more.
Except occasionally. And I cherish those.
What are a handful of recent films that were noteworthy by your criteria?
And a handful of all-time noteworthies?
Watching time-filler crowd-pleaser nothing-to-say movies that seem to be made simply because the world is full of non-discriminating consumers and someone needs to take their money ... leaves me feeling pretty bored.
There's a time and a place for it all, I guess. But life (free time) is too short (scarce) to waste.
What sort of thing are you into? What are some movies you really like? Would help to tune any suggestions.
[edit] Meanwhile, some shots in the dark:
- The Green Knight — Based on the story by the Pearl Poet and expanded and adapted with a combo of other Arthurian tales and the filmmakers’ own twists. Basically, a lonely, somewhat psychedelic (but not in a bright-kaleidoscope-colors sort of way…) dark fantasy journey with tasteful hints of dozens of influences adorning it. A great Winter watch, too. Benefits from the best screen and system you can get in front of.
- You Won’t Be Alone — Broadly horror-themed but not in a Hollywood monster movie or Halloween popcorn muncher sort of way. It’s not really aiming for scares, exactly. Comically similar themes and message to a major widely-lauded off-kilter film from the same year (2022) but approached from a very different angle. Macedonian language. You may worry in the first twenty minutes that you’ve stumbled into the Easter European Indie Movie Doldrums of Mediocrity, but persevere, it starts to come together and develop purpose before long. Hard recommend for fans of The Witch who liked the “historically accurate” grossness & mythology of that film, but it’s not as firmly in the horror genre as that was.
On the lighter (and not quite as good, good) side:
- The Kid Detective — Semi-comedy. Imagine the stereotypical middle-aged guy who’s never topped their time as a high school quarterback. Now imagine if instead of playing football, they were a kid detective (you know, Nancy Drew sorts of stuff) and that is the thing they peaked at in high school. That’s our protagonist. Film sags at times but the premise is so fun and relatively-well-used that it’s still a good time, if that blurb above piqued your interest at all. Certainly a sort of noir, with all that entails, so if Your Hero getting his ass kicked more than doing the ass kicking bothers you, avoid (as with lots of noirs)
- Spontaneous — Dark high school romance-comedy. Also, people, all over the place, have started occasionally suddenly exploding for no evident reason. That’s the movie’s deal. It took me embarrassingly long to realize what it was really about (or, at least a major one of the things it’s about) and it punched me in the damn gut when I did. Oof.
I reliably enjoy films from Miranda July and Greta Gerwig. I think I'd enjoy Wes Anderson more if he was a bit less campy (but I get it, that's a big part of the point, so I guess I appreciate the other things he's good at).
Thank you for the suggestions -- I have never heard of any of them. They are far afield from my known preferences, but sound like the better versions of the options that Netflix wants me to watch, which is great! I will check them out.
- Nomadland — Lonely older woman clinging to the bottom rung of the economic ladder is pushed into van-living and finds community. Basically positive-but-bittersweet vibes by the end, and with a similar strong reliance on setting and mood to something like a Wes Anderson work (though without the precise placement of every single element in frame), but definitely not "cute" like his are, and not about comfortable rich people. Includes many real people living in vans, blurring the lines between fiction and reality (and deftly almost-entirely avoiding the usual problems that come with including non-actors in a film). Lots of great outdoor shooting and lighting work.
- Red Rocket — Struggling, middle-aged male porn star moves back to his small, blue-collar hometown in Texas. We learn about his still-evolving relationships with the people he left behind when he moved away to LA, and see him make some... choices. Probably the most into archetype and symbolism of anything I've listed except maybe The Green Knight. By the end, is very much about its protagonist as a kind of daemon, if you will, of a part of the American experience and spirit (and also a representation of one or more sorts of real person with whom one may be familiar from one's own experience). Great attention to detail for a certain kind of ordinary setting, in the way that Anderson or maybe Miyazaki pay attention to that kind of everyday detail, but employed to obtain perfectly-trashy environs that aren't at all pretty but are also entirely true-to-life, not caricature. If you've spent time in such places, the clutter, the way trash has accumulated, the way in which the miniblinds are broken just so, and the way the people exist in that space, will feel very familiar.
- Eighth Grade — Bo Burnham's only film (I think?). Akin to something like Gerwig's Lady Bird, I'd say, but less heightened and more "real".
With more time to dredge my memory, I also remember really enjoying Amelie and a most (not all) of Hal Hartley's movies.
So I guess that boils down to "independent movies with interesting characters and/or dialogue"?
Thank you again!
I don't stream a lot. Every few months I'll just want to zonk out for a while though. The past few times I've wanted to watch "nothing in particular" it's gone something like:
1. Sit down, open Netflix.
2. Scroll through all the categories and suggestions on the home screen, finding nothing interesting.
3. Search for a few things I thought of while scrolling. Search returns things I can watch instead since what I searched for isn't on Netflix.
3. Open Prime Video, see something I'm interested in suggested pretty quickly, pay $ to rent or buy.
I'm not one of the people complaining, but I've definitely seen my self scrolling a lot with Netflix recommending I re-watch a lot of the stuff I liked before only to end up giving up and switching to something else.
I am not sure how that data would be gathered, maybe via an intermediary player like Plex, Roku, Android TV, etc..?
How does their licensing structure work? Do they pay a flat fee for unlimited license to some/all shows? Or do they pay a base + a micropayment for each view? If the latter, then of course they dont want to optimize for you, they want to find the optimization point between maximizing subscriptions vs cheapest content. Similar to the recurring conversations about the economics of buffets: you want a lot of people to come in, but not the ones who just eat all the expensive things.
Once they went heavy into content creation, this was expected and optimal for them, unfortunately.