Video

Video

Recommendations

Explanation

I am a movie fanatic. Originally, I made a spreadsheet to keep track of what I was watching and what my watchlist for later would be. However, that spreadsheet has evolved overtime, I’ve realized that the overarching goal of why I’m watching these shows is to get historical context for what made specific historical movies great and why. However, I am not one without individual taste, so my recommendations may not be great for say if you’re a huge fan of Disney.

As I was trying to figure out my personal rankings of these movies, I set about 4 distinguishing categories and exceptions. For example, the example of exceptions, “It’s a Disney, Pixar, Christmas, Cult Classic, Documentary, etc.” movie. While most of the movie watching public, including myself, will identify them as good movies there is too much public saturation for myself for there to be a distinction of artistically and culturally distinct - especially given how intertwined the two concepts are. To offer another perspective to the point I’m trying to make, imagine a complete opposite example of finding an extremely niche show on a platform like Tubi. While you can look at review on platform like reddit or rotten tomatoes, if you’re seeing less than 30 reviews on those platforms, how exactly do you know if you’re going to like the movie or not? But that’s beside the point.

This moves on to my next point - Trailers and Movie descriptions ruins movies and reinforces watching habits and detracts from artistic exploration. There’s this feature on Netflix when after you go inactive for some time the screen starts to preview thumbnails of specific recommendations. All you can see? “Show XYZ - Thriller / Mystery / Comedy”. I think this the most appropriate for my viewing habits because I do not like the outcome to be spoiled.

This ties into a much bigger argument of how much should reach out to your audience vs. your audience discovering you. If I then added a nice description for this movie as “A baffling death inside a quiet church draws Benoit Blanc into a tense investigation where faith secrets and suspicion blur as a close community turns against itself” (The Movie is Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery). Even though it will give many people a greater context of what they’re going to be watching my mind started to create a map of where the potential plot will be going and how the director is going to set it up. But that’s just me.

So why exactly did I start a tier list of movies? Back in seventh grade my teacher did a review competition of ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ and the bug has never been kicked. The 4 main classes in which I categorize the movies I watch are “Low, Medium, High, and Top”. The movies listed here are from the Top list and heavily fall into either an Action, Comedy, or Sci-fi.