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Comment by DaniFong | Hacker News Reader

That's hilarious. The list of movies that are hard to classify reads like a list of my favorites...

[Like] “Napoleon Dynamite” — culturally or politically polarizing and hard to classify, including “I Heart Huckabees,” “Lost in Translation,” “Fahrenheit 9/11,” “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou,” “Kill Bill: Volume 1” and “Sideways.”

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My similarity explorer would have picked some of those out for you without much effort! :)

http://gflix.appspot.com/netflix/3281

http://gflix.appspot.com/netflix/14273

I wasn't even using the algorithm ensemble that helped me get much further on the leaderboard.

Here's more about the app : http://www.discerniblepreferences.com/2008/10/netflix-movie-...

I would classify those all as Indie mainstream, stuff that is popular with the scenester, psuedo-intellectual, pretentious crowd.

So then, if only Netflix had a checkbox on its registration form:

[ ] Yes, I am a pretentious psuedo-intellectual scenester!

Perhaps you've discovered the most important demographic unit of the century? I guess then, the greater problem would be to glean which people answered the question sarcastically.. damn.

I would classify you as a pretentious psuedo-intellectual scenester based on the fact that you've just demonstrated mastery of that demographic's primary modus operandi.

No, it must be more complicated than that. If they were just consistently popular with a specific demographic, it would be easy to predict - the problem seem to be that even if you like Lost in Translation, you might still hate Kill Bill, or Fahrenheit 9/11.

I loved kill bill, but left the cinema when seeing lost in translation because it was so terrible.

So it is more complicated than that...

After signing up for Netflix last month, I realized that I am one of those users that the algorithm writer's probably hate. I usually vote things "1" or "5", because a movie I did not like meant I just wasted 2 hours of my time. On the other hand, a movie I did like was an enjoyable and relaxing 2 hours.

So I rate everything to the polar ends, and also tend to have pretty varied choices for what movies I like. Usually the only genre I avoid is Horror/Psycho/Chainsaw Death films.

I try hard to avoid judging people by their tastes.

I try to judge films by how I react to them, but this is difficult to do if at the same time I'm asking myself how others will react to my opinion of the film.

There are films I don't want to see and books I don't want to read because I heard statements like yours which I know would cloud my judgment and spoil my enjoyment.

Luckily, I already saw and liked enough of the films you dismiss to be able to safely ignore your condemnation of those I haven't seen yet.

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