Crowd-sourced recommendations are inherently flawed. People just aren't the same. My favorite movie of all time is There Will Be Blood and no matter how smart an application may be, it will never connect the dots to realize that my second-favorite movie of all time is Lost In Translation. People are strange and recommendations are an educated guess at best.
I'm with you on that, it just doesn't add up. Instead of going for glory and making recommendations based on statistics, it seems better to leave it to the user to explore and decide, just make that easy and fun for them !
Thanks. Yes, the point was to build a system in which we help people find movies they will like watching by discovering movies from the others - and vice versa.