This free tool will save you from 100 hours of bad movie watching.
And you might hate me for showing it to you.
My husband and I are always at a loss for what movie to watch on Friday nights. Our toddler is asleep, the long week is done, and we are entitled to some fun goddamnit.
But the quest to find a movie that we’ll both enjoy is never-ending and fraught with peril. Over the last seven years of our relationship, we’ve probably burned 100s of hours watching crappy movies.
But cue the angel choir and clouds parting: I have found the perfect movie recommendation engine. I’ll share it with you below. (It’s not LetterBoxd or Flixster or Rotten Tomatoes or any of that garbage).
Why can’t my husband just get behind romantic comedies already?
My husband Tom loves action movies, hates romantic comedies, gets bored with drama, and likes characters that contemplate isolation, war, fatherhood, and the responsibility of scientific advancement (i.e. Oppenheimer, Gladiator, 80’s action flicks starring Bruce Willis, and anything to do with Vikings).
I like comedy, satire, forbidden love, contemporary drama, and mind-bending sci fi (i.e., Inception, Triangle of Sadness, Short Term 12, Jerry Maguire).
Trying to find overlap in our taste is like creating the world’s most pitiful Venn diagram.
We didn’t like Parasite. (Don’t come at me.)
The movie review aggregators don’t work for us. Rotten Tomatoes is a very noisy signal. Tom and I are now suspicious of ultra-high scores. For example, neither of us liked Parasite, a movie with a 99% rating.
Parasite was fine. But we were both put off by the ending—it was so abrupt and unsatisfying. Yes, the movie is very artful and beautifully made and there are layers and symbolism and blah blah blah, but at the end I was like ugh, I wish I had spent that time watching something else.
Whereas a movie that we both love—Ad Astra—only got a 40% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes (it got 83% from critics). We have no idea why anyone wouldn’t love that movie. It’s awesome. If you love Blade Runner 2049, watch Ad Astra.
Movie critics need to stop taking themselves so seriously.
We tried to find a movie critic that shared our taste. Then we could watch all their positively-reviewed movies, secure in the belief that we would enjoy those movie too.
We started our critic-search with those who liked Ad Astra. That movie seemed divisive. Any critic that liked Ad Astra as much as us would share our taste, we thought.
We thought wrong. Critics who enjoyed Ad Astra would hate on movies Tom and I loved. For example, one of them gave The Gray Man (which Tom and I really enjoyed) a two-star rating. Whether or not an Ad Astra-loving critic agrees with our overall taste is totally random. We may as well flip a coin.
We also discovered that reading movie reviews is f***ing tedious. Have you ever actually tried to read a movie review? It’s like reading an essay you wrote in high school for AP English, where you explain why the Canterbury tales are great works of literature (I mean are they even?) It’s giving academic.
I don’t have time to hear critics wax on about the director’s vision, or how much weight the actor lost for the role, and whether the move is a true homage to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
I have a toddler. Movie time is precious. Am I going to enjoy watching this damn thing or not? At the end of the movie am I going to wish I had used those hours to sleep?
