Movies you’ll love (probably not)

If there’s one thing that bothers me about Netflix, it would be its decidedly mediocre recommendation engine. You would think that with millions of customers submitting millions of reviews and star ratings, somewhere in all that data would be the answer to the question, “what movies will Matt like?”

So far Netflix is doing a pretty poor job. Or rather, it is doing a good job at making very bad generalizations. I’ve rated a few anime highly, like Millennium Actress and Castle in the Sky; I also like a lot of the Pixar movies. Netflix interprets this as, “Matt will like anything animated.” Likewise my recent 4-star rating for Twilight Samurai seems to have convinced Netflix that I will love all samurai movies. Right now its list of “movies you’ll love” consists of mostly cartoons, cheesy anime, 50’s samurai flicks and a few Bollywood movies (huh?).

An informal survey of friends using Netflix revealed similarly frustrating experiences. So I was very surprised to read an update in the New York Times (sorry, subscription only) about the $1,000,000 contest to improve Netflix’s recommendation engine. The article reports that Netflix has one of the best systems on the market. Even more surprisingly, the brightest minds working to claim the million dollar prize have so far only managed a 6% improvement over the existing recommendation engine.

That is depressing. Surely there must be a better recommendation system out there. So I did a Google search, and I found MovieLens.

MovieLens is a free service that turns out to be a research project at the University of Minnesota. I decided to give it a shot and the results have been promising. The recommendations it has produced for me are pretty spot-on in terms of the genres I like, and I am actually interested in seeing most of movies it listed. If you are having problems with Netflix it may be worth checking out. Here are some of the finer points:

• You’ll have to reenter all your ratings into MovieLens (this took me about an hour for 264 movies)
• MovieLens lets you assign half-stars (Netflix does not)
• You can filter recommendations by genre and decade (I limited my search to movies released in the 1990’s and 2000’s)
• MovieLens can produce recommendations for a group of people: invite “buddies” onto the service and it will choose movies it thinks you will all enjoy (I haven’t tried this yet)

I am going to move some of the MovieLens recommendations to the top of my Netflix queue and see what happens. Here are my next six rentals:

1. The Beat That My Heart Skipped
2. In the Name of the Father
3. Dear Frankie
4. Little Dieter Needs to Fly
5. The Return
6. The Road Home

Wish me luck!