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!

These days it seems that I never have the time to sit down for a feature length movie (or write a blog post, for that matter). Thankfully I can still satisfy my film craving with Apple’s movie trailers RSS feed. New trailers are posted in excellent quality QuickTime format almost daily.

There are plenty of bad movies coming down the pipe (Kevin Costner and Ashton Kutcher, anyone?), but if you stick with it there are some gems to be found. Here are a handful that caught my interest this month:

• The Fountain
• Babel
• Children Of Men
• The Science of Sleep
• The Prestige

Better late than never, I guess.
My top 20 DVD rentals, festival screenings and theatrical releases of 2005:

• Beyond Our Ken (Hong Kong 2004)
• The Boys of Baraka (USA 2005)
• Broken Wings (Israel 2002)
• Brothers (Denmark 2004)
• City of God (Brazil/France/USA 2002)
• Comrades: Almost a Love Story (Hong Kong 1996)
• Czech Dream (Czech Republic 2004)
• Duck Season (Mexico 2004)
• Hana & Alice (Japan 2004)
• The Holy Girl (Argentina/Italy/Netherlands/Spain 2004)
• Ikiru (Japan 1952)
• Infernal Affairs (Hong Kong 2002)
• Linda Linda Linda (Japan 2005)
• Maria Full of Grace (USA/Colombia 2004)
• Millennium Mambo (Taiwan/France 2001)
• Shake Hands with the Devil (Canada 2004)
• Tempus Fugit (Spain 2003)
• To Live (China/Hong Kong 1994)
• 20:30:40 (Taiwan 2004)
• The Twighlight Samurai (Japan 2002)
• Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit (UK 2005)

This looks promising: Sundance Cinemas buys the Kabuki 8 theatres. The Kabuki here in San Francisco does an excellent job of hosting the major annual film festivals, including SFIFF and SFIAAFF. The acquisition by Sundance should bring even more independent films and events to San Francisco, plus give a nice renovation to the somewhat dull Japantown complex. Sounds good to me.

I picked up this story from SF360.org, a new site launched last month to promote film and media events in the Bay Area. It’s worth checking out. The feature articles are nicely written, and several interesting RSS feeds are available.

Something unexpected arrived in the mail today: the French release of Millennium Mambo, delivered from Amazon.fr two weeks early. Millennium Mambo was one of my favorite Netflix rentals last year. It’s directed by Hou Hsiao Hsien, who also directed Cafe Lumiere, another personal favorite that was shown during SFIAAFF2006.

Unfortunately the picture quality of the U.S. DVD release is very poor, so bad that it almost ruined my viewing experience. I decided to go with the French version after reading this comprehensive side by side comparison.

Today I am happy to report that the region 2 PAL disc works flawlessly in my new Oppo DVD player. Not only does the Oppo bypass the region restriction, but it successfully converts the PAL image to my NTSC display. And the picture quality is nothing short of amazing.

Count me as a very satisfied customer. :-D

I mentioned this in my previous post, but let me say it again: the 2006 San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival (SFIAAFF) was fantastic. This is quickly becoming my favorite festival primarily because of the excellent programming. The events this year seemed larger, flashier, and better organized; the movies, on the whole, were excellent.

I’ve written up some quick reviews on the feature length screenings I attended. But first, here’s an explanation of the rating system:

• ★ – Terrible.
• ★★ – Bad, but has some saving graces.
• ★★★ – Entertaining.
• ★★★★ – Worth buying the DVD.
• ★★★★★ – An all-time favorite.

And without further ado, the reviews:

Linda Linda Linda
This is a true crowd pleaser, and was my favorite screening of the festival. The deadpan humor is great, direction and photography are top notch, and the music will be stuck in your head for weeks. It’s not perfect: the acting from the young supporting cast is a little uneven, and the pacing of the first half hour is awkward. Still, this movie is easy to recommend and stands up well to multiple viewings. Please, someone release an English-subtitled DVD! ★★★★/5

Cafe Lumiere
How can such a simple movie be so compelling? You could argue that nothing really happens: we see long takes of trains, mundane activities, and more trains, usually from the perspective of a stationary camera. Yet somehow we become attached to the characters, and the movie as a whole is both relaxing and deeply satisfying. The sights and sounds of modern life in Tokyo are beautifully captured. Surprisingly, a domestic DVD release is already available. ★★★★/5

Grain In Ear
This is a very bleak, minimal movie (almost no dialogue), but captivating. It’s emotionally powerful without seeming overtly manipulative, the photography is amazing, and the ending sequence is especially haunting. Refreshing bits of humor are sprinkled in for good measure. Some of the plot devices are a tad gimmicky, but I’ll let that slide. A unique and enjoyable experience, despite the depressing subject matter. ★★★★/5

Letter From An Unknown Woman
I really want to love this movie. The photography is stunning and the acting is solid. But despite the eye candy and a very strong start, there simply isn’t enough of a story to keep it interesting. Nor do I like the omnipresent narrator explaining the character’s motivations. Can we just let the pretty pictures speak for themselves? ★★★/5

Be With Me
This was the only big disappointment of the festival. I’ll give the director some points for originality: in one story arc, he avoids spoken dialog and substitutes close-ups of text messages on mobile phones, interspersed with obnoxious pop songs. In another, he combines fictional characters with documentary. But the end result simply doesn’t work as a movie. This is “challenging” cinema, to put it nicely. ★★/5

Also check out Richa’s reviews of the festival for an alternate take. I think we agreed for the most part.

The film festival season has started here, and it’s already shaping up to be a great year. This month’s San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival was outstanding, and the even larger San Francisco International Film Festival will start in a few weeks. I’m psyched. In the coming days I’ll try to post more details and movie reviews.

In the meantime, the festivals have reminded me how much I love movies, Asian films especially. This has inspired me to go on a DVD buying spree, including the purchase of some obscure import discs.

If you’re familiar with region codes, you’ll know that foreign DVDs can be problematic: they’re not meant to play in a typical U.S. DVD player (Wikipedia does a good job explaining the economics behind this type of regional lockout). To work around this, my plan has been to rip the troublesome discs to my computer and then re-burn them without the region code restrictions.

“Backing up” DVDs sans copy protection and region restrictions is in a legal grey area, but it’s possible. Free software tools exist, and dual-layer DVD burners are now pretty common. But in practice it has been nothing but hassle: the software is needlessly complicated, my PowerBook’s DVD drive apparently can’t correctly rip foreign discs, and movie studios continue to introduce new forms of copy protection. Even if you can get it to work, dual-layer blank DVDs are expensive (the other option is to reduce the quality of the movie to fit on a cheaper single-layer disc).

So after much frustration today, I made a spontaneous purchase: the OPPO Digital 971H DVD Player. Ohohoho, feel the power. Yes.

Sure, it’s the highest rated DVD player in terms of picture quality, and gets excellent reviews. But check this out:

• DVI output (cable included!)
  My plasma TV has a DVI input, and now I’ll finally be able to use it. I’m hoping for a noticeable improvement in picture quality over my existing analog hookups.
• DiVX playback
  I’m not sure what to expect with this feature, but I think it means I can pop in a DVD-ROM full of DiVX-encoded AVI files. Wouldn’t that be nice?
• Region free
  This is the kicker. OPPO doesn’t advertise it on their site, but a few keystrokes on the remote will put the player in region-free mode. I can now watch foreign DVDs to my heart’s content: no ripping necessary.

Thanks to my complimentary Amazon Prime trial, this guy should be arriving in two days with free shipping. The first disc in my new player will be Iwai Shunji’s 1995 classic Love Letter, one of my recently acquired Japanese imports.

Bring on the movies!

Here’s a neat bit of Japanese culture trivia I recently picked up: the Kit Kat candy bar as pronounced in Japanese sounds a lot like the phrase kitto katsu, which means something like “you’ll win for sure!”. And thus sales of Kit Kat bars apparently skyrocket during school exam season, as students buy them for encouragement.

So is that what the random Kit Kat reference in Hana & Alice was all about? It makes me wonder how many other cultural references go over my head when I’m watching Japanese movies.

That reminds me: I haven’t yet posted my top 10 movies of 2005. It’s not too late as long as I beat the Oscars, right? Stay tuned.

Turner Classic Movies will be showing original Japanese versions of several Miyazaki movies every Thursday this month. The movies will be introduced by–wait for it–John Lasseter.

Thursday, Jan. 5
8 p.m. Spirited Away (2002 – English-language version)
10:15 p.m. Princess Mononoke (1997 – English-language version)
1 a.m. Spirited Away (2002 – Japanese-language version)
3:15 a.m. Princess Mononoke (1997 – Japanese-language version)

Thursday, Jan. 12
8 p.m. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984 – English-language version)
10 p.m. Castle in the Sky (1986 – English-language version)
12:15 a.m. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984 – Japanese-language version)
2:15 a.m. Castle in the Sky (1986 – Japanese-language version)

Thursday, Jan. 19
8 p.m. My Neighbor Totoro (1988 – English-language version)
9:30 p.m. Porco Rosso (1992 – English-language version)
11:15 p.m. Whisper of the Heart (1995 – English-language version)
1:15 a.m. My Neighbor Totoro (1988 – Japanese-language version)
2:45 a.m. Porco Rosso (1992 – Japanese-language version)
4:30 a.m. Whisper of the Heart (1995 – Japanese-language version)

Thursday, Jan. 26
8 p.m. Only Yesterday* (1991 – Japanese-language version only)
10:15 p.m. Pom Poko (1994 – English-language version)
12:30 a.m. Only Yesterday* (1991 – Japanese-language version)
2:45 a.m. Pom Poko (1994 – Japanese-language version)

via popgadget