I happened on clerk dogs, a new movie recommender, the other day. They are still in beta and are missing data in many key areas of film, but they are definitely worth checking out. Like Pandora, clerk dogs uses human editors to classify movies along several dimensions. Indeed, the founder Stuart Skorman (also founder of Reel.com) calls it the movie genome project. Of course, another movie recommender (also, still in beta) is using that term. Stuart goes on to say:
We have designed this innovative search engine for the movie buffs who have seen so many movies that they’re having a hard time finding new ones (or old ones) that they will really love. I hope you find hundreds of great movies!
Brazil
This is a problem I’ve been noticing with Netflix lately. I would be pretty sure I’ve seen every sci-fi movie worth seeing that has been released if all I had to go on was Netflix’s recommendations. I gave clerk dogs a shot, starting with my favorite movie. They seem to have done a decent job with classifying Brazil and a number of the similar movies they have listed are indeed similar in many ways to it. When I first visited the site, they showed the similar movies on a grid and said whether it was “more dark”, “less disturbing”, “more violent”, and so on. If that functionality still exists, I can’t find it.
However, you can “Mash it” to find movies that fit your mood. Pick your base movie and mash it. Then change the sliding scale to decide what sort of differences you are looking for. Can you say kickass?
I applaud clerk dogs for a job well done. I’ve already found a number of movies that Netflix was hiding from me. I added them to my Netflix queue though so I guess they are still benefitting.
