Nextflix Micro-Genres Are Amazing

Posted on January 6, 2014 at 8:00 am

The closing of the last Blockbuster stores has led to some “end of an era” pontificating and even some meta “end of the era of end of the eras” commentary from Monica Hesse in the Washington Post. For me, it is a chance to think about the moment that got me started as The Movie Mom — watching parents at Blockbuster ask the teenaged clerks if an Adam Sandler movie was appropriate for kids.

I usually had a good idea of what I was looking for, but most of the patrons would stand glassy-eyed in front of the “new releases” shelf or possibly go straight to “action/adventure” or “comedy.” The five or six categories were not very helpful. There are lessons to learn from Blockbuster about the risks of disruptive new technologies. Why didn’t Blockbuster invent Netflix? The ease of ordering by mail and then, even easier, just hitting a button on the computer for immediate streaming could have kept Blockbuster expanding, possibly even into creating its own content, as Neftlix has. They could also have developed the extraordinarily precise and granular “micro-genres” that are a large part of what makes Netflix so user-friendly. Instead of “action/adventure” they have an almost Dewy Decimal-level of specificity, with hundreds of sub-categories so you can find action-classics, action-comedies, action-African American or action-Blaxplotation, action-superheroes, action-thrillers, action-disasters, action-military, etc. The Atlantic has a great story by Alexis C. Madrigal about how the algorithms for defining these micro-genres were developed.

If you use Netflix, you’ve probably wondered about the specific genres that it suggests to you. Some of them just seem so specific that it’s absurd. Emotional Fight-the-System Documentaries? Period Pieces About Royalty Based on Real Life? Foreign Satanic Stories from the 1980s?

If Netflix can show such tiny slices of cinema to any given user, and they have 40 million users, how vast did their set of “personalized genres” need to be to describe the entire Hollywood universe?

This idle wonder turned to rabid fascination when I realized that I could capture each and every microgenre that Netflix’s algorithm has ever created.

Through a combination of elbow grease and spam-level repetition, we discovered that Netflix possesses not several hundred genres, or even several thousand, but 76,897 unique ways to describe types of movies.

I love the list Madrigal provides of some of the best categories:

Emotional Independent Sports Movies
Spy Action & Adventure from the 1930s
Cult Evil Kid Horror Movies
Cult Sports Movies
Sentimental set in Europe Dramas from the 1970s
Visually-striking Foreign Nostalgic Dramas
Japanese Sports Movies
Gritty Discovery Channel Reality TV
Romantic Chinese Crime Movies
Mind-bending Cult Horror Movies from the 1980s
Dark Suspenseful Sci-Fi Horror Movies
Gritty Suspenseful Revenge Westerns
Violent Suspenseful Action & Adventure from the 1980s
Time Travel Movies starring William Hartnell
Romantic Indian Crime Dramas
Evil Kid Horror Movies
Visually-striking Goofy Action & Adventure
British set in Europe Sci-Fi & Fantasy from the 1960s
Dark Suspenseful Gangster Dramas
Critically-acclaimed Emotional Underdog Movies

NSA’s invasion of our privacy is minor compared to the information we cheerfully provide to corporations. This kind of customer-guided big data is just the tip of the iceberg from the kind of individually-tailored marketing we can expect — for good and for bad — in the coming years.

Costume Designers Tell the Story

Posted on January 5, 2014 at 3:59 pm

I love behind the scenes glimpses of the unsung heroes of film-making like The Hollywood Reporter’s great look at five costume designers who worked on some of the biggest films of the year. Costume designers do much more than create clothes that are pretty and historically accurate. They play a key role in defining the characters and telling the story. Catherine Martin talks about one of Gatsby’s suits.

“That suit is a character in itself,” she says. “Tom tries to undercut Gatsby’s position by implying that he’s nouveau riche and he mentions the pink suit disparagingly,” says Martin. “Brooks Brothers was actually making pink seersucker suits in the early ’20s.” She admits: “I don’t know whether Leo was that thrilled about having to wear a pink suit. But I think it’s an instrumental part of reflecting the intense romanticism that lives inside Gatsby’s heart.

Mary Zophres designed the costumes for the Coen Brothers’ “Inside Llewyn Davis,” where the lead character wears just one outfit throughout the film. “His character is constantly living in someone else’s apartment, so I thought he should have a smaller bag and fewer clothes.” Daniel Orlandi speaks about dressing Emma Thompson as the real-life P.L. Travers for “Saving Mr. Banks.” Travers always wore silver bracelets, so he made sure Thompson did, too. But he gave her a more demure dress for the premiere of “Mary Poppins” on screen than the real author wore. Replicating the original dress, he says, would make the beautiful Thompson look too “hot.” A real challenge was dressing not just all of the extras in early 60’s clothes for the scene set in Disneyland, but outfitting the Disney characters as well.

“At the last minute we had to re-create all of the 1961 Disney mascots and retain that original, handmade look,” says Orlandi. “Mickey looked a lot different back then!”

And in the New York Times’ special Oscars section, the costume designer for “The Butler,” Ruth E. Carter, explains how the clothes worn by the title character’s wife Gloria, played by Oprah Winfrey, tell the story of the film — and of the challenge of putting one of the most famous people in the world into a movie and making the audience believe her as a character.

Gloria wears a cream-color A-line skirt and blouse topped by a turquoise cardigan, her hair covered by a floral-print scarf, as she sends her oldest son, Louis (David Oyelowo), off to Fisk University in Nashville from a Greyhound bus stop. “We had a big argument,” Ms. Carter said. “I think Lee’s main thing was: ‘When Oprah gets here, we’ve got to break the Oprah mold. We’ve got to make her a character.’ He told me, ‘I don’t want her in anything bright, and I want her in curlers at the bus station.’ So Oprah and I argued with him, she more than I. We won, thank God. I guess she proved to him that she was committed, and she was going to be this character and present something other than herself, and it relaxed him. And he was like, ‘O.K., you can do a couple of bright things — maybe.’ ”

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Guaranteed To Improve Your Life, Your Job, and Your Relationships: 365 Grateful

Posted on January 5, 2014 at 8:00 am

Start the new year by joining this wonderful project and find out how being grateful will transform your life.

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Trailer: Million Dollar Arm

Posted on January 4, 2014 at 8:00 am

A sports agent goes to India to recruit cricket players for major league baseball in “Million Dollar Arm,” starring Jon Hamm, Lake Bell, Aasif Mandvi, and Alan Arkin.

The Present NOT to Buy Your Children Next Christmas

Posted on January 3, 2014 at 7:13 pm

Dreamworks is teaming up with Fuhu, the maker of tablets for children to create the first tablet in which the content provider controls what the user sees. In other words, it’s more like a television. While Amazon sensibly makes sure that its Kindle Fire line gives parents control over the content available to children — and lets them set daily time limits as well — Fuhu gives parents no control at all.

The partnership is a convergence of two business trends. With children as young as 2 or 3 now routinely using their parents’ iPads or smartphones — if the toddlers don’t already have their own — technology companies are racing to introduce gadgets made for smaller and smaller hands. Fuhu itself sold more than two million Nabis in 2013, and its tablets, which are primarily designed for children 6 to 11, now collectively deliver more than 20 million video streams a week.

Entertainment companies have been surprised at how speedily children have taken to tablets, sometimes forgoing TV sets altogether. As a result, DreamWorks, Disney and their competitors are searching for ways to make it easier for users to find their characters on portable devices.

According to the New York Times piece, “Nancy Bernstein, a movie producer who is in charge of creating what she calls ‘character moments’ for the DreamTab, insists that the effort is not simply an advertising opportunity for the studio.” That is absurd. Giving content providers control over the characters and images children see is advertising. Even if the penguins from Madagascar are not specifically promoting a new sequel or toy, they reinforce brand loyalty, which is the whole point of the arrangement. I’m not in favor of tablets for children to begin with, but this is really a new low.