SOMETHING ON THE SIDE
Netflix is quick with recommendations
Netflix wants me to watch Jaws.
The streaming service aims to be the vanguard of an all-digital future of movies and television. And if, for the time being, its 3,000-plus titles (in Canada) are a thin veneer of film history — what, no Battleship Potemkin? Or Battleship? — it still aims to provide to subscribers a positive movie-watching experience. Netflix will gladly (maybe too gladly?) offer alternate recommendations to just about any film or TV show not in its library.
Tell it you want to watch the Marx Brothers’ 1933 comedy classic Duck Soup, for instance, and you’ll be asked to consider The Jerk (because it’s funny!), An Affair to Remember (because it’s old?), Alan Partridge (featuring Steve Coogan, another comedy innovator) and — Jaws. It will not, however, recommend Mr. Bean’s Holiday, possibly the closest thing in this century to Harpo Marx’s physical malapropisms.
Let’s say you fancy the 1991 Oscar winner The Silence of the Lambs. Netflix recommends in its place TV’s Hannibal (same character), Bad Company (same lead actor) and The Quiet Ones (same — silence?). Also The Office — same first word in the title! Also, Jaws.
Looking for The Shawshank Redemption? May we suggest Catch Me If You Can, Prison Break and, just for fun, Shaun the Sheep Movie?
Want to watch WALL-E? Well, you’ll probably be satisfied with another animated movie — Zootopia (3.5 stars), Monsters vs. Aliens (2.5 stars), The Nut Job (1 star). Or did you mean Wallander, about a disillusioned Swedish police inspector? Sometimes, you’re just a typo away from great storytelling!
Correctly type in Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 masterpiece Rashomon and the first alternate suggestion is Hot Girls Wanted, a Netflix original series about young women who have been drawn into the sex trade. Maybe there are various conflicting points of view to their stories?
Netflix will even offer recommendations for movies that haven’t been released yet. If you’re stoked to see Rogue One, it helpfully recommends you limber up with The Force Awakens as well as a handful of Star Wars-related documentaries: Elstree 1976 chronicles the actors behind the original film’s minor characters; I am Your Father is the David Prowse story; and Jedi Junior High follows a school’s musical version of The Empire Strikes Back.
And, to stoke the illusion of an infinite horizon of possibilities, it tacks on Star Trek, Supergirl and the documentary Einsatzgruppen: The Nazi Death Squads. I get it: storm trooper connection! And Flubber, starring Robin Williams.
The service’s recommendations almost always include the nearperfect and then a little something on the side. Ask for The Bridge on the River Kwai, in which Alec Guinness stars as a stalwart Second World War army officer, and you’ll draw forth a list of war movies (Winter in Wartime, Black Hawk Down, Zero Dark Thirty), British stiff-upper-lipped-ness (The Crown) and TV’s Top Gear. Because he really could have used a Lamborghini in that movie.
Then there’s the Jaws connection. Netflix’s algorithms must be shark-based. The 1975 blockbuster pops up in searches for the Marilyn Monroe comedy Some Like It Hot, the Great Depression drama The Grapes of Wrath, the boxing picture Rocky, the cross-dressing comedy Tootsie, the racially charged In the Heat of the Night, the musical Singin’ in the Rain, and TV’s family-friendly Flipper. It’s enough to make you afraid to go back to the small screen.
Of course, Netflix has expanded since its early days, becoming a creator and distributor of original content. Werner Herzog’s newest documentary, Into the Inferno, skipped a theatrical release to land on Netflix. So too did the concert movie Justin Timberlake and the Tennessee Kids.
One of the service’s own series is Stranger Things, recently renewed for a second season, due out in 2017. The first season’s eight episodes are heavily influenced by a number of ’70s and ’80s film touchstones, which many viewers have noted are not available on Netflix. They include Alien, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, The Goonies, The Last Starfighter and Jaws. Actually, you can watch that last one on Netflix.
In fact, I dare you to avoid it.