Hacker Cinema
Beyond the Black Rainbow
2010 · Film · 110 min
Directed by Panos Cosmatos
In 1983, a young mute woman with psychic abilities is held captive within the Arboria Institute, a secluded futuristic facility overseen by a sinister doctor with an unraveling mind and a growing obsession with her.
2 positive1 mixed1 neutralfrom 4 commenters
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4 comments on Hacker News
> But also at home I got the feeling there were less interesting movies.
I manage maybe 30-35 new movies per year (and usually pick up a few more from that year by about two years out from its end) and I'd say a solid 80% don't suck, and about half are pretty damn good. Usually there are another ten or so that I know about and wanted to watch but never get to, and there are surely a bunch more good ones that I miss entirely. 2021 was a bit of an exception because Covid fucked with productions quite a bit and made the movie scene that year kinda weird (though there were several really good small-cast-small-crew films released that year!) but otherwise, consistently, there are roughly mid-tens of good movies released every year, not even counting local indie scene stuff.
Now, assessing it this way does require 1) looking at more than just what's heavily advertised, and 2) having pretty broad taste in genres and being willing to meet a movie where it is, and at least having the capacity to enjoy what it's trying to do assuming it pulls it off reasonably well—me, I'd say Beyond the Black Rainbow and Guardians of the Galaxy and One Cut of the Dead and Logan Lucky are all good movies, so... I'm capable of enjoying most genres and both "high" and "low" art, so the set of films that I might like is pretty large, which helps a lot.
So first off, thumbs up and thumbs down is dumb.
There are movies which are really great, there are movies that aren't but are still worth watching, there are movies that aren't great and aren't really worth watching, and then there's the movies with Adam Sandler or Amy Schumer in them...
And reasons for liking a film could be that I liked the cinematography, or the script, or maybe just one actor, and not just that it was a horror movie.
Take for example Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010). It's weird, the story wasn't all that for me, the ending is weak. But I loved the way the director shoot it as an 80's sci-fi film, really capturing the look and feel of those films. And well, I love slightly weird movies. So overall it's a movie I really enjoyed watching, and will likely watch again a few times. So just how would Netflix interpret my thumbs up for this movie?
I've rated literally hundreds of movies in Netflix. I still get 90+% match recommendations that I can tell just from the poster and blurb that I'll hate (and my control for this are the movies I've watched elsewhere and hated). I've found some of the sub-50% match movies to be great, and really enjoyed watching them.
I know Netflix had this machine learning contest a few years back, looking for winners who made better recommendations than their own algorithm. But IMO it's just gotten worse and worse.
Here's a visualization summary of entire movies in a "barcode" timeline format from the start of the film to the end.
[0] http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/movie-index
[1] 2001: A Space Odyssey http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/post/3432026155/2001-a-space-odyssey-1968-prints
[2] Aladdin http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/post/5766889425/aladdin-1992-prints
[3] Beyond the Black Rainbow http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/post/39051819960/beyond-the-black-rainbow-2010-prints
[4] Blade Runner http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/post/4438993828/blade-runner-1982-prints
[5] Star Wars Episode IV http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/post/13255664875/star-wars-episode-iv-a-new-hope-1977-prints
[6] The Wizard of Oz http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/post/3512965847/the-wizard-of-oz-1939-prints
It's not a great film from a storytelling perspective, but I think Beyond the Black Rainbow is a fantastic example of this sort of use of color