Hacker Cinema
The Station Agent
2003 · Film · 88 min
Directed by Tom McCarthy
When his only friend dies, a man born with dwarfism moves to rural New Jersey to live a life of solitude, only to meet a chatty hot dog vendor and a woman dealing with her own personal loss.
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2 comments on Hacker News
Fascinating; I want to know if Jack, the baboon, drank the half-bottle of beer each week.
Connected by the topic of railways: Reminded me of the the Peter Dinklage film The Station Agent (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0340377/).
Well, it didn't work for me. If it is any consolation, no recommendation service usually does.
Here is the problem: recommendation engines usually try to match common variables between the movie you like and other movies - kudos to nanocrowd for doing this at a more sophisticated level than "it has the same actor in it" - but most fail to weigh heavily enough the quality of the movie (Netflix is notorious bad at this). More to the point, the movies that people really love have some personal connection with them that I am not sure is open to crowdsourcing.
I will now give you an example: I love the movie Pitch Black. Why? Yes, there's the action/horror tension, and the fabulous spaceship crash, and the charismatic lead - but the reason I love that movie is because of its kernel which is a highly moral tale about the salvation of caring for someone other than yourself, and of the powerful human need to seek redemption.
Now I am not going to reproduce this here, but go put in Pitch Black in nanocrowd and you will see the problem: it focuses on the superficial properties of the plot, and none of the movies recommended come even close.
What is the closest movie in feel that I have seen? The Station Agent. Now the day I type in "Pitch Black" in a recommendation and get back "The Station Agent" is the day I am going to sell all my wordly goods to buy stock in that company.
(That said it is safe to say most people aren't as picky as me, and I am sure you can find some success with this model especially if you harness it to something people visit a lot anyway, like IMDB or Netflix).