Curmudgeon's Corner (6)--Netflix Just Doesn't Understand Me

      First off, you should know that Smokey Burner, the Broken Stove's resident curmudgeon, loves Netflix. When Smokey bought his first DVD player back in 1999, it came with an introductory come-on offer to join a fledgling mail-order movie service that would ship him DVD's in the mail--as many as he could watch for a flat monthly rate--and their selection was already way better than the small shelf of DVD's available at his local Blockbuster (now they've introduced their on-demand box to instantly watch downloads on your TV). Smokey signed on, and has never regretted his decision. Smokey owns some Netflix stock, for crying out loud.
      But sometimes, Netflix makes Smokey just want to sit down in the middle of the road and have a good cry, because there is perhaps no more eloquent proof of the continuing inability of computers to extrapolate than Netflix's movie recommendation algorithm. Smokey has given Netflix his opinion about more than 3,400 films--albeit through the very limiting 1-5 star rating system. A fifteen minute conversation with another human film lover would no doubt yield an excellent list of recommendations for movies that Smokey has not yet seen but would thoroughly enjoy, but after almost ten years of tracking Smokey's movie-watching preferences, Netflix's bank of UNIVAC's still spits out head-scratchers like this:

Because you enjoyed

• All About Eve
• All Quiet on the Western Front and
• Annie Hall

we think you'll enjoy Shoah (ed. Claude Lanzmann's highly-regarded 4-disc documentary on the Holocaust)

      WTF?! What do these three movies possibly have in common with Shoah? OK, yes, the directors are all Jewish. But two of the three movies have absolutely nothing to do with Judaism, and the third is a romantic comedy. That would be like recommending Time Bandits (short actors) because Smokey liked Gangs of New York and Death to Smoochy (short directors). (That's purely hypothetical, by the way--Smokey liked Time Bandits but not so much Gangs of New York, and nobody liked Death to Smoochy). Is it because Woody Allen's character in Annie Hall keeps going to see The Sorrow and the Pity? Does Bette Davis compare Anne Baxter to Goebbels and Smokey just missed it? Is some ghost in the Netflix machine having Smokey on?
      Netflix has offered a million bucks to whoever can improve their Cinematch recommendation algorithm by a certain measurable percentage. So Smokey has a request for all you math and code geeks out there: please drop your silly pet projects like calculating Mars orbital approaches for JPL or mapping cancer's genetic triggers for Sloan Kettering and get to work on this problem for Netflix. Smokey's future movie-watching happiness depends on you. Smokey says, "Give a hoot, film compute."