I Want Good Movies

Hossein used to be my source of good movies. He knew my taste, he had his own taste, but also he used to watch a shit ton of movies, good and bad, and then he’d know what they’re about and could judge them firsthand. His strength was also that he’d recognize different people have different tastes in movies and he’d suggest something to me and not someone else and vice versa. And he could do this simply because he had watched all those movies. But then life happened and he’s not suggesting movies to me much anymore.

So I started asking other friends what they’ve watched recently, and started watching more movies myself. But I quickly realized a few things:

• Most people’s tastes are not like mine (not surprised)
• Almost no one’s taste is like mine (a bit surprised, but I think that’s normal)
• Most people just watch what Netflix tells them to watch or what their friends tell them they’ve watched, but they’ve watched it because Netflix told them and so on (furious about this, it’s just a huge regression to the mean, with likely 20 distinct tastes or so, is that what Netflix uses? 20?)
• Most new movies suck, each year only a couple, if at all, of good movies are made (mildly disappointed, but accepting it as reality)

So I decided that I should watch what I can with some sort of initial filter so that I don’t end up watching a whole bunch of trash. The filters are basically: any movie that a friend suggests (I had to ignore some friends because the movies they watched were really bad), anything that has an IMDb rating more than 7, any movie from the festivals that I appreciate like Sundance and TIFF. Then I started adding movies because of the directors I liked some of their works, some because of soundtracks, and some that were just randomly talked about somewhere. It doesn’t mean that I’m gonna watch all of them, but I’m going to consider them.

I created this very long list of movies that I have watched and I’m going to watch. Then I decided that I want to know if I have watched the movies and what I think about them, for two reasons: one, to avoid rewatching them, because sometimes I won’t remember some movies I’ve watched (could be old age, could be the movie was quite bad and my brain didn’t want to keep the memory, or it was dull and it didn’t even register in my memory).

Anyways, now I have a long list that keeps growing. But there’s one problem: when I’m deciding to find a movie from the list to watch, I have to somehow decide if I even watch it at all or not, and that usually involves watching the trailer. But that’s a slow process, and sometimes I’m just not in the mood for some specific types of movies. Maybe I can decide I do/don’t want to watch some movie just by reading the synopsis, or maybe it’s a really long movie and I don’t have time for it right now, or I just want something lighthearted.

So IMDb comes to help. But then I have to search for it on their website and then read a bunch of things before I can decide. There’s a Python package that does that and I can simply automate this process. Hence I used Claude Code to help me write this script and run it for some of the movies. Now my list has a bit more data that will help me decide faster what to watch when I’m ready to watch something, instead of searching endlessly and then getting out of the mood of watching movies.

The only problem is that the API it calls has 1000 free calls per day, which with accounting for some errors runs out pretty quickly. I think after getting rid of all the bugs I can quickly run it for all my movies in the list, and after that every time I add a movie it should be only a couple of calls to get the info for it. In fact I added a pre-commit hook that does this for any new movie that is added to the list, so that I don’t have to do it manually—I can worry only about my movies and not about the rest.

Also, Omid shared this cool list of 100 best movies of 21st century so far (I think that makes it the first quarter of the century) according to some directors and actors, which I’ve added to the list of movies to watch. The list is extremely white (very heavy on American movies, then UK, and EU, with only some very best movies from rest of the world), it doesn’t have “Shoplifters” in it (except as a secondary to Parasite), and they have chosen “The Favourite” but not “The Lobster” which is far superior to that, and they have five movies from Nolan? Out of 100? Really? I think Nolan might have had 1 or 2 good movies, but none of the recent ones should get even an honorable mention. But I digress, it looks like a great list, so I’m gonna go through it.

Now I just need to find a way to write more reviews for myself as I watch movies, because recently I’ve watched a whole bunch and I haven’t written anything!b