Archive for November 2008
culturally polarizing
This weekend’s New York Times Magazine features a story about competitors in the Netflix Competition — an ongoing challenge to improve Netflix’s movie taste prediction system by 10% with a $1 million prize. After a couple years, some people are really close; the top team has improved on the system by 9.44%. Each step closer to 10% makes it harder to improve one’s algorithm.
Here’s where it gets interesting: the remaining hurdles are more or less identifiable. There are limited number of movies for which it is immensely difficult to predict someone’s reaction. ”Napoleon Dynamite” is the big one the article identifies. Apparently, “ND” alone accounts for approximately 15% of all the unexplained variation. That’s huge! Unbelieveable!
In describing the top 25 most difficult to predict movies, NYT staffer Clive Thompson writes, “I noticed they were all similar in some way to “Napoleon Dynamite” — culturally or politically polarizing and hard to classify, including “I Heart Huckabees,” “Lost in Translation,” “Fahrenheit 9/11,” “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou,” “Kill Bill: Volume 1” and “Sideways.””
That’s true, isn’t it? Those movies are culturally polarizing, but it’s more than that. They are culturally polarizing and, yet, mainstream. An even more polarizing movie like Von Trier’s “Dogville” is actually easy to predict because the type of people who see a movie like that tend to be of one mind. But who didn’t see “Lost in Translation”? What confuses me is that on a gut-level I know that those movies are culturally polarizing, but I can’t, for the life of me, explain why “The Life Aquatic” would be. Why is that?
