
Scraping Roger Ebert’s reviews and finding his favorite movies on Amazon Prime - catwind7
https://www.linisnil.com/articles/scraping-roger-ebert-reviews-and-amazon/
======
sonofgod
If you need a more stateful version of requests:

    
    
        import requests
        session = requests.session()
        # now use session like you would requests
        session.get("http://httpbin.org/cookies/set/name/value")
        print(session.get("http://httpbin.org/cookies").content)

~~~
catwind7
oh I need to try that - I had this feeling that there was a more stateful
version but for ..... some reason ... reaching for a new dependency felt
easier at the time haha. Thanks

------
gabrielsroka
See also "Where to Find Roger Ebert’s Great Movies Streaming" [0] which has US
listings for Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Disney Plus, Criterion Channel,
Kanopy, HBO, Starz, and Showtime as of March 2020.

[0] [https://www.rogerebert.com/features/where-to-find-roger-
eber...](https://www.rogerebert.com/features/where-to-find-roger-eberts-great-
movies-streaming)

------
jyriand
I guess this list of movies applies to people who live in US. Available movies
differ substantially between countries. With Netflix it's easy, it doesn't
even show the movie you can't watch, with Amazon you have to click through
every movie you are interested in to see the screen that says that this movie
is not available in your region. There are even series where only one or two
episodes are unavailable.

------
Mediterraneo10
It is the fact that we have a relatively agreed-upon canon of great films
(with immense re-watch value over the years) that keeps me torrenting instead
of streaming. Sure, you could search from one streaming site to another for a
given film, but the film may be either completely unavailable, or it may be
offered one moment and the mysteriously removed the next. Meanwhile, some
torrent communities are run by ardent cinephiles and they have all of these
films, and once you have downloaded it, you can go back to it whenever you
want.

~~~
kjakm
You can also solve the “what streaming service” issue by buying the movie on
DVD or Blu Ray allowing you to go back to it whenever you want. Additionally
if you’re ok with DRM iTunes has most stuff.

Useful tip for finding which streaming service a film is on: google “film name
streaming” and google lists the answers in a box at the top of the results.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
The problem with recommending that people buy the DVD/Blu-Ray is that the
agreed-upon canon of great films stretches into the many hundreds of titles
(Ebert’s list at 364 titles is only an abridged canon.) Therefore, for someone
seeking a cultural education, buying the physical releases would run into the
thousands and thousands of dollars. It would be a challenge even for North
Americans or Western Europeans to amass a suitable collection, let alone
people in lower-income countries. Consequently, a person can only
realistically learn about great cinema by streaming from multiple subscription
sites, or torrenting, and people disappointed by the former ought to remember
that the latter exists.

~~~
dfxm12
You can sub to one streaming service and never run out of great films to watch
(in part _because_ titles rotate, not in spite of, but that's beside the
point). Justifying piracy because, for example, you're disappointed that
Netflix is missing one great film, is disingenuous.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
You misunderstand my point. It’s not that a person might be looking just for
"great films to watch", in which case any streaming site might satisfy them.
It is that a person might be looking for _the_ great films, that entire canon
of films which scholars hold to be important. Netflix is never going to have
them all regardless of how much they rotate.

~~~
dfxm12
That doesn't really affect my point. No streaming service will meet your
unreasonable demands (for many reasons, first of all is that there is not an
objectively agreed upon list of _the_ great films), and therefore justifying
piracy because of it is disingenuous.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
That a service should have it all is not an unreasonable demand, and it is
peculiar that you chide someone for "justifying piracy". After all, the HN
crowd is generally very sympathetic to Library Genesis, which is aiming to
gradually contain all books on all subjects, and therefore the curious reader
can conveniently and at no cost learn about classic 20th-century literature,
copyright be damned. Someone who wants the same solid cultural education with
regard to films will not be served very well by the commercial offerings
compared to torrent communities, but a cultural education is more precious
than anyone’s claim to copyright.

As for "there is not an objectively agreed upon list of the great films",
there may not be one single list, but as a broad consensus one can take the
overlapping suggestions of the critics who contribute to the Sight and Sound
poll, the winners at Cannes and Venice, those films and directors who have
been celebrated year after year in _Cahiers du Cinéma_ , and so forth.

~~~
dfxm12
_That a service should have it all is not an unreasonable demand_

Yes it is, especially when you said that it is a requirement for a service to
have a certain list of movies, and then admit that that no such list exists.
Therefore, a service _can never_ meet your stated requirements (and therefore,
you've created a self fulfilling framework to justify your piracy of certain
movies). If you're playing so fast and loose with what constitutes a list of
great films, then you can subscribe to the Criterion Collection and call it a
day.

 _it is peculiar that you chide someone for "justifying piracy"_

You said piracy of certain films was ok _because_ of their lack of inclusion
in a service didn't meet your requirements, requirements that could never be
met. I'm saying it's wrong to knowingly create unrealistic requirements and
justifying piracy based on that.

If you're going to change your argument to say that certain films should be
free to all, due to certain significance to the public, that's a different
stance (and one I'm more sympathetic to).

------
staycoolboy
Thank you for doing this. I wish "top critics" was a search option on Prime
(but their Roku interface is just abhorrent).

There was a time when I hoped Netflix would do something similar: click here
to see your favorite critics film list, but since Netflix has lost the
streaming rights to soooo many films compared when they first started
streaming ca. 2007, this is not doable. (Even DVD rights in most cases: films
that are in my "Movies You Rated" queue from 2003 are no longer in Netflix's
library.)

~~~
ddrt
They have a really poor UX imo. The categories are seemingly arbitrary, and
they have niche and seasonal ones that don’t make sense. During the December
holidays they didn’t have a holiday themed category until near holiday end.

Further, they make “innovation” like auto play when nobody asked for this, and
without any way to stop it (unless you go to desktop and disable it deep in
your settings).

When searching you will receive similar results for titles they used to
have... well why not state “are you searching for x? It’s no longer available,
here are some recommendations” so the user isn’t wasting time wondering if the
search feature is just “bad”.

In the world of constant, unannounced, and live experimenting on huge user
bases a little messaging goes a long way (with the comparison being nothing)

------
greggman3
I'm surprised not to see more people adding their favorite movies. Just
sticking to things semi-related. I may have to go watch "My Man Godfrey" again
but at least for me "The Thin Man" and its 5 sequels stuck with me where as
though I watched "My Man Godfrey" years ago but I don't remember any details
of it. (same lead actor and he pretty much always plays the same type of
person)

"The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" is a good movie but if you want some other
westerns starting James Stewart I can recommend "Destry Rides Again" which is
not super serious but I found it throughly entertaining. Also "Broken Arrow"
(1950), (not the 90s John Woo movie which is a fun popcorn movie).

Seeing "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" on the list I recently saw "The
Outlaw Josey Wales" which I enjoyed (also a Western with Clint Eastwood)

Of the movies on that list I've seen the one I'd recommend the most is "Women
in the Dunes". I don't want to over hype it I've seen most of the movies on
the list and they are all great stories but "Woman in the Dunes" might give
you something new to think about where as the others are mostly just great
entertainment.

~~~
patrec
In addition to “Woman in the Dunes”, I'd also nominate “The Gospel According
to Saint Matthew”. And, in fact, “It's a Wonderful Life” for those who haven't
seen it (it's a much more grown up and dark film than you may have been led to
believe).

------
sfaruque
There used to be a site call ClerkDogs.com that probably had the best movie
recommendation system I've used. You started off naming a few movies you
liked, and it would provide a list of movies you'd also probably like, and it
was very accurate.

From what I remember, the database was cataloged and maintained by actual
humans, and not some algorithm following behavior patterns.

~~~
fastball
Yep, jinni.com did the exact same thing, and I loved it. Unfortunately, it
seems like B2C just didn't work financially so they switched to an entirely
B2B model to help providers with their recommendation engines and no longer
have their data accessible to end-users.

~~~
cpach
It’s a shame that the economics of recommendation engines doesn’t seem to work
very well in the B2C space. Good rec. engines can be very useful.

------
x3blah
Instead of using Python, here is a solution that only requires sh, curl, sed,
sort, uniq and grep.

This solution uses a generous 87s delay to retrieve the Amazon pages. There
are 328 films listed as "great movies" on rogerebert.com. As such, the script,
named "1.sh", needs 8h to complete, e.g., the time while you are at work or
sleeping. No cookies, no state, no problems.

    
    
       Usage: sh -c 1.sh > 1.html
    

Open 1.html in a browser and it shows whether each "great movie" is available
as Prime Video or whether it is only available in some other format, such as
Blu-ray, DVD, Multi-format, Hardcover. A link to the item on Amazon is
provided.

    
    
       #!/bin/sh
    
       curl -HUser-Agent: -H'Accept: application/json' --compressed 'https://www.rogerebert.com/great-movies/page/[1-16]?utf8=%E2%9C%93&filters%5Btitle%5D=&sort%5Border%5D=newest&filters%5Byears%5D%5B%5D=1914&filters%5Byears%5D%5B%5D=2020&filters%5Bstar_rating%5D%5B%5D=0.0&filters%5Bstar_rating%5D%5B%5D=4.0&filters%5Bno_stars%5D=1'|grep -o "/reviews/great-movie-[^\\]*"|sed 's/.reviews.great-movie-//'|sort|uniq|while read x;do y=$(echo $x|sed 's/-/+/g');echo $x;curl -s --compressed -HUser-Agent: https://www.amazon.com/s/?k=$y 2>/dev/null|grep -m1 -C4 a-link-normal.a-text-bold;sleep 87;done|sed '/^[^< ]/s/.*/@&,/;1s|.*|<base href=https://www.amazon.com />&|;s/ *//;/^$/d;/^[@<]/!s|$|</a>|;1s/@//;s/@/<br>/'

------
dvt
Roger Ebert had an unexpected impact on me in my 20s. In my late teens, I
started religiously reading his reviews, and this continued until his death.
I've never really been a "movie buff," but Ebert's witty prose and pointed
technical critique reminded me of Scalia (whom I also loved reading). Thank
you for putting this list together!

~~~
Mediterraneo10
The tragedy of Roger Ebert is that, although he had a vast knowledge of great
cinema, he established a niche where he was expected to mainly write about
ephemeral popular films. His time was mostly spent on Hollywood blockbusters
and popcorn, and he was appearing in media where he could not go into any
great depth due to space limitations, or because that would be a turnoff for
his mass audience.

So, only in a few Ebert productions like his "Great Movies" books can one get
a sense of the films that really mattered to the man and to art. Compare this
to a critic like Richard Brody, who in his career has been fortunate to focus
entirely on art cinema (though of course Brody’s net worth is probably an
order of magnitude less than Ebert’s was).

~~~
ctchocula
I've only read a few Ebert reviews, enjoyed them and happened to be looking
for a book to read, so I appreciate the recommendation!

edit: The introduction alone makes the book worth reading:

> Of all the arts, movies are the most powerful aid to empathy, and good ones
> make us into better people. Not many of them are very good.

------
catwind7
Author here.

The list (both on my post + the google sheet) should be correct now - I
underestimated how many different releases of the SAME movie title there are
...

Thanks all for catching the mistakes.

~~~
jchazin
FYI - the "Review URL" links at the bottom don't seem to be working properly.

e.g. for "Moonstruck", the link leads to:

"www.linisnil.com/articles/scraping-roger-ebert-reviews-and-
amazon/www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-moonstruck-1987"

instead of:

"www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-moonstruck-1987"

~~~
catwind7
hey thanks for catching that - turns out leaving out the protocol in markdown
causes makes it a relative url. fixed.

------
duxup
I miss Roger Ebert.

I honestly watch fewer films since his death.

Maybe this list will change that.

Also "Spirited Away" is on the list but doesn't seem to be included with
prime.

~~~
vincentmarle
Spirited Away is now on HBO Max if you're looking for it

------
lostgame
I’d like to see this for more services. Amazon Prime has IMHO the worst UI/UX
I have used in a streaming service.

~~~
TechBro8615
Agreed. What’s most annoying is how they deal with geo blocked content. They
don’t tell you it’s blocked until you start watching it. So you browse the
catalog for five minutes, finally find a movie to watch, press play, and then
get an error message.

~~~
glenneroo
Or how they sometimes won't allow you to watch the original English version
because you're not in an English speaking country. Even if your language is
set to English (of which around 1/4 is still not translated). All movie
previews are in native language which necessitates a visit to YT or IMDB. Even
non-prime content is affected, just recently I paid 2.99 to watch some cheesy
90s movie with my friend who had always wanted to see this "classic". The
syncing was abysmal and resolution 480p i.e. 720x480 i.e. DVD.

After we were done, I noticed there were a handful of HD torrents in various
languages. Reminded me immediately of Gabe Newell's thoughts on pirating
games: "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem".

------
Curnee
Self-promotion: A number of years ago I made a little website which links you
to a random review written by Roger Ebert. It isn't the cleanest of
implementations, but it did what I needed it to do when I built it.

[http://randomebert.com/](http://randomebert.com/)

------
alexilliamson
Side note: one excellent film that Roger Ebert didn't review is Life Itself,
the documentary about his life that came out right after he died. It's full of
joy and heartbreaking at times, but it really solidified his place of most
universally relatable movie critic in my mind.

~~~
catwind7
thank you for this. We will be checking this out!

------
Alex3917
FWIW the link for "The Bicycle Thief" (1949) links to "The Bicycle" (2015).
Great list though. It would be interesting to see the thing done for the AFI
and BFI top 100. (Although I suspect that most movies on the AFI are probably
already on Ebert's list.)

------
intellijdd
I was just seeing someone else's tutorial on scraping Amazon prices. They also
ran into an issue where they needed to scrape twice instead of once. Not sure
that it's the same issue you're facing but I thought I might drop my two
cents.

~~~
catwind7
I actually did notice that issue, even with using a stateful client like
mechanize. Sometimes I had to scrape > 5 times in order to get through the
"anti robot" page.

Other times, I get no issue at all. It's weird - maybe they're doing some
pattern matching on request metadata on their end?

------
trimbo
"The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance"

IMO, John Ford's best movie, hands down.

Unfortunately, it is not actually available on Prime without "CBS All Access"
[Edit: ah, I see that this is not just "Included with prime", but all movies]

~~~
dmix
Prime just recently introduced channels, which dramatically increased the
amount of content available, but each is $3.99. I personally love this because
I’d rather have the option to subscribe to Smithsonian content or MGMs back
catalog using the same streaming service I already use, rather than paying to
use 10 different or getting stuck using the small list of (mostly old, TV
movie, or B movie) content on just prime or Netflix.

So this is a feature, not a bug. Mostly because I’ve accepted how backwards
the movie industry is going to be with copyright. But still having the option
is the less evil.

That said, Maybe the UI can make this more obvious?

~~~
wolco
First time surprised me. I can see it being useful when you have the channel.
Or as a separate tab when you want to possible add a channel.

It kinda taints the other content. You ask internal.. Is it really available
without subscribing? to channels you have access to. Then you finally click
and they have season 1 and 3 and 5 of some show. Terrible UI. Feels like you
get so much less than you do.

With netflix it feels like you could just fall into a series immediately.

------
bogomipz
Although it's not listed in this post because it's a rental. I feel like it
deserves a mention nonetheless. "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" is a 1960s
cult classic. It was directed by Russ Meyer and written by Roger Ebert.
There's a link to it on Roger's site as well as available to stream from
Amazon for cheap:

[https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/beyond-the-valley-of-
the-...](https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/beyond-the-valley-of-the-
dolls-1980)

------
cottager
When you said you were faking a proper agent with `requests`, do you mean you
were setting the headers to look like a browser, as in here?:
[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27652543/how-to-use-
pyth...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27652543/how-to-use-python-
requests-to-fake-a-browser-visit)

That was going to be my suggestion for how to get around the anti-robot
responses.

~~~
x3blah
No agent at all is required. I got past the anti-robot response using no user-
agent header and a simple delay.

------
youngamerican
Reading Ebert's Great Movies site was hugely formative for me. I also love
that he's low-key one of the best writers about addiction and recovery. Side
note: A colleague who worked at the Sun-Times when Ebert also did recently
told me about how whenever management threatened cuts, he'd come into the
newsroom to throw his weight around against it. Even when he was getting to be
in ill health. Much respect.

------
DarknessFalls
I think this is referring to his list of "Movies You Must See Before You Die".
On that note, I should mention "Gates of Heaven", which is part of that list.
A compelling documentary on animal cemeteries, by Errol Morris.

[https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-gates-of-
heav...](https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-gates-of-heaven-1978)

------
chillee
Self-promotion (of sorts), but I (with some friends) have been watching lots
of movies and keeping globally ordered rankings on github here:
[https://github.com/chillee/movierankings](https://github.com/chillee/movierankings)

I find globally ordered rankings of movies to be an interesting exercise of
consistency.

------
samteeeee
Folks interested in this topic might like my new side-project: get an email
when your favorite director releases a new movie -
[https://directoralerts.website](https://directoralerts.website)

------
ngcc_hk
Minor instruction to make it work for me:

pip3 install BeautifulSoup pip3 install mechanize mkdir data

Guess you can check data directory but not sure about the pip3, python does
not like R I am not sure and can it pip3 install when not exist ....

------
boomboomsubban
Only three movies in the past fourty years, non past 87, is surprising. Is
Prime that full of older content or did Ebert's recommendations just stop
coming from major studios?

~~~
zucker42
Using [https://www.rogerebert.com/great-
movies](https://www.rogerebert.com/great-movies) you can filter by date

~~~
boomboomsubban
Thanks, but that doesn't explain why Prime doesn't have any released after 87.

~~~
ThePadawan
I'm having a hard time coming up with the data to confirm this theory but
1986/1987 seems to me to be the peak of both VHS sales and the bottom of VCR
prices.

I assume from that many studios had to come up with their first licensing
schemes for movies "for home use" (contrary to movie theater and broadcast
use), which could potentially still apply to (and restrict) streaming.

Once again, this is my personal hypothesis (and I'd be happy to see some data
to support or contradict it).

~~~
boomboomsubban
1988 was the year of the Writers Guild strike, so while your exacts may be
mistaken you're probably right that the licensing scheme is involved.

------
NicoJuicy
I cancelled my Amazon prime subscription, because of the ridiculous things
they did in France.

And following the dark pattern path to unsubscribe. I'm happy that I did it.

Fyi, I'm from Belgium

~~~
jrib
I didn't hear about this. Can you give a quick summary of what actions Amazon
took in France that you are referring to?

------
s1artibartfast
Useful information but the results look like garbage in Chrome and IE. The
multi-line titles all run together and would greatly benefit from a table
outline.

~~~
adamzegelin
Safari too. I just discovered that modern user agents don't include table
borders by default in their stylesheets -- at least, choosing Develop ->
Disable Styles didn't make the table borders appear.

I'm having flashbacks to the chiseled borders of Netscape.

------
xtiansimon
Are these free on Amazon or is this just an advertisement for Amazon Prime (or
does everyone have a subscription but me?)

~~~
catwind7
Not an advertisement for amazon prime :) These are free with prime, not free
for non-subscribers

I'm actually going to be cancelling my prime membership, which is another
reason I wanted to see what I could watch for "free".

------
exhilaration
If the author reads this, the link in the Google sheet to the Battle of
Algiers goes to Algiers, a totally different movie.

~~~
catwind7
i'm fixing this list ... just realized a few bugs in the code. _sigh_

------
gittes
Don't mean to undermine this guy's screen-scraping adventure... but if you
want to use something that will tell you all the streaming services that have
the list of movies, you can use:

[https://letterboxd.com/dvideostor/list/roger-eberts-great-
mo...](https://letterboxd.com/dvideostor/list/roger-eberts-great-movies/)

You can look at each movie to see what streaming service it's on one at a time
for free.

If you have a pro paid account, you can even do:

[https://letterboxd.com/dvideostor/list/roger-eberts-great-
mo...](https://letterboxd.com/dvideostor/list/roger-eberts-great-
movies/on/amazon-prime-us/)

Which shows that there are 39 movies in Amazon Prime US from Ebert's "Great
Movies," not 21 like this guy's spreadsheet says.

To be fair, the exercise was to scrape the reference sources... so it might
just need some refinement.

Need to double check though if both lists are correct, only confirmed number
totals.

 __Full disclosure: That letterboxd list is not mine, I just found it __

~~~
js2
FWIW, I screen scraped rogerebert.com and copied all of his ratings and an
excerpt of every review to letterboxd:

[https://letterboxd.com/re2/](https://letterboxd.com/re2/)

Just the great movies:

[https://letterboxd.com/re2/tag/great-
movie/films/by/release-...](https://letterboxd.com/re2/tag/great-
movie/films/by/release-earliest/)

You can then filter those by streaming service, but you need a pro account.
Looks like 38 movies:

[https://letterboxd.com/re2/tag/great-
movie/films/on/amazon-p...](https://letterboxd.com/re2/tag/great-
movie/films/on/amazon-prime-us/by/release-earliest/)

[https://ibb.co/KFSj9jg](https://ibb.co/KFSj9jg)

Apparently I missed the Buster Keaton movies:

[https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-the-films-
of-...](https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-the-films-of-buster-
keaton)

[https://letterboxd.com/director/buster-
keaton/](https://letterboxd.com/director/buster-keaton/)

But that means 39 isn't quite right either since Ebert is saying all of Buster
Keaton's films are great.

Anyway, the scraping was easy. The harder problem was parsing the html reviews
(even with BeautifulSoup, the html is a mess), and then matching the reviews
on Ebert's site to the correct movie, which I did via queries to tmdb and a
lot of heuristics. There's nearly 8000 reviews and many have wrong years, bad
titles, etc on rogerebert.com. It was a fun spare time project for a couple
weeks.

~~~
gittes
Nice! Yeah, I wish letterboxd was free somehow without ads and they made their
beta api public.

Yeah, I bet there's not a great standard for normalization/corrections of
tiles, making a distinction of like when a movie was made and when a movie was
released and translations and imports.

Good work.

~~~
js2
I ended up using the director and cast that are listed for most reviews on
Ebert's site for matching the right movie. Even that required some tricks due
to spelling errors or differences in how names were listed. I then flagged any
matches that weren't unique or where the title wasn't similar enough for me to
manually review. I think I only had to double-check about a hundred or so.

I didn't use the letterboxd api. Instead, I generated csv files for the
letterboxd importer. I then did a csv export from their site I could reconcile
to look for import errors.

Trivia: Ebert reviewed a few adult films which I couldn't import to letterboxd
because the site officially doesn't allow those.

BTW, it's only $19/year for an account. I have my own account I pay for which
follows the re2 account. That way I can easily see any of the re2 reviews for
movies in my own watchlist.

~~~
gittes
Yep, I caved and got an account last month too

------
cm2187
A weekend project idea for geeks like me who like films, but have the feeling
to have already watched everything. I find that imdb ratings have a high (but
not 1.0) correlation with me liking the movie (provided I like the genre). You
can still download from imdb flat files that contain all movies, ratings, as
well as cast/directors/producers/writers. Stick that in a database, with a
basic UI to hide movies you have already watched. And you can make a good
personal recommandation engine for movies you didn’t suspect exist. The power
of this approach is that imdb is pretty much an exhaustive catalog.

~~~
jraedisch
I tend to like movies/shows on Rotten Tomatoes, where the critics like the
movie less than the other users, e.g. The Orville
[https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/orville](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/orville)

P.S.: And audience score should roughly be above 70.

~~~
kspacewalk2
I completely agree with this. Whenever critics' and users' assessments of a
movie or a TV show diverge, it is almost universally the critics who end up
being wrong (in my subjective view).

They sometimes over-rate things people in their position cannot be seen
disliking because it's about Societal Importance or some such thing that has
little to do with actual quality. And conversely, they sometimes ignore or
under-rate things because they cannot be seen to overly praise a work that's
criticised for things having little or nothing to do with actual quality.

Thing is, I don't need to be culturally influenced, have my outdated views
updated to match what's currently considered mainstream, my privilege checked,
etc. I just want to watch a good fucking movie and decide for myself whether
it contains a message that changes my mind on a topic.

For example, critics and users disagree on The Shape of Water[0] (users are
right, it's very mediocre). They also disagree on Green Book[1] (users are
right again, it's a great film even if it doesn't tick all the wokeness and
political correctness checkboxes).

[0] [https://www.metacritic.com/movie/the-shape-of-
water](https://www.metacritic.com/movie/the-shape-of-water)

[1] [https://www.metacritic.com/movie/green-
book](https://www.metacritic.com/movie/green-book)

~~~
clairity
> "For example, critics and users disagree on The Shape of Water[0] (users are
> right, it's very mediocre). They also disagree on Green Book[1] (users are
> right again, it's a great film even if it doesn't tick all the wokeness and
> political correctness checkboxes)."

no, the _green book_ is awful, a particularly bad example of the feel-good
movie, never once inviting the viewer to get lost in a believable world,
instead inviting the viewer to question every directorial decision made. it
was fake and pretentious at the same time, and completely safe around race
relations.

the _shape of water_ was not perfect, but better. not the best example of
interracial relations (metaphorically), but gentle, revealing, quirky,
ambient, and unpretentious.

------
jamesrcole
On a tangent: I dream of a web where whenever there are sets of items (eg
eberts-great-movies, and movies-on-amazon) you can easily apply set operations
(like intersection) on them (so if ‘n’ stands for ‘intersection’, eg eberts-
great-movies n movies-on-amazon).

So, in effect if you’re on a site that deals with a set of items, like the
amazon prime movies, you can tell the browser to intersect this set with a
different set at another URL.

I understand that doing this would require the right ‘infrastructure’ to be in
place.

~~~
castratikron
I don't know why there's no good way to know what's streaming on a certain
service. Seems like the only way is through third party sites that are
probably made up of people manually adding to the list.

If everyone is going to make their own streaming service then there needs to
be a standard interface to make them collectively easier to use. A "guide", if
you will.

~~~
pjc50
Unfortunately their profit incentive is the opposite: to train you to watch
what they choose to recommend, rather than take a step back and look at what
isn't there. See the hollowing of the Netflix catalog.

