How to Choose a Movie to Watch Without a Family Quarrel
When it comes to entertainment in the Quarantine Times, my wife and I are spoiled for choice. We don’t have cable, but we do subscribe (or have access to passwords) on Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video, Disney +, HBO Max, and the Criterion Channel, not to mention the many free streaming services . So … why can’t we pick the damn movie? Ever since the isolation began, but in fact, since our relationship began, we’ve spent more time arguing about which movie we want to watch than actually watching the movies ourselves. Half the time, we end up with a low-key struggle because of another person’s indifferent mood or terrible taste before choosing something; otherwise it’s too late to watch anyway. You will notice that this adds up to 100% of the time, and this is just a slight exaggeration, but I finally found a solution to our paralysis of choice.
It comes from cinematic married couple Karina Longworth, creator of the important film history podcast You Must Remember This , and her husband Ryan Johnson, director of Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Knives Out (the latter is a film that my wife and I managed agree to watch, she did not like it). It turns out that even famous directors and film historians can’t agree on what to watch, but Longworth found a solution, as shown in the third episode of her other quarantine podcast, Pictures That Got Small .
“[Ryan Johnson] and I got into a passive-aggressive behavior like, ‘You choose what we watch, no, you choose what we watch.’ And so I created an innovation in our house: I actually made a list of all the films I could think of, which we said, “Oh, we should see this someday,” plus a few deep cut directories I’m trying to get. to know better, plus a few Criterion Blu-ray we had. We put it in an app that can randomize any list. And so every night when we’re going to watch something, we press a random button and it tells us what we’re going to watch. “
Longworth and Johnson christened their decision the Randomizer. To maintain and randomize their list, they use the Random app called “The Generator of All Things”. It’s great – free! – an option that can store and mix any list and select one item in it at random; you can also use it to flip a coin, generate a random number, roll a die, and more. However, it’s only available for iOS, but you can tweak the same results using a Google Docs spreadsheet and any random number generator (I like the one at Random.org for ease of use). There are other schemes for choosing films. built on random chance. In our Slack, Lifehacker technical editor David Murphy recommended Netflix Roulette , which will randomly select a movie for you from the entire Netflix library (and, if you create an account, HBO, Prime Video, Hulu and “50+ Others”). While you can narrow down your choices by genre and score on Rotten Tomatoes, this is a wild west decision for me. (I mean, what if he tried to make me watch the Wild, Wild West ?)
I prefer the self-control of the randomizer. My wife and I are constantly discussing films that we might see someday, but never in the same place; we have options scattered across Alexa lists, multiple streaming service browsing queues, random texts and old emails, and yet for some reason every time we launch Roku we can’t think of anything that we even any interest. Using the model randomizer, not only will we have all the possibilities in one place, but the hard part – the choice – is out of our hands.
Now this is a solution that requires both installation, it’s going to take a while to put together your that-to-watch list, and you’ll probably be curating it all the time, like a streaming service add and remove movies-and-buy-in- all, provided that the Randomizer must agree to abide by the rules of the Randomizer . If you just hit the shuffle button again, if you don’t like what you’re given, you can also go back to Netflix’s Endless Watch plan . If this is too harsh for the health of your relationship with other bystanders, consider following some household rules. Maybe you can sort your lists by genre (so you don’t end up watching a horror movie on Valentine’s Day) or give each person one veto per viewing session – all you have to do to keep the peace, and finally just watch a fucking movie. …