Saturday, February 1, 2025

Not recommending me a movie I've already seen

I did not like You're Cordially Invited. "Hate" is not too strong a word.

This despite the fact that Will Ferrell is one of my comedy heroes, Nicholas Stollar directed my beloved Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and I've liked Reese Witherspoon pretty much every time I've seen her on screen. If you want more of my thoughts on why I did not like hated this movie, see my review here

In fact, so low was my opinion of You're Cordially Invited that I did something I almost never do: I rated it with a thumbs up or a thumbs down, as the streamers are always asking me to do. In this case, that was obviously a thumbs down. 

I found the result funny, and counterintuitive -- only worsening the experience, if that were possible.

Here is what came up on screen after I gave the thumbs down:

I'm caught up on the wording "We won't recommend this."

Because Amazon doesn't say to whom it won't recommend it, I'm left with the following two guesses:

"We won't recommend this to you." Well, of course you won't recommend it to me. Why would you recommend me any movie you know I've already seen? That's just dumb. If I've seen it, I can judge for myself whether I want to see it again. 

"We won't recommend this to any of our customers." If that's the case, it's a little extreme based on one person's opinion. Some people may like You're Cordially Invited, though I wouldn't want to be friends with them.

What I think they mean to say here is "We won't recommend you similar movies," but if that's what it is, that's wrong too for how I would practically use their service. I do want to watch many if not most romantic comedies, which is one of the reasons I watched this within the first 12 hours of its availability. If the result of me rating this movie is that I no longer know about other romantic comedies streaming on Amazon that might interest me, then I really do regret rating it, and this is why I don't do these ratings in the first place.

What they maybe should be saying, though it would be very wordy, is "We will take your rating into consideration when deciding the extent to which we will recommend this to other Amazon subscribers whom we have deemed to be somewhat similar to you." Then again, I haven't given them many/any ratings before, so they only know I watched certain movies, not whether I liked them. So my one rating may not be of much use to them anyway.

A paucity of available space forces unhelpful semantic shortcuts in the text. We can say that one thing for sure.

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