What To Watch Next Generator

When you cannot decide what to watch

It is nine in the evening. You sit down with two free hours, which is not a small thing, and you spend forty minutes of them reading descriptions of films you will not watch. Eventually you put on something you have seen before, or you go to bed annoyed with yourself.

The problem is not that you have no taste. It is that choosing is work, and by nine in the evening you have done enough work. So let something else choose. A few of the films it can hand you:

• Saving Private Ryan
• Se7en
• Love Actually
• My Name Is Khan
• Shakespeare in Love
• An American Werewolf in London
• Hera Pheri
• The Godfather

Before you press it, though, it helps to know what you are actually asking for. Most bad film nights are not bad films. They are good films watched in the wrong mood.

Using it

1. Press Generate and watch what it gives you. That is the whole discipline of it.
2. Ask for three if there are two of you, and let the other person veto one.
3. Type into Contains if you already know roughly what you want, a word, a name, a year.
4. Copy to save a shortlist for the week.

What is in this list

Films gathered and checked by hand, spread across decades, countries and moods, chosen because they reward the two hours rather than because they topped a chart. The picking happens in your browser.

What are you actually in the mood for

In 1988 the media researcher Dolf Zillmann described something he called mood management. His claim was simple and slightly unflattering: we do not choose entertainment because it is good. We choose it, largely without noticing, to move our mood where we want it to go.

He said we sort content along a few axes. How much it will excite us. How completely it will absorb our attention. How close it sits to whatever is on our mind. And whether it is pleasant.

The absorption one explains more of your evenings than you would like. If you are anxious, you do not need a happy film. You need an absorbing one, because a film that takes your full attention leaves no room for the thing you were chewing on. That is why a tense thriller can calm you down and a gentle comedy can leave you stewing.

The one about closeness is the most useful, and the most ignored. Zillmann called it semantic affinity: the less a film resembles your actual problem, the better it works. Nobody who has just been dumped should watch a break-up film, however brilliant. It will not distract you. It will simply hold up a mirror and charge you for it.

Do you want to feel better, or feel something

Here is the single question worth asking before you press play, and it is not what genre do I fancy.

Researchers who study why people watch things eventually had to split the answer into two. Some viewing is what they call hedonic: you want pleasure, comfort, an easy time. Some is eudaimonic: you want meaning, and you are willing to be moved around to get it. People lean one way or the other as a matter of temperament, and everybody switches depending on the week they have had.

Confusing these two is how you end up resenting a great film. Somebody puts on a slow, careful, devastating drama when you needed to be entertained, and you decide the film was boring. It was not boring. You were hungry and it served you something to think about.

So decide first. Do I want to feel better tonight, or do I want to feel something. Then pick. The generator is far more useful once you have answered that, because you will know within thirty seconds whether the film it gave you belongs to the right half.

Films for the room you are sitting in

A film is not watched in a vacuum. It is watched in a room, with particular people, at a particular hour, at a particular level of tiredness. The room decides more than the genre does.

Alone, and tired. Choose absorption over ambition. Something with momentum in the first ten minutes. A film you have to work at will lose you at minute forty and you will remember it as bad.

Alone, and awake. This is the only reliable slot for the difficult film, the long one, the subtitled one, the one with a reputation. Do not waste it on comfort viewing. This slot does not come often.

Two of you, new to each other. Avoid anything that requires either of you to be quiet for two hours to enjoy it. Avoid anything sexually awkward. A good rule is a film with a pause button used often.

Two of you, years in. You can risk the difficult one. You can also abandon it at minute thirty without anyone taking offence, which is the real luxury.

A family, mixed ages. The film has to work at two levels or it works at none. Look for the ones that let the adults enjoy something the children do not notice, rather than the ones that ask everyone to enjoy the same thing.

Something on in the background. Be honest that this is what you are doing and put on something you have seen. A first viewing spent half-watched is a first viewing wasted, and you only get one.

Cannot sleep. Not a thriller and not something new. Familiar, warm, well lit, and something you can leave halfway through.

Why we choose sad films on purpose

Mood management runs into an obvious wall. If we choose things to feel better, why does anybody choose a film they know will make them cry?

Mary Beth Oliver went at this properly in 1993 and found something odd in the data. Among viewers of sad films, feeling sad was not the price of enjoyment. It was positively related to it. The sadder people reported feeling, the more they reported enjoying it.

The explanation she reached for was what she called meta-emotion, which is how you feel about how you feel. Crying at a film is not the same as being sad. It is being sad while safe, and noticing yourself being moved, and rather liking that about yourself. The tears are evidence that you are the kind of person who can be reached. You cannot get that from a comedy.

There is a practical use here. When you are actually low, the reflex is to reach for something cheerful, and it often bounces off. A sad film sometimes lands better, because it meets you where you are rather than shouting across a gap. Just watch the closeness rule. Sadness about somebody else's grief helps. A film about precisely your grief does not.

Resetting a stale palate

If everything looks like nothing, your palate has flattened. It happens to everyone, and it is not that the films got worse.

Usually you have been eating one flavour. Six action films in a month and the seventh cannot land, because you have stopped being surprised by any of the moves. The cure is not a better action film.

Three things that work, in rough order of effort:

1. Change the decade. The quickest reset available. A film from the 1970s runs on a different rhythm and forces your attention to re-tune. You will notice yourself watching again rather than consuming.
2. Change the country. Not for virtue. Because the storytelling conventions differ, so you genuinely cannot predict the next beat, and prediction is what killed your interest in the first place.
3. Watch something you expect to dislike. The most underrated move. You will either be wrong, which is a gift, or you will be right and discover exactly why, which sharpens everything you watch afterwards.

This is where handing the choice to a machine earns its keep. Left alone, you will pick another version of the last thing you liked. That is not a character flaw. It is just how taste works when it is tired.

Questions people ask

How long should I give a film before giving up?

Twenty minutes, and be honest about whether you gave it your attention or your phone. If a film has genuinely lost you at twenty minutes with your full attention, stop. Finishing it out of duty teaches you nothing and costs you an evening.

What if I get a film I know I will not like?

Press it again. But note which films you reject on sight, because that list is a portrait of your taste, and it is usually narrower than you think you are.

Should I pick the mood first or the film first?

The mood, always. Genre is a poor proxy for mood. A comedy can be exhausting and a horror film can be comforting, depending entirely on which of the two of you is watching whom.

Is rewatching a waste of time?

No, but be clear about what you are buying. A rewatch is comfort, not discovery. Problems start when you rewatch on the one evening a month you were awake enough for something new.

References

1. Zillmann, D. (1988). Mood management through communication choices. American Behavioral Scientist, 31(3), 327–340. https://doi.org/10.1177/000276488031003005
2. Oliver, M. B. (1993). Exploring the paradox of the enjoyment of sad films. Human Communication Research, 19(3), 315–342. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2958.1993.tb00304.x
3. Oliver, M. B., and Raney, A. A. (2011). Entertainment as pleasurable and meaningful: identifying hedonic and eudaimonic motivations for entertainment consumption. Journal of Communication, 61(5), 984–1004. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2011.01585.x