Jinni helps choose your movies

I am a notoriously moody movie-watcher. I don't go to the theater very often because one day I might be in the mood to see something funny, but the next day I might change my mind because I want to see something with lots of explosions and chase scenes. (Who am I kidding? If it has monkeys or zombies, I'll pay $10 to see it.)

A friend recently introduced me to Jinni.com (pronounced like "genie"), which does for movies what Pandora.com and Last.FM do for music. Simply create a free account, search for movies you've watched and rate them on a scale from Awful to Must See, then click a link called Recommendations for suggestions on movies to watch. This is all based on how you rate each movie and all the tags associated with the movie.

When I log in, after rating quite a few movies, here is the basic info I get. I get a small sampling of suggestions represented by images from the movies (the bigger the image, the more likely I am to enjoy the movie based on my previous movie ratings).

I will also see a box of tags (again, based on ratings of movies in particular categories). The larger and bolder the text, the more movies I have rated positively within those categories.

So far, the suggestions I have received either look like movies I will enjoy or have actually been recommended to me by friends and family members. It's not only a lot of fun to find recommendations, it's also really fun to look up a movie to rate, only to come across another movie you had forgotten about and have really fond memories of.

If you are an avid movie-watcher or just want to learn about movies you've hadn't heard of before that you've been missing, I highly recommend using Jinni. Afterward, it wouldn't hurt to check our online catalog to see if some of the movie recommendations are available for checkout.


This entry is cross-posted at What To Read.