social film recommendation & review sites (film affinity, auteurs, flixster, etc.): which ones are good?

These there's a lot of film review & recommendation community sites out there now.

Flixster
FilmAffinity
Criticker
the auteurs
FilmCrave
Spout
Other?

Useful for keeping track of what you've seen, figuring out what to see next, interacting with other movie geeks (well, you can do that on ile or ilf, but not so much the other stuff). Any ilxors using them? Which are good?

Honestly, I don't think a one of them has the formula down right.

Are these like Discogs for movies?

how do they compare to the netflix recommendation thingy?

Discogs for movies is a good analogy.

How they compare to Netflix I don't know, I use Greencine, which isn't much use recommendation-wise.

Netflix recommendation software is pretty stellar. I've gotten tons of tips from it.

I only use netflix for the relatively rare thing that the local video store doesn't carry, as well as to recommend things to look for at the video store. That ... and the ability to watch movies for free online - though most of the ones I watch online aren't ones that I'd actually make the effort to rent.

yeah netflix is eerily OTM when recommending stuff to me

I quit netflix because of the movies started coming slower and slower, which is apparently what they do for people who go through a lot of movies. There was a lawsuit about it, I think. Are they still doing that?

I stopped watching as many movies and that solved the problem, but yeah I think they are still doing it (throttling is what it's called.)

xp Alex: netflix does an okay job for me, though most of its recommendations are pretty predictable ... not the biggest fan of their rating scheme, primarily because there isn't an option for "it was just okay"

I don't know, I get one at a time, and they come very quickly, but where I live has really quick mail delivery.

Frankly it's almost impossible to imagine my world without Netflix now.

Yeah I've rated something crazy like 4500 movies. The stuff that's left over is generally pretty far predictable.

do you go to a video store at all, Alex?

Not much anymore. When I lived in Hayes Valley I did, but there isn't much in the Outer Richmond.

That's one thing about SF that I don't miss ... in some ways it was a major hassle to leave one's neighborhood/go anywhere. In theory, it seems ridiculous that you wouldn't go to Le Video or Lost Weekend, because they're not that far away -- I drive five miles to Berkeley to rent movies, but the operative word is "drive" and I have a driveway and the video store has a parking lot.

But we also used to have a membership at Leather Tongue in SF (RIP) ... which had probably the best selection of bootlegged weird shit.

"because they're not that far away"

Uh even if I had a car and a guaranteed parking space on either end of the trip, Lost Weekend would be that far away. That's like a fifteen-twenty minute drive each way from my house, depending on traffic/lights.

Le Video's pretty close-ish though and I used to occasionally arrange my day around hitting it up, but now I just watch Netflix and Free On Demand movies for the most part.

I'm a member of FilmAffinity, and while it's fun having "movie soulmates", i.e. people who've ranked movies similarly to you, it seems like it's recommending nothing but the same depressing films by the same depressing directors. I slog my way through enough depressing movies as it is. Shock me, recommend a comedy once in a while.

does anyone watch films on the auteurs?

I've watched The Cranes Are Flying on it, cos it was offered for free. No complaints, wonderful quality. I don't know that I would ever pay for the films, though, considering I have a Netflix subscription. I can't think of any film I would need to see so urgently that I would pay five dollars to see it now rather than wait for the DVD to arrive, especially since a lot of Auteurs content is Criterion, which Netflix has scads of.