The Projector #74: Choosing Not to Choose (Patreon)

by Keith Phipps

Has anyone else tried Netflix’s “Shuffle Play” feature? Actually, I'm not even sure everyone has the “Shuffle Play" feature. It rolled out as a test for some users back in August. I think I first noticed it on my app in November or December. It’s, frankly, poorly done. It seems to draw its selections from shows I’ve either watched before or indicated I like. I don’t really need Netflix to serve up an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. There’s no surprise there.

That doesn’t make it a bad idea, however. True Netflix randomness might be pure chaos, but a little chaos isn’t a bad thing, really. I used to do another podcast with my friend Mike Ryan from Uproxx called Random Movie Night. (It was fun. It just got hard to keep up.) The gimmick was we let a random number generator choose two numbers, one would provide the year of the movie we watched and the other its rank on the year’s 30 highest-grossing movies. The moment when we got our “assignment” could be really exciting because choosing can be hard. There was no, “What do we do next?” when planning episodes. It was more like, “Well, I guess we’re watching Cannonball Run II.”

I hope other streaming services implement and improve on Netflix’s idea. And I hope Netflix improves upon it. I’d like to be able to shuffle within a genre or be served a random episode of the show of my choice. Instead having to, for instance, pick out a Twilight Zone to have one picked for me, as if stumbling across it on television. I think, for as much as we gained, we lost a little something when we took total control of what we watched and when we watched.

I’d especially love to see how it would work on a service like Shudder or The Criterion Channel. Shudder already does something kind of like this with its Shudder TV feature, which is always playing something from the library at any given time, and other services will likely add similar features, spurred in part by the popularity of Tubi and Pluto.TV, which have helped recreate that old channel-flipping feeling of discovery. (I’d read about but never seen Frank Sinatra: A Man and His Music until happening upon it recently. And, yes, he had a cold.)

There’s also something to be said for unexpected connections. Last night, more or less at random, I watched The Tall Target on Criterion. It’s a 1951 Anthony Mann film streaming as part of a Ruby Dee series. I’d heard of the title but didn’t know much about it, only to discover it 's an historical thriller set largely aboard a train in which Dick Powell seeks to foil a plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln, then a president-elect, as he makes made his way to his inauguration. Playing out in the background is the story of a divided nation — a division that extends to the train’s passengers. Some refuse to recognize Lincoln’s legitimacy. The headlines announce the ascent of Jefferson Davis. It ends with an image of the Capitol building still under construction that then dissolves into a present-day shot of the finished building. It now plays as weirdly timely, and I had no idea of that as I headed in. I had no plans to watch the movie and little idea of what the movie even was, which only enhanced the experience. Done right, a shuffle feature could make creating that sort of experience a lot easier.

Of course, your top priority should always be watching the movies we tell you to watch, which this week means checking out Promising Young Woman. Like it or not, it’s giving us a lot to talk about. I think we’ve gotten more feedback about this episode than any other episode. We love it. Keep it coming. (And, having recorded our next episode already, there should be a lot to respond to there, too.)

Meanwhile, here are a few articles worth your time.

• Directly relevant to Promising Young Woman, Scott Tobias wrote about Abel Ferrara’s grindhouse classic Ms. 45 for Oscilloscope’s Musings.

• For Polygon, Tasha Robinson talked to Mike Cahill about his new alternate-reality film Bliss.

• Elsewhere at Polygon, Kyle Wilson ranked Lord of the Rings’ “orc daddies.”

• For The Hollywood Reporter, Seth Abramovitch had a rare conversation with Shelley Duvall at home in Texas.

• Also for Polygon, Siddhand Adlakha makes a case for the Bourne trilogies shaky cam action scenes.

• At The New York Times, filmmakers Lulu Wang, Lee Isaac Chung, Bing Liu, Alan Yang, Justin Chon, Sani Tan, and Mira Nair participate in a roundtable about Asian-American cinema.

• At Criterion, Angelica Jade Bastién goes deep on the charm and physicality of Cary Grant.

• Sometimes actors make terrific directors, and right away. At Vulture, Gregory Wakeman rounds up 18 of the best debut films from actors.

• We’ll be covering Minari soon (spoiler?) so why not enjoy this interview with its 8-year-old star Alan Kim conducted by our pal Rachel Handler, also at Vulture.