So Amazon has this thing where you buy a movie or a record, and it lists all the things that other people have bought when they bought your particular selection. This has occassionaly proven useful, but for me, at least, it mostly doesn't work. Here's why.

First of all, I don't buy DVD's that often, but I'm starting to a bit more. The reason is that they are so cheap. Kara and I go to the movies a fair amount. When a remake (Planet of the Apes) or sequel (Rush Hour 2) comes out, we, apparently along with the rest of the world, want to rent the previously released movie so that we get the one-two experience. However, did you try to find The Mummy in video stores when The Mummy II came out? It was impossible. And worse than that, we could only find it on VHS (magnetic tape is sooo passe, don't you know), and what's even worse, it was a horrible, terrible movie. And on top of that, we actually did, then, go out to see The Mummy Two in the theatres, proving that I, at least, have questionable intelligence, because you can guess what we thought of the sequel. Arg.

But I've seriously digressed. So I'm tooling around looking for something - I think it was Solar Crisis, which was a spectacularly bad movie reviewed elsewhere on the web site, and I come across this other movie, Lifeforce. It looks really bad too. And then I wonder how many degrees of separation there are from bad movies and good movies in this feature. So I start clicking through, randomly, movies that other people bought when they bought the movie I'm looking at. You know what, they're mostly all bad.

Check out this sequence:

Solar Crisis -> Timelock -> Laserhawk -> Total Reality -> Escape Velocity -> Escape Under Pressure

Have any of you heard of any of these movies? Maybe Escape Velocity, maybe Timelock, but the rest? Did you know Escape Under Pressure stars Rob Lowe? Some of these movies were so bad that no-one had even written a review!

The other problem I have with this system at Amazon is that most people are stupid. Really! I mean, you the reader are probably not stupid, but if you take the population as a whole (conveniently omitting the people you like), people are stupid. That's one of my main problems with a democracy. A democracy consists of either lots of stupid people voting, or lots of people too stupid to vote. Anyway, why are people stupid? Well, in this case, it's because their purchasing habits on Amazon are really bugging me. People who buy DVD's of bad movies tend to also buy bad movies. The kind of CD's I've been buying lately make it even worse. Can you guess what people most often bought when they bought a Phish album? Could it be, another Phish album? That does not help me at all. Jazz is just as bad. People who bought a Wes Montgomery album go on to buy albums from other people who played with Wes Montgomery. Well hey, I can figure that out myself you know, because I'm not one of the stupid people.

What I'd really like to have happen, is that I'll go and buy something on Amazon, and it will recommend some totally new and surprising thing that I haven't been exposed to, and I'll get interested, and my horizons will get expanded, and life will generally be pretty good.

I'm not holding my breath on that one.