I took the ~471 movies I remember seeing in my lifetime, ranked how much I liked them (with extra weight on the ones I feel sentimentally attached to), and plotted that against how much Everyone Else liked them (as measured in iMDB ratings).
Lefter = I like it more. Higher = others like it more.
And while we're on the topic of movies, here's an accompanying ramble!
Few things make me feel more like an alien than seeing movies, or watching TV, or playing video games.
Is it that my tastes are super unusual?
Is it that movie/TV/game creators are bad at giving people what they want?
(I'd guess it's a lot of both.)
Even the best movies / games / TV shows constantly make me feel like the creators are exerting effort to specifically try to avoid the primary things I enjoy in art.
Stuff like:
Minimalism. Slowness. Moments of stillness, contrasted with moments of intensity and movement.
Contrast, more generally.
Lyrical, elegant, crafted-feeling cinematography, dialogue, story, tropes. Symbol, mythological resonance, and weightiness.
Things that trigger truly intense feelings, both good and bad, in the viewer. Things that provoke anger, disgust, horror, nausea, confusion, anxiety, sorrow, disorientation, and complex in-between feelings, along with positive sentiment.
"Alive"-feeling characters -- self-aware, cognitively nimble, genre-savvy characters that actually think and optimize, like in Eliezer's "Guide to Intelligent Characters". Rather than just doing whatever's convenient for the plot, or whatever's expected/normal, or whatever's likely to locally please the audience.
Script-breaking, self-awareness, and consciously going against type. Fucking with the viewer. Connecting with the viewer. Actually talking to the viewer like they're a fellow human being. Just having a conversation, a moment of contact with another mind.
Ambitious epics. Stories that span years or generations, and build slowly toward a carefully planned and constructed resolution. Epics bound up with human tragedy, and catharsis, and evil, and growth, and regression, and rare hope.
