Judging a book by its movie tastes

I've recently been shown Flixster, an online movie rating community which claims to rate your friendship by how close your taste in movies is. It's fundamentally flawed because I haven't seen all the movies listed, so it relies on our ability to pre-judge movies (i.e. Want to see it/Not Interested). Fortunately, I have the uncanny ability to predict how much I'll enjoy a movie before I see it.

It's an intriguing concept, but as I was discussing with Josh yesterday, it's stupid to assume that you can't get along with someone if your opinions differ. While sharing a common interest is a great discussion point, which can help you get to know each other better, it isn't the be-all and end-all of friendship compatibility, especially when you're talking about movies. I believe you can like different movies or even have different fundamental beliefs and values, provided that what you do talk about can be discussed on a similar level.

The MCT is the place where you rank 50 movies, which forms the compatibility ratings. I enjoyed it because I got to diss out the two worst movies I saw last year, War of the Worlds and Ocean's Twelve, as well as praise a few great movies like Donnie Darko and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, just as part of the 50. Unfortunately, it brought up one of the most common and frustrating arguments.

I say I'm not interested in 8 Mile. I hate Eminem's music, I don't care about his life and I'm sure he's a "great actor" because he's playing a role very close to himself. I am not a great actor if I play myself in a movie, I am simply capable of expressing the appropriate emotions at the right time. That makes me human, not a good actor. The argument to that was "How can you criticise something you haven't seen?"

Has anyone here seen the Holocaust happen? Me neither. Does anyone have a problem with criticising the Holocaust? No? You do? Well, you're a Jew hater. Seriously though, my response was that it's stupid for me to spend my time watching all these movies I don't think I'll like, just to prove a point. I acknowledge that I don't need to see, hear and know everything in the world - truly good things should find their way to me somehow and if they don't, I'll live in blissful ignorance of them.

I'd love to find a musical equivalent of this, because that's where my real passion lies (I've never been a big movie-goer or renter). Until then, feel free to log on to Flixster and search for username "phorgan" to add me to your friends list. I've written comments about most of the 50 movies I had to rate, some of which might be of interest to a desperately bored blog reader. Not that I'm hinting...