Yahoo has launched a new service today for providing movie recommendations. Upon visiting that URL you’ll be asked for your Yahoo login.

Movie recommendations from Yahoo! movies provides personalized recommendations for both current and past films playing in theaters, on TV or on DVD/video. It’s easy to use—simply enter your age range and gender (this is optional, but can help focus the recommendations you receive), indicate whether you lean more toward Hollywood-type or independent films, and rate a few movies that you’ve already seen.

I rated a few movies just to see what it threw back at me. Firstly, I like the smooth looking colorful rating popup. It will produce movies for you to quickly rate and then submit in blocks of six movies at a time. For some reason in Internet Explorer it wouldn’t record my votes (doh!), so I switched over to Firefox which wouldn’t even popup the submit box. But wait, that’s only one machine, so I’ll try another …

On the second computer (my M1400 Tablet PC) when I logged in it showed that I had indeed rated three of the six movies (correct). I decided to check out what these three ratings would tell it about whether I’d like Star Wars III (which I already had reviewed). The critics overall rated it B+ and Yahoo users were a bit more positive with an A-. Me? Still a B:

I surfed around a bit more and added some more ratings. Noticed a lot of high marks from Yahoo users as opposed to critics, which I suppose is a given, but still, can the critics always be that cynical? I found one movie that Yahoo users were actually lower than the critics.

All seemed to work fine on the Tablet PC. I didn’t demo this in Safari on the Mac. I went to ratings to see what it turned up for suggestions: Kicking & Screaming (yes), The Longest Yard (saw it awhile back, but would like to see the new version, yes), Crash (looks worth seeing, yes), Unleashed (ok), Madagascar (the kids would like that, yes). Solid picks, I’d say. Reminded me of the TiVO suggest function which I’ve missed since dropping TiVO.

It also gave me some TV suggestions (Shrek 2, The Quiet Man, Swordfish, Men in Black and The Last Samuri). Not bad, though I’ve seen MIB already.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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