I Built a Movie Brain in BlackOps Until It Knew What I Should Watch Next

At 12:34 on a Saturday morning I went looking for a movie brain in BlackOps and didn't have one. I have brains (collections of markdown files in my Obsidian vault that BlackOps keeps organized) for wine, whiskey, workouts and deploys but nothing for movies, so I had BlackOps make one and start with Up in the Air.

How Up in the Air Started It

It was the movie closest to how I liked to live. Ryan Bingham lives out of a rollaboard and chases ten million miles. I used to be a frequent flyer and a points person, so a lot of that movie was just true, but my current role includes no travel except for a couple of long trips to Japan. And Clooney is still one of my favorite actors.

The BlackOps agent wrote the note with the year, director, cast, a short plot and my take, then asked what else I loved.

I just kept naming movies

The whole process was me saying a title and a verdict, like "Pulp Fiction is a classic" or "Didn't like Killers" or "Ocean's Eleven and Thirteen. Twelve is meh." BlackOps filled in the rest and linked each film to the others it shares a director or an actor with. Every film is its own note, so in Obsidian it's a graph I can click around in.

I stopped around 1am with 22 films. I picked it back up at 6:30 and had 48 entries by 7.

Leo is in eleven of them

I knew Leo was one of my favorite actors. I didn't realize he was in eleven of the 48 entries. Scorsese has eight, and six of the seven I've seen are favorites. The one I didn't like was Killers of the Flower Moon. The Departed is the movie I've watched more than any other. Tarantino has six, Mel Brooks five, Kevin Smith four.

Some of the categories came out of the conversation. I said there are silly classics like Road House, which I watch every time it's on TV, and that became a tag. Big Trouble in Little China, Real Genius and Mallrats are in there with it now.

Pan Am shows up twice

Catch Me If You Can and The Aviator are both favorites, and both run through Pan Am. My grandfather worked at Pan Am. I flew Pan Am 747SPs to Japan with my parents when I was little, and the first flight I ever took with Audrey was a Pan Am 747 from MIA to LAX in Clipper Class. That history is in both notes now. And I have a 747 tattoo on my arm.

Aviation keeps finding its way into my notes. I spent over 40 years wondering about one plane until Claude found it. The BlackOps agent also noticed that the food truck in Chef drives Miami to LA, the same route as that first flight, which was a strange, fun fact I never would have thought of.

Then I asked what to watch

Once the brain had my taste in it, I asked what I should watch. BlackOps grouped picks by the threads it saw: Heat and The Town for the crime side, Out of Sight and The Sting for the con men, Midnight Run for the road trips. It told me to skip The Irishman, because it plays a lot like Killers of the Flower Moon and that one didn't work for me.

Some of those I'd already seen, so they went in with a rating. Shutter Island and Tombstone went on the watchlist. It's the same thing I did with wine, where the brain ended up knowing my next bottle.

How it's set up

BlackOps handled everything over MCP. It created the brain, wrote one markdown note per film into my vault, and BlackOps keeps a map of every note so whatever agent I'm talking to can pull it up later. I didn't open Obsidian once while building it.

Next up is Shutter Island.

If you want a brain like this for your own stuff, you can get BlackOps Pro at $35/mo with code FOUNDING for the first 25 customers. Details are on the pricing page.