Nottie the results you would expect

On Thursday I announced I was making The Hottie and the Nottie the next film I'll watch in my monthly series Famous Flops.

God help me.

So I jumped on Netflix to add it to my queue, and couldn't help noticing the second movie that came up when I searched for it.

That's right, it's the terrific monster movie from 1954 about giant radioactive ants, called Them!

That's a much different kind of scary than the scary I'm going to get in The Hottie and the Nottie.

I can't for the life of me figure out why this fun 1950's movie comes up when I search for Paris Hilton's dreadful 2008 vehicle.

Some of the ones that come up later in the search make a little more sense. The next one after Them! is 1945's And Then There Were None -- also a very curious choice until you parse what the Netflix search engine must be doing. It's seeing the consecutive letters T-H-E-N in "the Nottie" and finding you titles with Then in them. That theory also easily explains the next search result (And Then There Was One) and the one after that (Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer, which also has the consecutive letters T-H-E-N across two words -- a pattern you'd think it would share with literally hundreds of movies, though).

The next three results -- Rosemary & Thyme, The Thief and the Cobbler and Edie & Thea: A Very Long Engagement -- bring us right back to square one. None of those titles have consecutive lettering in common with the title I searched, though oddly enough, the middle title shares a structural convention with it. But so do a dozen other movies that don't appear here.

Maybe Netflix is just trying to give me some reason, any reason, to find something other than The Hottie and the Nottie to watch.