Reviewer's ratings of movies often vary significantly from each other. Which to believe?
I'm suggesting a web site, or added feature to an existing one, in which a user could enter their own rating for a number of films that they have already seen, and the site would then report which reviewer their tastes most closely matched.
It could even be refined to include genre:
"In DRAMA your tastes most closely match Roger Ebert" "In ACTION your tastes most closely match Entertainment Weekly" "In ROMANTIC COMEDY your tastes most closely match Reel"
If this already exists, please, I want to know about it.
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Good idea, maybe this is something a site like say www.rottentomatoes.com could work in...
I always look at movie ads in the paper -- a movie can have all the Michael Medved and Topeka MovieMinit raves it wants, if it doesn't have a thumbs up from Ebert I think twice.
This feature could easily be added to metacritic.com, a review database for movies, music, games, and more.
Netflix has this system all ready, but i think you have to be a subscriber. you just rate every movie you want from 1-4 and it figures it all out somehow.
YES! Can't agree more. And I've thought about this problem extensively.
What can a movie buff like me do to find films I'll like? Look at a random critic? A metacritic or rottentomatoes score? An IMDb vote tally? These factors are all I have to go on, but they completely fail to account for the fact that *different people like different things*.
The mathematics behind a system like this is simple Stats 101. In fact, I could sit down today and implement exactly what you ask for. But without being able to tie into imdb.com, with its database of titles, and where millions of users have already entered millions of ratings, and where a hundred other features add more value -- I don't see how my dinky site could ever possibly catch on.
My service would *need* to be able to scrape vote data from IMDb, which is something explicitly forbidden by the IMDb terms of usage.
In fact, I've also figured out how to scrape metacritic data, so that you can find out which critics think along your lines, but this is also verboten. (Wouldn't it be nice to know whose reviews to read every week?)
It's sad... the value of this would be tremendous to movie buffs, not only to find better movies to watch, but also to build a sense of community with other movie watchers, and to help the particularly savvy movie critics have their work noticed more than the rest. But if imdb.com doesn't just decide to do this on their own, what can I do?
What Netflix does is similar, but they attempt to take it a step further and predict what your rating would be, based on the ratings of "users like you". They don't actually show you who the "users like you" are. Even worse... their system just basically doesn't work. Despite having carefully rated around one thousand titles, the recommendations I get from them are completely bizarre. I spent weeks, months maybe, happily renting them, thinking "sure, it looks bad, but users like me have liked it!" and in the end realized it was all bogus.
But I do think the idea could work.