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Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

A weekend project idea for geeks like me who like films, but have the feeling to have already watched everything. I find that imdb ratings have a high (but not 1.0) correlation with me liking the movie (provided I like the genre). You can still download from imdb flat files that contain all movies, ratings, as well as cast/directors/producers/writers. Stick that in a database, with a basic UI to hide movies you have already watched. And you can make a good personal recommandation engine for movies you didn’t suspect exist. The power of this approach is that imdb is pretty much an exhaustive catalog.

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I tend to like movies/shows on Rotten Tomatoes, where the critics like the movie less than the other users, e.g. The Orville https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/orville

P.S.: And audience score should roughly be above 70.

I've generally found in life that my own preferences are more in line with the non-professional crowds than any self-anointed critics or other experts.

I'm probably the opposite but it's not really surprising that there's a divergence between the two. The box office makes it pretty clear that big budget popcorn movies/summer blockbusters/etc. are very popular with mainstream audiences. Whereas people who feel a calling to be film critics (or any sort of culture) tend to be a bit dismissive of at least cookie-cutter flavors of blockbusters (e.g. Transformers, most modern superhero movies, etc.) and more appreciative of indie and other smaller releases even if they aren't full-on fans of European and Asian art house fare.

Even Ebert, who was a relatively "everyman" sort of critic, definitely had a serious film critic persona if you've ever listened to any of his DVD commentaries.

If you watch enough movies the cookie-cutter type gets boring. If you watch once in awhile the cookie cutter formula can be reassuring that whatever leisure time you have you will get a predictable experience.

So, critics are for the movie-privileged? Seems to be an upper-class thing if one can watch a lot of movies to the point that things become "boring".

I've watched at least 500 movies probably 300 full tv series.

It does get repetitive. It is boring. It does become a job.

Critics are elites.

Same thing happens in music. You get critics rating albums in magazines. Some people rely on them but most listen to the radio and pick songs they like based on that.

I think you touch on something else as well. (And this also applies to other formats like reading.) Some people just want entertainment/escapism. Others are going to (also) appreciate craft, to be challenged, etc.

I tend to prefer RT over IMDB as a starting point because the former assesses whether a review is generally positive or negative. It gives me an idea of whether a movie/show is worth looking into. If even 70% of reviews are positive then I'll drill down and skim the actual reviews to get an idea of whether it's something I will personally like. If it's something like 5% of reviews that are positive, I probably keep looking.

IMDB always seems to skew mid-high since they're averaging out lots of "star" ratings. Seeing 3.5 stars doesn't tell me much. But even if 90% of the reviews were "nothing amazing, but fun to watch" then there's a chance it might be fun to watch.

Obviously it's just a tool for sorting and surfacing options, but it can be useful. I probably won't depend on a review aggregator to decide whether or not to go see a movie in the theater, but they are helpful when I see a movie/show pop up on Netflix or Amazon and I want to see if the general consensus is "worth a watch" or "effing terrible".

I completely agree with this. Whenever critics' and users' assessments of a movie or a TV show diverge, it is almost universally the critics who end up being wrong (in my subjective view).

They sometimes over-rate things people in their position cannot be seen disliking because it's about Societal Importance or some such thing that has little to do with actual quality. And conversely, they sometimes ignore or under-rate things because they cannot be seen to overly praise a work that's criticised for things having little or nothing to do with actual quality.

Thing is, I don't need to be culturally influenced, have my outdated views updated to match what's currently considered mainstream, my privilege checked, etc. I just want to watch a good fucking movie and decide for myself whether it contains a message that changes my mind on a topic.

For example, critics and users disagree on The Shape of Water[0] (users are right, it's very mediocre). They also disagree on Green Book[1] (users are right again, it's a great film even if it doesn't tick all the wokeness and political correctness checkboxes).

[0] https://www.metacritic.com/movie/the-shape-of-water

[1] https://www.metacritic.com/movie/green-book

> "For example, critics and users disagree on The Shape of Water[0] (users are right, it's very mediocre). They also disagree on Green Book[1] (users are right again, it's a great film even if it doesn't tick all the wokeness and political correctness checkboxes)."

no, the green book is awful, a particularly bad example of the feel-good movie, never once inviting the viewer to get lost in a believable world, instead inviting the viewer to question every directorial decision made. it was fake and pretentious at the same time, and completely safe around race relations.

the shape of water was not perfect, but better. not the best example of interracial relations (metaphorically), but gentle, revealing, quirky, ambient, and unpretentious.

I tend to find that the movies I really like have a strongly bimodal distribution of comments on IMDB - some love and some hate.

e.g. "Blood Machines" - which I can see why a lot of people dislike it but I think it is awesome.

Edit: Probably not a great idea to search for it if you have a problem with nipples.

Do the movies you really dislike have the same distribution of comments? :)

I do think that that there is something to media that creates a "love it or hate it" response. It's usually trying something new (Blood Machines certainly was).

p.s.: I saw Blood Machines when it premiered on Shudder & really enjoyed it.

Good question - I checked IMDB for Force Majeure and it does seem to have that "love it or loathe it" distribution - I tend to agree with the comment about it being "mind-numbingly pretentious drivel" (which I guess some people would apply to Blood Machines).

> I find that imdb ratings have a high (but not 1.0) correlation with me liking the movie

You could track your own personal rating of the movies, then regress these ratings against a variety of external rating sources (IMDB, ebert, etc) to see which is the most predictive.

Along the same lines, MovieLens has been an ongoing project since 1997. The data is also available: https://grouplens.org/datasets/movielens/

>You can still download from imdb flat files that contain all movies, ratings, as well as cast/directors/producers/writers.

What's the easiest way to do this?

https://datasets.imdbws.com/

It looks like it's actually not as easy to find any more if you try to find it on their developer portal as it's been revamped recently with their official paid API.

Assuming it's the same one I used in the past, https://imdbpy.github.io/ effectively does this, putting the files into a local SQLite database for you.

A long time ago, you used to be able to download flat files of things like soundtracks and connections. Apparently that is gone.

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