How Criticker fits into my personal movie recommendations...

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Quicky
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Re: How Criticker fits into my personal movie recommendations...

Post by Quicky »

Philip wrote:I discovered something while going through the movies to put them on my remember list. I don't think "Grave of the Fireflies" (http://www.criticker.com/?f=4316) should be in the humor section. "This movie makes me want to kill myself" (80 pts), "One of the most depressing and beautiful movies I've ever seen." (90 pts), "Too sad for words..." (81 pts) ...
I haven't seen the movie, so maybe humor is a sub category, but I don't really think it's a laugh out loud kinda film.

Ok, 2 things... First of all, the labels 'ACTION', 'DRAMA', 'THRILLER', 'HUMOR' and 'ARTHOUSE' should be considered quite broad. The origin of these five labels comes from the fact that my local video store classified its movies in either of these 5 genres and I kind of liked this classification. I think I just like the simplicity of having only 5 genres, as compared to like 23 on IMDB. It makes it easy for people like me who sometimes feel like watching something serious (DRAMA), sometimes something action-packed (ACTION), or something light (HUMOR), etc.

So it has been my goal to classifiy each movie in my database under one of these five labels, where each of the labels corresponds to a set of IMDB genres. For example, as is shown in the .pdf with your recommendations, the ACTION label contains movies with the genres action, adventure, sci-fi and fantasy. So if a movie has only the genre 'adventure', like 10,000 B.C., it also will be categorized as 'ACTION', even though it doesn't have the genre 'action'.

Secondly, I don't do this classification manually (which would take way too much time when you're crossing the 2,500 movies mark). I devised a way to automatically classify a movie under each of the five labels by taking its genres on IMDB into account, as well as its popcorn rating (I consider movies with very low popcorn rating to be 'alternative' movies and thus classify under 'ARTHOUSE'). Of course this automatic classification is not fool proof, and there will always be movies that you'd think should be under a different label. I'll try to find a way to override the automatic classification with manual input to accommodate these errors, so that Grave of the Fireflies can be classified under ARTHOUSE instead of HUMOR.

livelove
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Re: How Criticker fits into my personal movie recommendations...

Post by livelove »

Quicky wrote:In the past few years I've been developing a movie database in Excel that makes scores (much like PSI here) that tell me which movies I'll probably like and which I probably won't. During those years, the database has gradually gotten bigger and more complex. Before I came across Criticker.com it was calculating a PSI-like score for each movie on 6 parameters: 1) IMDB-score (for 18-29 year olds), 2) Length of the movie, 3) Popcorn-rating (more on that below), 4) Age of the movie, 5) Genre, 6) Awards.

The algorithm is quite complex, but in the end the score is based on these 6 parameters, each having their own weight. I calculate these weights with a program I wrote in IDL so that the final scores most accurately agree with how I rated my movies myself after I saw them (putting more emphasis on the movies I rated high). Now that I know about Criticker, I added a 7th parameter: the PSI shown to me here on criticker.

The weights for each of these parameters in my final score is now as follows:
  1. IMDB: 29.0 %
  2. Criticker PSI: 22.8 %
  3. Length: 13.4 % (apparently longer movies have a better chance at pleasing me... maybe because they have more depth?)
  4. Popcorn: 12.1 % (I calculate a popcorn rating based on the ratio between box office income and IMDB rating. If a movie has a high box office income, but a low IMDB, I claim that it has a higher 'popcorn' rating, i.e. it's less alternative and is able to reach the wide audience. For example, Spider-Man has a high popcorn rating, Donnie Darko has a low popcorn rating)
  5. Age: 10.6 % (Don't ask me why, but I tend to like more recent movies better than older ones. This might be a psychological effect whereby I 'forget' how good an old movie actually was...?)
  6. Genre: 7.8 % (I like history, sport, war better than family, comedy, horror)
  7. Awards: 4.3 % (the more awards a movie has won, the better)

ha ha, I was doing exactly the same thing ... :lol:

well, my Excel spreadsheet collected more parameters than yours, but I never had the time to actually implement the "prediction" part (which was my end-goal though). I only calculated the overall average of each parameter, which was quite interesting, too.

Anyway, kudos for actually getting this to work.
With my discovery of criticker, I had actually been planning to abandon my Excel-prediction-project because I thought that Criticker would be able to better predict my movie taste anyway.

In your experience, was Criticker not a better predictor than your own Excel model ?


just a minor tidbit:
I like your popcorn paramter, but I think it is not really properly conceived. I mean, what if a film like Avengers:Infinity War has both a high box office income and a high IMDB rating? This would result in a mediocre popcorn rating according to your calc, although it's the ultimate in popcorn flix.
If you start thinking about it, the IMDb rating doesn't really have anything to do whether "it's less alternative and is able to reach the wide audience" ... whether or not a wide audience is reached is reflected in the box office income and the number of viewers worldwide, and NOT by the IMDb rating.

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