Monday Morning Quarter-Baking: Filmdora
By J. Goodman
I have a dream. That films will one day be as easy to search and discover as music. It's a simple man's dream. Like peace on earth, cold fusion and the ability to grow gills when Waterworld occurs.
If my dream came true, here's what it would look like:
FILMDORA
Have you ever heard of Pandora, the online music service that allows you to discover and listen to songs that share similar music characteristics? It's a great way to find 'new' music that's similar to music you already like. It's a pretty good service.
Where's Pandora for films? Sure, you can stream films on Netflix or Amazon and those services will make suggestions based on the movies you like and watch, i.e., if you liked this, check this out. But what are those recommendations based on? What's the formula? Now, I don't know. I'm no elite hacker who can break into their system and tease out the algorithm. So I'm just going to raise an unsupported assumption and parade it around as fact.
What those services do is they take a movie that you like and recommend movies that other people like who also like the movie that you like. Less confusingly, if I like Shawshank Redemption, they might tell me that I'll enjoy The Usual Suspects because a lot of people who like Shawshank also like The Usual Suspects. Well, both of those are great movies - where's the real depth in analysis?
For every song, Pandora applies its categorization. It's called the music genome project. Pandora employees find the DNA of every song based on dozens of variables and the program uses those results to match songs to one another. If I listen to a music channel of Nirvana, I'm going to listen to other bands that are musically similar like Pearl Jam and Soundgarden and after a while I might come across some unknown band that released a song last year that's stylistically comparable to what Nirvana was doing in the 90s.
FILMDORA will do just that, too. We'll have the movie genome project and break down every film along a spectrum. If you like Shawshank then we will recommend other prison/escape films like Escape from Alcatraz and The Green Mile and (maybe even) Face/Off, but we'll also recommend introspective dramas about hope and determination like Castaway and Contact. Any many more.
And maybe Netflix and Amazon do this to some extent, but they don't have the following feature that will make FILMDORA unbeatable: we do the same thing with movie quotes.
Consider this, a movie quote database that is inextricably linked. If you type in a quote like the Joker's 'Wait til they get a load of me' from Tim Burton's Batman, FILMDORA will spit out similar quotes from other movies like:
I'm the party pooper. (Kindergarten Cop)
This is SPARTA! (300)
We will be cruel to the Germans, and through our cruelty they will know who we are. And they will find the evidence of our cruelty in the disemboweled, dismembered, and disfigured bodies of their brothers we leave behind us. And the German won't not be able to help themselves but to imagine the cruelty their brothers endured at our hands, and our boot heels, and the edge of our knives. And the German will be sickened by us, and the German will talk about us, and the German will fear us. And when the German closes their eyes at night and they're tortured by their subconscious for the evil they have done, it will be with thoughts of us they are tortured with. Sound good? (Inglourious Basterds)
FILMDORA probably just blew your mind. Suck it, IMDB.