Posted on Monday, May 28th, 2012 by Ariel Disner
Your favorite film might not have won best picture, but does that mean that you wouldn’t happily watch it over and over again? In fact, I wonder how many award winners you would happily watch over again? Your enjoyment of a film is different to its critical reception and that’s why Goodfilms has created a site which allows you to rate, review and share films based on your friends reception.
By using the Goodfilms graph you can choose a movie based on you and your friend’s taste, and while doing so find new films to watch. Simply click on the graph and it will find a movie that is both re-watchable as well as high quality. The higher you go on the graph the better!
Co-founders Glen Maddern and John Barton have built the site based on two fundamental ideas. First, films are social. The best way to find movies is through the people you know. Goodfilms puts your friends opinions front and center, instead of a random grab bag of internet voters or highly specialized critics.
Second, existing rating systems are broken. According to a YouTube study, which blogged the effectiveness of a five star rating, films cannot be rated effectively with a single one to five star rating. “The number of 5-star ratings greatly outnumbered all others, with 1-star a distant second. They decided to switch to a thumbs-up/thumbs-down system, which by all reports is working better.” According to Goodfilms, an aggregate score just isn’t enough.
Goodfilms takes into account two crucial factors in rating a film. The first is the “critical quality”, or how “good” a film is. This is a lot like what you’d expect to a normal film critic’s rating to cover. The second is the “rewatchability” of a film, or how much you’d enjoy sitting down to watch it again in the future. This is what makes Goodfilms different from any other online rating system, and my personal favorite. The quality is measured using a star rating, while the rewatchability uses smiley faces. Moreover, movies are then graphed based on the previous two factors. According to Goodfilms, “Movies to the upper right are the “Good, Good” films, the upper left the “Enjoyably Bad”, the lower right the “Difficult, Great” movies, and the lower left is what we call the “Zone of Crap”.
At the moment, you can’t see a site-wide average for a film on Goodfilms, which is a deliberate decision made by the co-founders. If you want an average rating, there are better sources such as Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB. Goodfilms not about needing an automatic recommendation, nor a single aggregate score for a film. It’s about allowing you to express your personal opinion of a film, in terms of something objective (quality), and something deeply subjective (rewatchability) with your friends.
And it’s easy to sign up. Like all other social media outlets, just simply sign up with Facebook or Twitter and you can start instantly watching movies based on ratings from people that matter. But keep in mind, its not totally free. In order to watch the movie, you need to have a Netflix account or be willing to pay the Itunes fee to rent the movie.
Goodfilms is a better way to rate your favorite films because your friends understand the difference between films you love and films you just thought were ok. So sign up if you haven’t already, and get rating!
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