Do you ever struggle to choose a movie to watch? Spending what seems like eternity scrolling through Netflix, Amazon, NowTV (delete as appropriate)? Or are there simply too many movies out there and you let a gem slip by unnoticed?
Well fear not, those days are over. The wonderful people at FilmFish (an excellent site) have watched and curated over 15,000 movies to make choosing what to watch fun. We spoke to one of the site’s creators Phillip Sull.
What was the inspiration behind Film Fish?
Annoyance, as I suspect is the motivation behind a lot of start-ups. My business partner and I were consistently spending half an hour trying to find a decent movie, and often found ourselves cracking up at how bad the stuff movie algorithms suggested was.
We thought, we can’t be the only people facing this problem. There’s an opportunity here.
15,000 movies is a lot! How long did it take you to curate such a huge amount?
Around 8 months of solid work. But of course, we’re constantly adding to the database. A curator’s work is never done!
What do you get from human curation that you don’t from a computer program?
We recently typed ‘Finding Nemo’ into a movie recommendation algorithm, to see what similar films it would give us. The top result was an adaptation of Earnest Hemingway’s ‘The Old Man and the Sea’.
To a computer this makes sense: both films are set at sea, centre on an epic quest, and have fish as protagonists. But any human being can tell the two are fundamentally different.
Think of a puzzle. A robot can catalogue the individual pieces; but it takes a human being to understand the picture those pieces collectively form. FilmFish deals in big pictures, not small parts.
So for Finding Nemo we might recommend the list ‘CGI Adults Love’, featuring ‘Wall-E’ or ‘Up’ (films that I, as a 23 year old man, am ashamed to admit I like more than 99% of movies aimed at my demographic).
Humanly curated categories capture the way people actually think about and discuss movies. The ideal is to recommend you a movie the way a friend would. That’s something robots can’t do.
You clearly love movies, what kinds of movies do you prefer to watch?
I’m a big fan of social-realism, and nobody does it like the Brits. I saw ‘Fish Tank’ and ‘My Brother the Devil’ recently: both stories about teenagers coming of age in the grittier bits of London.
Then I tried to watch ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’. It felt so fake in comparison (although maybe it’s an accurate depiction of everyday life in Australia – I’ve never been).
What’s the most obscure sub-genre you have?
Well I don’t know if it’s the most obscure, but ‘Nicholas Rage Movies’ is one of my personal favourites. It’s a collection of all the movies featuring Nicholas Cage in a state of fury. Cage is fantastic as a psycho, like in ‘Bad Lieutenant’ or ‘Wild at Heart’, but I’m not trying to watch him do Indiana-lite in ‘National Treasure’. So I separated the wheat from the chaff.
Of course then you also have stuff like ‘Yugoslav Black Wave’ and ‘Cinéma du look’, but to be honest I left all that to other, smarter curators.
‘Samuel L. Action’ and ‘Damme Good Movies’ – those are my crowning achievements!
Do you think you’ll ever come across a movie that’s difficult to categorise?
Some movies are more difficult than others, but none exist in a vacuum. Directors are constantly taking thematic and visual inspiration from each other, so it’s always possible to discern some meaningful connections between a film and its contemporaries.
The closest thing to ‘unclassifiable’ you’ll find is a movie that pioneers its own aesthetic.
Tarantino and Anderson are like Kafka. How do you define ‘The Metamorphosis’? It’s Kafkaesque. In the same way people understand what you’re talking about when you call an action movie ‘Tarantino-esque’ or a comedy ‘Anderson-esque’. Those classifications are a little circular, but still concrete and meaningful.
What’s next for Film Fish?
World domination! We are looking to close an angel investment round, which will allow us to get the product to as close to perfect as we can muster.
And finally, if you could be any film character, who would it be?
Well, the obvious answer is Thor. Who wouldn’t want to a 6’ 3” Norse god in a flexible relationship with Natalie Portman?
But I’m going to shake things up and say Jar-Jar: widely considered the most annoying on-screen character of all time. I’m picturing myself at a friend’s wedding, tripping over the chairs and licking everybody’s cake.
‘Exqueeze me!’ It would be a hilarious, lonely existence.
Visit FilmFish now or on Twitter and Facebook
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