Why a "Movie Vs Movie" website?
There are 2 aspects to this idea:
- First the fun aspect. Simply put, comparing movies is how a lot of people discuss movies. Some people do it just for fun, or as part of a serious discussion, or even as a way to discover new movies based on ones they've already seen:
So at the outset, FlickBoxing is a community space where you can vote on, comment/debate on, even create your very own movie comparisons (or FlickBouts as we call them), and see what the rest of the movie-going world thinks. Maybe - and so we hope - FlickBoxing will eventually let the community of movie lovers discuss and discover movies via this experience.
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There is also a more serious or 'scientific' aspect. Many online rating systems for movies rely on a scale-based system (user rates each movie on a scale of 1-5 or 1-10). These ratings systems show great variations because raters vary in their leniency.
You may rate an excellent movie 8/10 and an average movie 6/10, but a more lenient person would rate excellent movies 10/10 and average movies 8/10.
Hence if you go to a movie's rating and see an 8/10, you might think its excellent - since that's how you rate movies - but it may not be so if only lenient people have voted for it.
It is better in such subjective situations, to use FlickBouts. If we get enough FlickBout votes from users, we can then present the data in that manner (75% of voters felt that 'Shawshank Redemption is better than The Godfather; this result is then independent of the 'leniency' factor).
In fact there is a way - given sufficient data - to actually present an ordered list of movies (or rankings) based on FlickBouts. This ranking will likely provide a different ranking than pure scale-based rankings. (Aside: The ranking system will be executed in a future phase of this community's development and is not available immediately)
When users search for a movie on FlickBoxing, they will find all FlickBouts ever created with that movie and how that movie fared vs. other movies. This could allow a user to determine (say) that since Movie B (which he has not seen) is rated better than Movie A (he has seen, liked and now searched for on FlickBoxing), it would be a good idea to see Movie B. So it becomes a sort of recommendation system or a method of discovering good movies based on movies you already like.
So when users create and vote on FlickBouts, they are finding ways of adding to this knowledge database by telling people how they felt about a movie vis-à-vis another popular movie. In a sense this is a human intelligence based recommendation system in an age where websites use automated systems and correlations to generate recommendations! (Aside: The creators of this website have absolutely nothing against the automated systems)
And naturally, the more voters there are for the FlickBouts, the more solid the final analysis.
So please join the FlickBoxer community by registering, voting on FlickBouts, creating FlickBouts, and promoting your FlickBouts to get people to vote on them (each FlickBout can be shared via Facebook, Myspace, Digg and Del.icio.us) - all in the aim of making Project FlickBoxing a bigger, better community!
But first, please have fun! Happy FlickBoxing!
Tribute
This website was born of a love of the movie art form, and is an unofficial tribute to all the great directors, actors, writers, technicians, producers and assorted journalists, critics, and bloggers who have contributed in their own way to the movie-going experience, and hence have contributed indirectly to Flickboxing.
Flickboxing wants to make a special mention of the website IMDb.com, and in particular those good souls who founded and nurtured it in the early days of the Internet. Flickboxing.com owes one to IMDb.com, as the idea was born one night while reading a particularly heated debate between two commentators on one of IMDb.com's inner pages. (Yes, the debate was a "which is the better movie" debate!)
A special mention of the following, who have played crucial roles in the creators' initiation into the magical world of movies:
- Videowala - the 'old man with the small VHS rental shop and a big heart'; who gave us kids free movies if we got good grades
- Video Cinerama (a.k.a. VC) - the joint that (illegally) exhibited hard-to-access movies, right next to a police station, in a small town very very far from Hollywood (Aside: The creators of this website strongly feel that piracy is wrong, but if a movie is not distributed to all the corners of the earth, what do the people who live in those corners do?)
Both are no more. Long live the Movies.
About Us
Flickboxing or its creators have no fiduciary connections with any of the websites, people, or corporations mentioned above. Flickboxing is indie in the truest sense of the word.
The creators' only qualification in respect to this site is a love of the movies and love of analysis - both understood better by reading the first two sections on this page.
Contact Us
Please send in any negative or positive feedback on this project to the below address:
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