Hi, I'm J Maher. Match Cut is a hobby project, built nights and weekends.
The story
I kept losing track of what I had seen. Not the films that mattered, because those you remember, but the vast middle: the ones half-watched on a plane, or seen so long ago that the title rings a bell and nothing else does. Every few months I would start a list, get forty films in, and abandon it, because typing titles into a search box is a chore and a chore is not a hobby.
The insight, if it deserves the word, is that answering is much easier than recalling. Show me a poster and ask "seen it?" and I can answer in half a second. Ask me to list what I have seen and I will manage a dozen and stall. So Match Cut never asks you to remember. It shows you posters, a hundred at a time on the Grid or one at a time on the Deck, and asks.
Once a few hundred films are sorted, something more interesting falls out. The app knows which directors, writers, editors and composers keep turning up in what you watch. Not what you claim to like: what you actually sat through. That is what the Deck leans on when it deals you films, rather than on anything you had to tell it.
Why "Match Cut"
A match cut is an edit that carries a shape or a movement from one shot straight into the next, so two unrelated scenes rhyme. It seemed a fair name for an app whose whole job is noticing what one film has in common with another.
What it isn't
It isn't a social network. There are no followers, no public reviews and no feed. Your library is yours, it stays on your device, and nobody else can see it.
It also isn't a streaming guide, though it will tell you where a film is playing. It is a diary that happens to be good at helping you choose the next entry.
Film data
Every title, poster, cast list and release date comes from TMDB, a community-maintained film database. Streaming availability is supplied to TMDB by JustWatch, the hour an episode airs comes from TVmaze, and the critics' scores on a title's page are the ones recorded on Wikidata. The Box Office collections come from Box Office Mojo's yearly charts. If a film's details look wrong, they can be corrected at TMDB and the app will pick the change up.
Get in touch
Bugs, feature ideas, or just a hello: feedback@matchcutdiary.app.