MovieChat Forums > emvan
emvan (12)
Posts
Petition to Restore the Boards
Future of This Board
How to Treat Amazon (IMDB's Owner)
View all posts >
Replies
Oh, that was 114 movies in a theater the last year (Oscars to Oscars). Previous two years were 111 and 102.
I have a 60" Samsung plasma (last year that they made them) and an $8000 surround-sound system, and I could never watch all my movies at home.
I pay $225 a year for a membership to my local arthouse cinema, The Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, Mass. With that, movies are free Monday to Thursday. They have a huge main screen and three more smaller ones. And obviously, crowds devoid of jerks.
This year I saw Mustang, The Lobster, Embrace of the Serpent, Captain Fantastic, Florence Foster Jenkins, Hell or High Water, Moonlight (x2), Loving, Nocturnal Animals, Manchester by the Sea (x2), Jackie, La La Land (x2), Lion, I Am Not Your Negro, Oscar Shorts (4 programs), and The Salesman, among Oscar nominees, plus The Witch, Rams, Hello My Name is Doris, Eye in the Sky, Green Room, The Clan, Midnight Special (x2), The Dying of the Light, Sing Street, Miles Ahead, Colliding Dreams, A Bigger Splash, The Meddler, The Man Who Knew Infinity, Maggie's Plan, Wiener, Love and Friendship, Unlocking the Cage, Swiss Army Man, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Café Society, Indignation, Don't Think Twice, The Light Between Oceans, Southside With You, Morris From America, Cameraperson, The Beatles: Eight Days a Week--The Touring Years, Snowden, Birth of a Nation, American Honey, Denial, American Pastoral, Queen of Katwe, Certain Women, Coming Through the Rye, Michael Moore in Trumpland, Aquarius, The Handmaiden, 20th Century Women, and the re-releases of Chimes at Midnight and Multiple Maniacs.
But wait, there's more. They do repertory, mostly in 35mm, on the big screen. So I also saw Trainspotting, Killer of Sheep, Strangers on a Train, West Side Story, The Great Dictator, Dont Look Back, The Philadelphia Story, Buena Vista Social Club, Pulp Fiction, 8 1/2, Alien, A Face in the Crowd, Chinatown, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Goodfellas, Planet of the Apes, Ball of Fire, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and A Fish Called Wanda. Some of these were preceded by "Science on Screen" talks. Most of these fill their 400-seat theater, and nothing beats seeing a movie in a crowd like that.
It works out to $2.50 a movie.
I'll also see eye-candy movies, in real IMAX whenever possible. This year that was Deadpool, 10 Cloverfield Lane, The Jungle Book, Captain America: Civil War, Star Trek Beyond, Kubo and the Two Strings, Voyage of Time: The IMAX Experience, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (that was friends' idea!), Sully, Dr. Strange (x2), Arrival (x2), Hacksaw Ridge, Moana, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, A Monster Calls, and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. I saw Hidden Figures, Fences and Silence, the only three major Oscar movies that didn't come to the Coolidge, and Patriots Day because the terrorist shootouts happened within earshot of my home. With just a few exceptions, I'm really glad I saw all those on the big screen.
Oh yeah, also The Edge of Seventeen, Elle, and Things to Come because they had best-of-year buzz.
I agree that giving moderators wide discretion is problematical. There needs to be a set of rules that go further than "no death threats."
What we want to do is eliminate trolling (by banning the trolls), and that's fairly easy to define.
If most of a person's posts are subjective attacks on movies, they are a troll. A bad troll simply goes into every popular movie and starts a thread saying "This sucks." A better troll might specify "it's badly paced, the plot makes no sense, Robert Downey is terrible, the CGI looks like it was created by fourth-graders on a cell phone ...." This is still obvious trolling. If a plot makes no sense, and that genuinely bothers you, you *know why.* You don't just assert that, you say something like "The Dwarves learn they need to get to The Lonely Mountain by Durin's Day, but instead of leaving immediately, they hang around!" If a movie is badly paced, you talk about how scene X following scene Y was a bad idea. I have read and responded to lots of substantive negative posts. It always makes for good discussion.
Uncritical praise can be an invitation for others to elaborate on what made a movie good. (I've responded to many "This was great!" posts with a set of reasons why I agreed, and often gotten thanks.) But uncritical condemnation -- if you cannot articulate why you didn't like a movie, that serves no purpose on a message board. I think people should be gently discouraged from the all-too-common "Everyone else loves this, but I was bored and hated it" posts (or, rather, encouraged to tell us *why* they think they were bored), but I think you'll find that most authors of those posts can be found enthusing about most other movies. Someone who *only* says things like that is trolling.
What else? No off-topic vitriolic rants.
These thoughts are based on serious number crunching (data analysis) of many hundreds of films that I had seen and rated myself.
First, you want use the Rotten Tomatoes Average rating, not the Tomato Meter. It has the advantage of being on a 10-point scale, just like the IMDB rating. And it's even better than the Metacritic score
Neither number is better. It's great when they agree, but there are films that are great that the other side misses. I would watch any movie that sounds interesting that has either a good score from one or the other.
This year DEADPOOL had a much higher rating at IMDB than with critics. Years ago, THE PRESTIGE, ditto. THE FALL was actually rotten at RT while it was rocking an 8.0+ at IMDB (it's still 7.9). The film geeks were correct on these.
OTOH, films that are in any way difficult can have undeservedly low IMDB scores. If critics love a film and describe it as artful, thoughtful, or whatever, and that's your cup of tea, you can ignore the IMDB rating. I think UPSTREAM COLOR is one of the two best films of ordinary length I've ever seen, but it has a 6.8 at IMDB because it's really hard to make sense of.
A TechCrunch piece written by a "clueless far left hack" ... I certainly think the author was clueless, and they may well be far left, but cluelessness come in all political stripes, and it's an objective fact that there's astonishingly more cluelessness on the right than the left (based on asking liberals and conservatives *factual questions*). Way more hacks on the right, too, if you define a "hack" as someone who writes untruthfully for hire.
Now, there's no question that the blockbuster movie message boards became a cesspool of trolling and hate, thanks to IMDB's disinterest in monitoring them. By which I mean that there were typically about 4 such threads on a front page of 20, which is 4 too many, and they were very often the most active. You might see a bunch of threads with 6 or 9 answers, and then there'd be at least one hateful trolling one with 42.
Some idiot simply measured the amount and nature of the activity on the most boards, and correctly concluded that it was largely meaningless trolling and troll-rebuttal. OK, so because the boards are 55% crap, we'll eliminate them! With no sense of the value provided by the other 45%, and no sense of who used the good 45%.
I had 700+ posts that were still in existence. I would guess that several thousand had been deleted over the years.
I'll continue to use IMDB as I always did, except for checking showtimes. So should everyone else. No reason to spite yourself.
What you should do is:
A) Make sure you have an ad blocker when you go to the site.
B) Boycott Amazon.com unless it's an inconvenience.
I literally have 102 saved items in my cart (all books and movies). I plan to buy them elsewhere, whenever possible. I plan to let them know.
IMDB is not the problem. Not using and contributing to IMDB is self-defeating. I'll continue to send data updates for the benfit of *other movie fans.*
What you do is never buy another thing from Amazon unless you have no practical alternative.
Jim, you're a hero.
I wish I'd know about the site before tonight*, so I urge everyone to continually talk it up on IMDB's Facebook page. When I went there to complain that the boards had been shut down early (at midnight Greenwich mean time? Seriously? That was the plan and you didn't mention it?), I saw a mention of this site.
*I would have just archived my lists of posts and gone to the Boston Film Critics Society Awards presentation with some friends! Instead I stayed home, cutting and pasting.
Those sociopathic assholes shut the boards down at SEVEN-TWENTY PM EST THE DAY BEFORE THEY WERE SCHEDULED TO BE SHUT DOWN.
I had about 230 posts left to archive.
Thank god for this site ... but I have no list of those 230 posts! I do have a list of every movie I've seen, so I'll have to search for myself in each of them ...
View all replies >