I would urge you to find that info on Wikipedia now.
Wikipedia does have much of the factual info (cast, etc.) but that’s mostly copied from IMDB and in any case, they don’t have the discussion that went on in the IMDB message boards.
Why? To punish IMDB?
Right (and ultimately, their parent company Amazon).
Certainly they don’t. As I’ve said earlier in this thread and elsewhere, the loss of those message boards is a cultural and intellectual disaster for cinephiles.
Sorry, I practically support amazon singlehandedly. Also, the IMDB is the most comprehensive site for the kind of information I want. I just miss the boards, that’s all.
That’s too bad.
I’m not boycotting Amazon because it’s trivial for me to give up either, just FYI–far from it–but that’s all the more reason it will have more impact. I have been a Prime member for years and still will be until the end of the year. We have “Alexa”; my eldest daughter has gone through multiple iterations of the Kindle Fire; nearly all the presents we buy for Xmas or birthdays come from Amazon, and our various Amazon wishlists have been the go-to link to send anyone who asks what we or our kids want as gifts. We have several Subscribe and Save subscriptions, and we get most of our basic household goods from them. I am a big fan of several Amazon Prime original TV shows; and in the past whenever I wanted to buy a season of a show I can’t stand to wait for on other streaming services (like Breaking Bad, Fargo, Better Call Saul, or The Americans), I have purchased it through Amazon rather than iTunes. But that is all ending now, and I told them exactly why. I’m hoping to recruit others to join me, but I’m obviously not going to convince everyone. So it goes.
Wikipedia is decidedly lacking.
Recently I saw a name like “Rebecca Mazer” or something and that reminded me of Rebecca Mozo, who was in the charming and fun Zerophilia. But she never seemed to get any work after that, so I forgot about her. Seeing the name led me to wonder if she was still working at all.
IMDb shows me that she was the star of a recent series that looks pretty interesting: Kittens in a Cage. It appears to be a total ripoff of Orange is the New Black, which I like, and it also features Michelle Monaghan in an episode. Looks good, at least to me.
Wikipedia doesn’t even have a page for Rebecca Mozo, or a page for that show. Nor does it list that show on Michelle Monaghan’s page.
I don’t go to IMDb for broad strokes and big budget pictures. I go to IMDb to see complete cast information and a list of all projects an actor has appeared in.
At least 95% of the stuff in the boards was mindless drivel, and not a small amount was absolutely disgusting. There was the rare good insight, but it wasn’t worth wading through all the crap for. Small loss.
If you have any kind of public forum, your choices are 1. Keep a tight rein and always take out the trash pronto, or 2. get overrun with trolls and flamers and spammers and other wastes of oxygen. It’s taken an embarrassingly long time for the Internet to wise up to this fact, but it has (largely) wised up, and you’re only going to see more places decide that they don’t give a rip what the bleating rabble thinks.
As long as the amazing breadth of information remains, as far as I’m concerned IMDB is still worth it.
I don’t know what boards you were frequenting, but that is absolutely not true about the actor/actress and title boards. I can’t speak for the special interest boards, because there were only *two of them that I ever read. I’d venture at least 80% of the discussions were on the level about the subject at hand, and many times offered really good insight.
*If anyone is interested, they were “I Need to Know” and “Contributors Help.”
I think the extent to which it was true about the title boards varied widely depending on the title. It was not true about most of the title boards that I posted on, but along with independent and foreign films, I do also like sci-fi and some superhero stuff. On those boards, there were definitely a lot of trolls; and for the big budget blockbuster movies there was a ton of traffic. So if you just measured based on the proportion of all posts that were trolling, you’d get a high number. But if you instead treat each title as having equal weight, and sample a random title, the number will be much lower.
And as I have said many times, there will always be plenty of places to comment on big tentpole movies. It is a much greater loss for all the small films that now have no obvious central gathering place for film buffs to talk about. Moviechat.org has a leg up due to archiving a bunch of the old boards, but they lost important formatting, including the delineation between quoted material and responses, and threading (people made fun of the IMDb boards for being ancient and not updated, but the threading was actually very helpful–we could use that here, come to think of it). They do not appear to have email notifications, so important for lesser-known films that people see in dribs and drabs over the years. Not to mention that they just aren’t well known enough to have the critical mass required for smaller films to get a robust discussion going.
The Moviechat.org forums have very little discussion aside from the posts that were copied from IMDB. But I’m seeing more chat here; the IMDB v2.0 discussions on freeforums.net.
I guess it depends on what you are looking for. My primary interest in the IMDb boards was to go to the boards for individual movie titles, mostly for independent films and often obscure ones at that. There I might ask “why did so-and-so say such-and-such in this scene?” Then I had to wait, and sometimes it might be months or even years before someone would answer and I would get an email notification, but it was like planting seeds that later bore fruit. Or, often, I would find that someone else had already posed the question. I don’t see any sign of individual title boards at your link, and the entire section for independent film has three posts total.
I can identify with that.
I think the person who said ‘95% dreck, 5% worthwhile’ had it absolutely backwards. As long as one approached the boards for the big tentpole super-hero movies with caution, there wasn’t really much impact from trolls.
I assume that moviechat.org will get shut down sooner or later for the copyright infringement, so I’m not willing to get involved in that message board.
The owner claims to be an IP attorney. Plus, this is content that users generated without being paid and which Amazon is not using for any purpose. Even if they could technically prevail in a lawsuit, what would be the point of Bigfooting them? Just to prove they are huge corporate dickheads? That goes against the techie culture and could actually hurt them in recruiting and things like that without having any upside that I can see.
Just this last week I watched The Big Blue (1988), In the Mood for Love (2000) and Alien vs Predator (2004). I could look up critic reviews, or even audience reviews, but I also liked looking up random threads on Imdb. For good films, like the first two I mentioned, people would ask questions that I never even thought to ask myself. It was a good place to learn other perspectives on a film. My own interpretations were often completely at odds with the general consensus, leading to a deeper appreciation. For truly shitty movies, like AvP, I would love to read some snarky trolly threads.
A problem with having only reviews to look at is that reviews carefully refrain from discussing the plot–and a discussion of the plot is, sometimes, exactly what one wants after having seen a film.
Yup. Reviews discuss more plot than I want to know before seeing a movie, and less than I crave afterward. Plus there’s none of the back-and-forth I like. And I enjoy picking over minutiae, like last night I wondered why Legion has two sets of credits. Since Previously TV is still a thing, I could ask there. But IMDb used to fill that role for movies.