My wife and I watched The Aviator over the weekend and I was very disappointed. The movie was nominated for 11 Academy Awards and won 5 so we expected it to be great. Instead, we were bored out of our minds. The movie seemed like a half-hearted attempt at a documentary. After a quick read of the Wikipedia entry for Howard Hughes I had more valid information than the entire movie provided.
This has happened one too many times. We hear about a movie that is given rave reviews by all sorts of movie critics and we get it and are bored to tears. Other examples of this include King Kong and Walk the Line.
I told my wife I’d love to find a place to get movie reviews from people who have similar tastes, because using the Academy Award nominations are obviously not doing the trick. I’ve posted previously about Yahoo Movies recommendations, but they haven’t been all that impressive.
I ran across another site that’s capitalizing on the social network bonanza with a site called MovieTally. In their own words, Movietally is simply a collection of movies. The movies are your movies. They’re the world’s movies. Catalogue, share, and discover the movies you like!
I’m encouraged by the fact that Groundhog Day is on their front page. This may become my new source for movie recommendations.
Update: If you do sign up for it, change your profile to public if you wouldn’t mind. The default setting is private, and when you look for users who have the same movie tastes as you, all of the users listed are private. The site really shouldn’t show you private users because it’s pointless. At the very least it could tell you that you won’t be able to view their profile without making you click on the user link.
Another deficiency is that the site has no information about the movie besides the user-entered name and tags, which makes it confusing when two movies have the same name (like Ocean’s 11). It would be nice to have things like rating, year, actors, maybe a picture and a brief synopsis of the movie. All of that is probably available through Amazon’s web services API. I’m not sure if the web services expose the information at IMDB too, but that would be incredibly useful.
My review source is imdb.com. It’s ranking comes from hundreds to thousands of users and tends to be more accurate IMO than your Academy judges. Now on The Aviator you still might be out of luck:
http://imdb.com/title/tt0338751/
It looks like 34,000 people had a good opinion of the movie. Now that doesn’t help you if you know your opinions are peculiar, but I find it more or less close to what I think.
Have you seen the Aviator? I thought I might just be crazy thinking that it stank, but the messages boards at IMDB indicate that I’m not alone. Recent posts include titles like, “i fell asleep!!!!!!”, “Proves once and for all that Di Caprio can’t carry a movie.”, “the only film iv ever walked out on!”, and “Cate Blanchett was AWFUL in this.”
I should have looked at that before wasting nearly 3 hours (we finally turned it off when we realized how long it was).
Hmm. I didn’t read the reviews much, but I did see the movie back when it came out. It’s been too long to remember well, but IIRC, I didn’t think it was a sleeper. I thought the guy was weird, and I think I thought it lasted too long, but it wasn’t on my list of awful or “don’t see” shows. Maybe I was asleep ;)