In which she seeks a movie review site

[zeborah]

Every now and then I have the urge to write up a short review of a movie the same way I write up short reviews of books on Goodreads. Problem is, I've never been able to find a satisfactory Goodreads-for-movies. Last time I searched, I ended up starting research on how I'd go about building my own.

(The answer is, with great difficulty. I don't have the knowledge or the skills and I particularly don't have the willpower necessary to put in the time to gain the knowledge and the skills.)

I did another hunt today and ended up creating accounts to further investigate:

• DVDCrate - makes a bad first impression with a random error prominently displayed on the main page; I suspect something wrong with a database query. Still, I'm easy, so looked further, but when I create reviews there's no page which lists my reviews. This is kind of a basic feature.
• DVD Aficionado - pretty but clunky. DVDs can only be in one collection at a time (eg it can be 'owned' or 'watched', but not both!). Again you can review items but there's no apparent listing of one's reviews.
• FilmCrave - looked decent considering the advertising and let me have my preferred password with non 0-9a-zA-Z characters. Allowed multiple custom lists to be created and lists all my reviews in one place; on the downside, I couldn't find an RSS feed for that list, the user interface is... frankly bizarre, I was automatically friended by the founder, which fine, but this made his face appear on the friends area of my profile without recourse; plus did I mention the advertising.
• Criticker - lets you create 'private lists' which can be used as tags, lists all reviews in one place and has an rss feed for them (though the item titles are ugly as heck). Downsides: terrible ads and reviews can only be up to 500 characters long.
• Oh, and iheartmovies.com which looks like it'd be exactly what I want if the website was actually up and running.

In the end I went with Criticker. But that 500-character limit is really going to bug me. It's almost tempting to just create a Dreamwidth account just for movie reviews. It's almost tempting to go back to researching how to build my own Goodreads-for-movies.

Mental reminder: I do not have the skills. I do not have the willpower to sustain my interest long enough to gain the skills. Most importantly of all, I do not have the data.

--Oh dear. I just googled "open movie data" and discovered TMDb, "a free and open movie database" with an open API. (None of the services currently using it do what I want.)

Mental reminder: I do not have the skills. I do not have the willpower to sustain my interest long enough to gain the skills....

Comments

sorry to butt in...

[(Anonymous)]

...but i couldn't help overhearing your complaint :) i had the same thoughts you've got about a year ago. i went searching for my very own "goodreads for movies" and found nothing satisfactory. long story short, here we are a year later and i've got a site up in private beta. you can read more about it at http://seenth.at/blog, and even sign up to get access once we roll out more invites.

i hope i'm being more helpful than annoying here...

jp

Re: sorry to butt in...

[zeborah]

Looks like it could be promising - have signed up and will judge more when I see more. :-)