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

[julesjones]

The LibraryThing crowd every so often mutter about wanting a DVDThing. Someone eventually went off and created one, which I believe is still running, but I'm a bit too sore to go delving into the comments threads looking for its name and address at the moment.

[zeborah]

<hunts> Is it Take11? It looks nice. Of course I'm always a cheapskate about such freemium models - it's probably why I went with Goodreads rather than LibraryThing in the end - but am attempting to mend my ways.

The bigger problem for me is it's focused on the cataloguing and statistics side of thing, seeming to go out of its way to bury any actual reviews. No obvious way of listing all the reviews a given user has done, let alone get an RSS feed of them.

[julesjones]

That sounds familiar. I'm surprised the reviews are difficult to find, as it was explicitly modelled on LT, which *does* have RSS feeds of any given account's reviews, like so: http://www.librarything.com/rss/reviews/JulesJones

Might be worth asking about it, although if they're an annual subscription, rather than a one-time payment like LT, it may be less tempting to shell out for an account. (I played with LT's free account for half an hour before getting out my credit card -- I thought that even if the site went away within the year, the lifetime membership for $25 was still better value than any library cataloguing software I'd seen, particularly as it very deliberately allowed users to export their data as a CSV file for use elsewhere.)

[laughingrat]

God, I've been wishing for a Goodreads-for-movies for years.

[green_knight]

I don't think Wordpress would be too difficult to bend into shape with custom post types.

Where 'not too difficult' still means a lot of work.

[zeborah]

Yeah. Just, ultimately, I don't really want a blog-thing. I want a movie-review-site-thing. I don't know *why* this is what I want, since I rarely-to-never use the community features of such sites. Maybe just the ease of typing in the title and getting the full movie details? In which case there's a Wordpress plugin using the TMDb API which I could try playing with.

Needs more pondering of motives, perhaps.

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. :-)

Goodreads for Movies

[(Anonymous)]

Not sure if you're still looking for one but, in case you are, we are building one at Rinema.com

Check us out at www.rinema.com/features to see if we fit the bill