The One with the Thoughts of Frans

I started logging the movies I watched in Letterboxd after IMDb broke the final straw. IMDb, the only website I’ve regularly visited for twenty years, had been getting more annoying for years anyway. Letterboxd sent me a clever little overview e-mail in commemoration.

I have no idea why it opted for those three specifically when I gave Wonder Woman and Léon the same rating, plus I explicitly marked the Disney movie as a rewatch. Basic Instinct never appealed to me for whatever reason, but last year I found out that it was directed by Paul Verhoeven, one of my favorite directors. He didn’t disappoint.

Ah, it’s always nice to be greeted by a message of decay on a sunny Sunday morning.

Because IMDb’s message boards continue to be utilized by a small but passionate community of IMDb users, we announced our decision to disable our message boards on February 3, 2017 but will leave them open for two additional weeks so that users will have ample time to archive any message board content they’d like to keep for personal use.

Source.

Because of my annoyance with that cavalier turn of phrase about “ample time,” I’ll share an entry from my private Zim notebook.

Monday 16 Jan 2017

Noticed Inventum on F-Droid, a simple TMDb (The Movie Database) client. This in turn led me to omdb (Open Media Database).

Something to keep in mind if IMDb ever goes bad.

Another potentially interesting website is Letterboxd.

It’s a pity that omdb isn’t the MusicBrainz of movies. The Movie DB looks like a more viable alternative with a possibly more usable website than recent IMDb to boot, but I’m not sure if it is as open. Still, you can use their API to scrape the entire DB. Note that The Movie DB is essentially a fork of 2008-era omdb data, as stated on older versions of their about page.

I bet everyone’s seen this by now, but who cares. I sure don’t.