Monday, September 12, 2005

IMDB? Two Stars, Margaret

As a source for reliable movie reviews, IMDB bombs.

The 'user submitted' reviews often suck ten times as hard as the movie they're reviewing.

Here's a review of Michael Caine's classic (sic) 1981 horror, The Hand by user, stephanebordeauxmarseille.
"This is one of the most terrific movie of M Caïne. The music & noises are excellent. The cast is perfect, secondary actors and rednecks are really ugly. The story is a variation on the theme of the lizard tail. See this movie if you find it !"
Pauline Kael he aint.

I haven't yet found a movie review site that comes close to replacing my clapped out copies of Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide and Pauline Kael's 5001 Nights at the Movies.

Here's a few that try.

If you use iTunes and you know how to use the podcast thingy, Ebert and Roeper present a weekly radio show. I like Roger Ebert because he was the genius who wrote the screenplay to Russ Meyer's Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls.

Leonard Maltin does have a website called Movie Crazy, where he not only reviews the movies but also DVDs, movie books and soundtracks. The book reviews are especially tasty.

I thought The Muppets' Statler & Waldorf reviewing the movies would be piss funny. It's not.

And Rotten Tomatoes, a busy looking site which links to hundreds of newspaper reviews already on the net, is the best review site I've found so far.

Do you have a favorite? Click the comment thing below and tell me about it.

1 comment:

Glenn Peters said...

Melbourne writer/movie maker/funny bastard, Warwick Holt (http://media-empire.net/blog/) pitches in...

Two film review sites you should check out are The Four Word Film Review (http://www.fwfr.com/) and The Editing Room (http://ter.air0day.com/ - not reviews so much as rewrites).

Rotten Tomatoes is still probably the go for serious critique but tell me these aren't great sites.