Operation Dusty Reviews

Old Dusty Book

Proof that what goes on the internet, stays on the internet is the stash of my original movie reviews that I diligently wrote between the years of 1996-2005. I lamented that I had lost them all, but while I did not have them on any of my computers, the internet had them. After 25 years, there they were, ready for me.

When I was writing my original reviews, there was no Rotten Tomatoes or any review aggregator. There was the Usenet and on the Usenet there was rec.arts.movies.reviews. Whenever I wrote a review, I posted it to rec.arts.movies.reviews and that was where I found most all of my original reviews. I found additional reviews that I posted to my old website archived on archive.org.

In total, I found 213 reviews, the bulk of them written between 1997 and 1998. For a year, I was incredibly lucky to have had the help of Cher Johnson, an English professor. She would help me edit my reviews and she taught me a lot. I have lost touch with her, but I am forever grateful for all that she did.

I spent the last few nights adding these old reviews to ultramookie.com and then linking them in the External Reviews section of each movie at IMDb. It was a lot of copying, pasting, and adding metadata to get them on my site. Then more clicking and pasting links into IMDb. But it was worth it. I was able to recapture a wayback part of my life.

I now have my old reviews of films that helped form my taste in movies. Movies like:

My movie reviews section now consists of 375 reviews totaling some 240,000 words. It is something I am proud of and motivates me to continue to write.