Operation Dusty Reviews
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:
- Midnight Run
- Speed
- My Best Friend’s Wedding
- Crimson Tide
- Face/Off
- Sneakers
- Jacob’s Ladder
- The Matrix
- Die Hard
- Contact
- The Rock
- Red Planet
- Grosse Pointe Blank
- The Abyss
- City of Angels
- Red
- Jerry Maguire
- Meet Joe Black
- A Simple Plan
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.