Generic Film-Related Entry Title

I've been spending some of my spare just-browsing the-'net time on Flixster.  Basically (for those who haven't already heard of it), it's a site where you rate movies, and then it uses these ratings to determine compatibility between your listed friends' movie tastes, and your own.

It's not without flaws though.  Foremost among these is the way in which friends are added.  If you don't know someone's profile, you enter an email address and it sends a message off to the person inviting them to join Flixster.  If you do know the profile URL, you click on the add friend link, and then... it sends off an email asking the person if they want to let you add them as a friend.  (All friend relationships are mutual; adding someone as your friend automatically places you on their friends list as well.)  To be blunt: it's email-flood-tastitc!

Secondly, among its flaws, is that you can't trust the overall user ratings.  Unless, of course, you believe that Ultraviolet (described by a connoisseur of bad movies as "quite possibly the worst movie I've ever seen in the theater") is as good as Casablanca (as both have a rating of 3-stars).  To sum up the problem, I'm grabbing one review each from When A Stranger Calls and Final Destination 3 (neither of which I have ever seen).  To quote from a 1-star rating for Stranger: "i dnt no dis 1 aint seen it", and a 5-star rating for Destination: "it's look's so good want 2 c it so much!!".  (The later is incredibly confusing, as there is a Want To See rating included for just that purpose.)

But yes, it would appear that you don't even have to have heard of a movie to rate it one star.  (Something which appears quite common, unless it's normal for someone to have seen several thousand films, most of which are worthy of one star ratings.)  What's even scarier though?  The fact that those ratings aren't even close to the worst.  What does "dis film izn brill" mean?  "This film isn't brilliant" makes the most sense, except that it was paired with a 5-star review.  So that terminal n?  It appears to serve just to make the two-letter word longer (in contrast to all the other mangled spellings).  English teachers everywhere weep.

But anyways, if you're still interested after this (it's not as bad as all that), you can find my profile using either my MSN or my Google Talk account addresses.  Don't let the fact that the real name isn't what you expect fool you; Ed Black is in fact myself.