"KEEP BUSTIN'."

Hey friends, why not browse the review archive?

I’m trying to decide if Clubside Chris is my Q, or my Lucius Fox. I would say he’s the janitor from DIE HARD 2, but he’s too high tech for that. And it wouldn’t be nice to say he’s Kevin Smith from DIE HARD 4.

Anyway he’s been striving the shit out of the excellence and is programming in his computers and everything and honestly I got no clue what he’s doing with most of this but he keeps coming up with great features for outlawvern.com. What he’s really been sweating over for a while is this database that creates new and better ways to browse the review archive. If you look above there’s a “Reviews” button you can click on that goes to a dropdown menu with the different options. You can look at all my reviews in traditional alphabetical order, you can look at them in chronological order by release date, you can flip through the fancy timeline version…

The options I’m really excited about are the ones that are sorted by category: all my DTV reviews in chronological order, all my slasher reviews. There’s a new one called “Icons” where you can access all my Nicolas Cages, all my Dolphs, stuff like that, with all the movie posters of the reviewed titles, in release order.

I love these because I’m jumping around watching and writing about all different movies and they’re slowly forming into this history, so I can look at them in context. I can look at the DTV list and see that the earliest one I’ve reviewed is VIDEO VIOLENCE from ’87 and the next is SILENT NIGHT, DEAD NIGHT 3 in ’89, so that encourages me to look into what else came out before and around that time and see what’s up. It takes these scattershot writings and forms them together into a body of research that I’m building for the betterment of mankind or whatever.

Anyway when you feel like reading some reviews please try these features out and let Chris know what you think or any suggestions you have for how it could be even better.

thanks everybody and thanks Chris

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 6th, 2012 at 12:26 am and is filed under Blog Post (short for weblog), Site News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

18 Responses to “Hey friends, why not browse the review archive?”

  1. Great Features! Always a pleasure to browse older reviews from outlaw vern! thanks to clubside Chris for sorting them and thanks to vern for writing them :)

  2. Thats fantastic Vern. There are so many reviews it was getting a bit crazy trying to browse through them before. I love the years section, will there be more genre sections in there, so if I want to see a what-if-a-real-person-became-a-super-hero movie I could jump straight to all of them and choose from there? If that’s too specific then just a section on werewolf movies would do. Also, how about a catagory which just has your favourite films, or at least your favourite bonkers movies. So when your readers are lost for something to watch they can look at your recommended list and watch a film involving guy flying through a window on a motorbike, hitting a helicopter then exploding a load of cars as he crash lands, and know that it would be two hours well spent.

  3. THANKS CHRIS!

  4. Yeah bobajim, that’s what we’re looking for. Just as an exercise I added a “Real” Heroes page for you. Just click on Reviews in the menu bar and you’ll see it with the other topics. Unfortunately Vern doesn’t have a specific tag that meets your request so I cobbled together a list of only five movies. But those types of suggestions will drive us to think about what makes sense and whichever ones Vern thinks are worth adding I’ll take care of. Hopefully this shows the speed available by setting up a dedicated site and database to index Vern’s reviews. I have a bunch more to say, thanks to everyone, and I hope we get some more discussion here. On that note I’ll leave you with this:

  5. Anyone remember the old geocities days when everything was just in alphabetical order and you’d be looking for “Punisher” and then you’d see Vern’s “Predator” review right below and just be like “Eh, fuck it.” and go through all the P’s?

  6. That bookshelf has a smiley face…

  7. When I first discovered this site the first thing I did was go read every archived review. Didn’t everyone else do that?

  8. Odo19, dude, you’re giving me flashbacks. I’d like to say I’m nostalgic for the old geo, but that just ain’t the case.

    Clubside, this is most excellent. Keep up the good work!

  9. HELP WANTED!!!

    Okay, here goes the pitch: to further the studies of badass cinema I have created http://badassdb.com which handles Vern’s reviews but is designed as a public site to offer up relevant information and serve as a source of information for other sites. The primary goal is film preservation: having full context information about the release of the movie, ways to view and more importantly own a copy, and important marketing materials. First and foremost the site has no editorial policy, there is no user-generated stuff like ratings or comments (see below for the caveat), it’s all about objective information. The reason for this is two-fold: to encourage adoption of BADASSDb as the best source for definitive release information, and to encourage cooperation from studios and other businesses to provide detailed and exhaustive information to the public through marketing materials.

    There are lots of good sources for movie (and television) information out there, and in this context obviously IMDb and BoxOfficeMojo are already there. However as much as I love Amazon both of these sites being controlled by the same retailer and business-focused entity means their mission is different. Yes, BADASSDb wants to give you ways to find and purchase films, but focused on the film itself not “related” stuff, out-of-context advertising or hiding certain information behind a paywall. Since IMDb began as a community project that was later commercialized, where do we have to turn for a site that is about the movies first?

    In order to provide the information that is most important in terms of placing a film in the context of it’s release I have set up only a small subset of information to get things started, those that I feel are most important for historical significance:

    The Most Commonly Known U.S. Title
    Title Sort
    Title Differentiator (to separate movies released in the same year with identical titles)
    Movie Type (Theatrical, DTV, TV Movie)
    First Release Date (first date of a non-sales related showing including notes)
    U.S. Wide Release Date
    Release Poster
    Release Trailer

    Beyond this there is a lit of information to add. Being a curated site means picking just what is most important to set a baseline. If you have suggestions for any crucial information I missed please suggest it here or in the forum post I’ll be linking.

    The other helpful thing is that this community Vern has built has a number of regular writers of reviews for personal or professional sites. I’m hoping to engage those of you and build a community of regulars whose reviews will be linked at BADASSDb as well. If you are willing to get involved it would be very helpful to be able to launch with more than a few places people can go to find reviews that aren’t a part of established media sites.

    There’s a lot more to talk about. DVD, Blu-ray and streaming releases marked with whether they meet collector needs: aspect ratio, trailer and poster inclusion. Three tiered genre labeling: single master genre as used in physical video stores, dual genre label (romantic comedy, sci-fi action) and modern infinite genre labels. Above-the-line, below-the-line talent. Financial information. All of these things are important and I’d love help designing the parameters.

    BADASSDb will also have a public API. Like TechCrunch’s CrunchBase, any movie could have an embed from BADASSDb that serves up details, a poster even the trailer. Other APIs will be available for navigation such as next movie by title or release date. I think a tablet app for reading Vern’s reviews would be great, here’s how it starts.

    But none of this can truly succeed in a vacuum. I am asking for help in designing and providing content for BADASSDb. Please add any comments here or join the extended discussion on the forum:

    https://outlawvern.com/forum/the-sight/badassdb-com/

    I’ll be introducing the companion sites there: BADASSZone for news and user interaction, and BADASSJoint, the hangout and ulterior motive.

    Thanks again to Vern for letting me be a part of his presence here on the web, and congratulations on over 1,700 reviews since 1999. GOTT DAMM that’s a lot of fucking movies!

  10. Nnnnnnnope… not gettin’ it, clubside.

    Either that was too much info.to process at once, or it wasn’t conveyed simply enough, or my inner cretin just came up for air, or a combination of all three.

    It’s almost like you’re a rival pimp trying to lure away Vern’s stable of hoes. All’s fair in love, war and poontang analogy, I suppose.

  11. Awesome. Great work, guys. I’m off work this week and have already spent a bunch of time delving into the archives. Your Transporter 2 review still makes me laugh out loud. I’m going back in…

  12. You see this cat Chris is a bad mother–

  13. Background Singers

    December 7th, 2012 at 8:28 am

    Shut your mouth!

  14. But I’m talkin’ about Chris!

  15. Not trying to lure anyone away Larry, just noticed after going through every review and comment that there are at least a handful of people here who also write reviews. As I said BADASSDb will be curated so unlike IMDb where people go and submit their site’s review I’m hoping some of the regulars might want their reviews linked from the site.

    Here’s the scenario I want to “correct”: do a web search for “On Deadly Ground” or “on deadly ground review”. Wouldn’t you like to see Vern’s review near the top? In the unlikely scenario you don’t already own a copy wouldn’t you like to find a site near the top that described every special feature on every region’s version, the tech specs, to find the best collectible version? If you’re a fan of commentaries wouldn’t you like to know which releases no matter format or region they are available on? Or make sure you bought the Blu-ray of Blade that was actually in the correct aspect ratio? Or which version of some film wasn’t Weinsteined?

    I apologize for the info dump. I wrote it like I would say it while at the same time trying not to bring everything up. I’ve been thinking about and working on this thing for a few months, but there are a lot of passionate film lovers here and I was hoping to hear what they’re looking for and see where those needs fit into a movie (and television) information site. That’s what I’m hoping for, the insights of the great people Vern has attracted here whether they post a lot or just on occasion. Plus I needed a break from three months of data entry lol.

  16. Hooray for metadata! Great work Clubside!

  17. You’ll now find a Christmas years and timeline link on the Reviews Index page and the years version has been added to the menu to celebrate the season per Vern’s request. Enjoy!

  18. what happened to the archive? I can’t seem to find it

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