Movie Review Date

I have been writing movie reviews for 23 years now and have had a web page with reviews for 20 years. Often I will watch an old movie and write up a review, but at first I didn’t bother writing reviews of old movies. I started getting DVD’s from Netflix in 2006, and since I could only have 2 movies out at a time, I tried to watch a movie the day I got it and return it the next day. I was able to watch a movie almost every other day that way. I couldn’t keep that up all the time, so I would only join for a few months at a time. I watched a lot of movies that way. By the third time I joined they had started letting you watch movies online, but I still had dialup! Around that same time, I moved my movie reviews from static html web pages to a database that would generate web pages that I would then upload to my web server. A little later I started including the date I wrote the review which let me put the 10 most recent reviews on the home page, which I still do. But I didn’t try to add dates to the older reviews and after a movie fell off of the most recent ten, the date didn’t really matter much except to me and never appeared in the review. Lately I thought I probably should include the date in the review, just to give some sense of when I wrote it. I had dates going back to 2007, but the oldest reviews had been saved to text files from writing them on the Macintosh User Group. I started saving the reviews in 1998. I still have those text files and they often (but not always) include the date of the posting, so I was able to enter some of those.

I also wrote a lot of reviews while watching DVD’s from Netflix, and I kept up a list of movies I watched from Netflix so I could see how many per month I was getting. I was able to use the dates in that list to put dates in the reviews from 2006 and 2007 until I started including the dates when I wrote them. When the database generates the web page it is easy to have it ignore the date if there isn’t one attached to the review, but add a line at the bottom with the date if there is a review. I already started something similar that tracks whether I own the movie and in what format, plus some reviews have spoilers that are blanked out.

It is a pretty small upgrade to the movie review site, but it got me to go back and look at some old reviews and my Netflix history. Earlier this year I watched The Maltese Falcon and said that it seemed kind of familiar so maybe I had seen parts of it before. But going over my history, I can see that I watched it on August 5, 2007 and my blog entry says that it was one of the movies from that batch that I liked. So I had definitely seen it before.