Overpriced Cinema tickets and an ugly IMDB

I love it when Blog­ger takes six hours to publish a post that I make via email. It fills me to the brim with joyous green radioac­tive goo, none of that half assed polo­nium busi­ness though. I apo­lo­gise for my pos­ting fre­quency in January – my resi­den­tial cam­pus Inter­net pro­vi­der ban­ned me for 28 days due to “sus­pi­cious use” which pro­bably cons­ti­tu­ted using a wire­less rou­ter to con­nect my Wii and a wee­kend uploa­ding blitz that saw me bac­kup 10GB of digi­tal pho­tos to some web space I have.

With no con­nec­tion to the outside world I found time to com­plete all sorts of life chan­ging things, from my pre­vious posts it is evi­dent I wor­ked on my foo­bar designs; I also com­ple­ted a num­ber of assign­ments and pro­ject work. Life without the Inter­net wasn’t hard, more incon­ve­nient.  Scrubs got me through (until I reached the rather unfunny down­fall that is sea­son 3… but that’s another story).

Any­way, I was going to make this post about something. Yes – the price of cinema tic­kets these days. I wan­ted to see Hot Fuzz on Satur­day in the Odeon but we thought bet­ter of it – no way did we feel that a dis­coun­ted £6 stu­dent tic­ket was worth it, con­si­de­ring within 12 months the film could be purcha­sed for that amount or less. I hate to think what the full price was. A shi­ning exam­ple of the per­fect cinema is the local War­wick Arts Cen­tre cinema — £2.50 for a tic­ket and every sixth film is free. What’s more it shows qua­lity art house films, clas­sic cinema and has com­for­ta­ble homely seats. Even sit­ting in the very front row for the enti­rety of Babel I did not feel uncom­for­ta­ble (the sound­track for which is immense). So ins­tead we deci­ded to watch Woody Allen’s Match Point, a bri­lliant (and very dif­fe­rent to the stan­dard Allen) thri­ller sta­rring my favou­rite Scar­lett Johansson. 

My next point is the inter­net movie data­base, more com­monly refe­rred to as IMDB. What on earth have they done with their design? It is cate­go­ri­cally the mes­siest and worst rede­sign since the all-music guide abo­mi­na­tion. Huge over sized middle but­tons, with an indis­tinct side­bar and non-fitting page high­light. Did they not rea­lise that Web2.0 was/is a fad? – IMDB was the last sta­ple & suc­cess­ful “web 1.0″ site. Now sec­tion hea­der ima­ges look small and out of place; the cast list is oddly inward shif­ted; the text is too small; it’s not ins­tantly clear what the infor­ma­tion you are loo­king at rela­tes to; nothing matches up; ratings are in a less impor­tant page zone and when I vote I need to count the stars. Give the main body some colour – make sec­tions more dis­tinc­tive, shade cells in tabled infor­ma­tion, make the side­bar big­ger, put the rating back in the middle of the page… it is that impor­tant. Yikes, I am very glad that the for­mer IMDB layout is still online here.

In other news, I bought Okami for PS2 – a very ori­gi­nal and inte­res­ting video game.