That was in 1966. It has been an oft-repeated line in movies since. But it is also, perhaps, the philosophy that IMDb.com follows. If you are on to something, go the whole hog, or as Bruce Willis would say, go the Whole Nine Yards. Or don’t do anything at all.
IMDb.com (short for Internet Movie Database), therefore, has a collection of just about every Hollywood movie ever released. It doesn’t just talk; it delivers.
It has more than 6.3 million entries, making it, as the site itself claims, “Earth’s biggest movie database.” At last count, it had details on 4.23 lakh movies, 1.64 million people (including actors, directors, producers, cameramen, set decorators, make-up men, etc), 14,000 trailers, 4.1 million recommendations. Actually, the list could go on.
Find Everything
IMDb is not just about movie titles, or even people. It can search, apart from titles and people, quotes from movies, biographies, film plots and characters from movies. The fun is in searching for the most obscure part of a movie, or even obscure movies related to a certain well-known film.
For instance, type “Mother India” in the search field, and you will not only get the Nargis-Rajendra Kumar-Sunil Dutt classic from 1957, but also Bharat Mata from 1932; a reference to the epithet of Mother India for former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on whom several movies and television series were made; and all the movies and TV series that Indira Gandhi featured in as herself.
Search for the popular Star Wars character “Luke Skywalker” in “Characters,” and you will get a complete list of movies and television shows in which the name features, in addition to all the actors that have ever played the character. A film enthusiast could not ask for more.
Great Links, Small Packages, Interactivity
God, after all, is in the detail. With the latest news, DVD releases, trailers of upcoming movies, box-office reports, photo galleries (with updated pictures, we must add!), a star birthday corner, translated sites in Spanish, Italian and German, a trivia of the day, a movie quote, and a compilation of links to the latest movie features from some of the leading Web sites of the world.
In a way, IMDb.com is perhaps the most democratic of all movie sites. It lets the user decide which is a great movie and which is not. More often than not, users-by virtue of being true movie buffs-do not prank around; they give an honest opinion. Therefore, a rating on IMDb.com is as close to the real rating as anyone would give.
This brings us to the IMDb.com Top 250 films of all time.
The Top 250…
Based on user feedback and voting by its readers, IMDb.com automatically updates the top 250 movies of all time. You have to register in order to be able to vote, and the ratings are derived out of a relatively simple, yet mostly fool-proof statistical formula. This results in really great movies making it to the top 250. For instance, the current No 1 is The Godfather with over one lakh votes. Other favourites in the top 10 include Casablanca, Schindler’s List, The Shawshank Redemption, and the Star Wars series.
…And The Bottom 100
Not ones to miss out on a little bit of fun, IMDb puts a little bit of twist to the Top Movies formula. And so, we reach the Bottom 100 list, led by SuperBabies: Baby Geniuses 2. Other movies in this elite list include Arnold Schwarzenegger’s debut film Hercules in New York, a few parts of the Police Academy series, and even the sequel to the classic Grease.
IMDb Pro
While movie enthusiasts can drool over the sheer amount of information the site has, movie professionals have a corner exclusively to themselves. It is paid, though ($12.95 or Rs 585 per month), and provides representation listings of over 50,000 people in Hollywood and movie studios across the world; in-production charts of over 1,500 current movies; international box-office charts for students of financial aspects of cinema; a search feature to generate customised reports for corporate presentations; and a calendar of all the film festivals across the world.