A great strategy but has its limits. Just a few weeks ago some guys tried a rather good version of this strategy in Estonia to sneak into a Rammstein concert. Not only did they have high-vis vests, but one of them also had high-vis pants, both of them had working gloves and they were carrying a ladder. [1]
It didn't work out though, they didn't get past security. I think one of the major flaws in their attempt was that they arrived too late, thousands of regular people were already on the premises. They should have come early in the morning.
Never mind that most stage hands wear exclusively black, not high-viz. A concert is probably one of the few places where seeing someone in a high-viz outfit stands out.
I used to live and socialise in a place where a lot of my city's security guards and bouncers drank, and became if not friends, at least familiar with many of them. (Kings Cross in Sydney in the 80s/90s)
I also used to pretty much exclusively wear black jeans, black t-shirts and when it was cold enough a black leather bike jacket.
I would often show up to clubs or gigs, and just get waved in by whoever was on the door because that assumed I was arriving for work.
It was the middle part between the two bits you quoted - he was just going to a show, was in a phase where he liked wearing all black, and would get waved in without even intentionally trying to trick anyone because they assumed he was arriving for work. Does that help?
Yeah. These would all have been "show up and pay at the door" type places, not sold out weeks in advance with pre-booked tickets. Bouncer (or sometimes door bitch) takes your money, unless the bouncer waves you through.
I think that US English writers/readers would also find the latter the most common term for that noun phrase. I think the most likely explanation is that the writer+editor(s) did not choose the words well to describe the situation.
There's a reason wikipedia classifies IMDB as an unreliable source. Apparently Michael Madsen has a real problem with people adding him to films in production in an effort to get financing.
I was an extra in an indie film because a friend asked me to help out. Lo and behold - I now have an IMDB page - presumably the film producer added me.
Fast forward a year and now there are 5 films credited to my name. I had nothing to do with 4 of them. I am unclear how and why this is happening.
I've had 2 LinkedIn accounts since the early days.
There was a brief time that my 2nd account showed as endorsing my other one. Despite me never doing such a thing.
Probably a bug but I know I've heard lots of similar stories and I'm always sus of just automated engagement in any social media curated or created site. Including imdb.
Its 1 thing when its bots, its another when its real accounts.
> Content from a Wikipedia article is not considered reliable unless it is backed up by citing reliable sources. Confirm that these sources support the content, then use them directly.
But, unlike IMDB, it's (supposed to be) verifiable.
Except you can use obscure dead tree books as sources and no one will take the effort to check whether the book indeed says so. Use a book obscure enough -- especially in a non-English language -- and it becomes almost impossible to execute said check.
It depend so. The amount of trust I want to give. By citing an obscure book I can judge the fact "hm, that book sounds obscure, why isn't there some other source?" and then decide how much weight I give to it.
And if I don't have the book at hand I can identify the person who added the citation and can see what other edits they did to judge their domain knowledge.
But in case they do you can ask your other well established sleeper account for a book reference then reply a few days later with a: This is what I found posting. Then when asked you can point to yourself and say I've asked him. Do a conversation with yourself weighting how a book is hard to validate vs how important the information is to the article.
A bit of topic. Does anyone know, why the english Wikipedia site about the JFK movie does not talk about what was fiction, what was true in the movie and what is unknow? On the german page about the movie, they have a lot about it.
I understand there are differences in languages. But in this case, in english, the most important information is missing. So it's just a movie, all fiction?!?
In general you can sometimes get insight from the "Talk" section for these kinds of questions.
In this case, there was a "historical inaccuracies" section which was removed due to sourcing concerns. Not sure how well it holds up to what is (/was was the time) up on the German one.
Sometimes it can be up to chance or culture, sometimes editorial differences.
EDIT: Come to think of it, in this case maybe the German Wikipedia just has misproportionate coverage and activity for its speaker-base (this would certainly fit with my preconception)? I recall reacting to pages on topics from other countries where I'd be surprised to find it covered in German and not the native language,
1) Nobody said anything about qualifying what wikipedia is. However, this is wikipedia, as one can see by looking at the domain in the url, wikipedia.org. Even so, there are many pages that cover tesla at wikipedia.org. Besides, if you just google for, "What companies has Elon Musk founded?" without quotes you will get a google listing of companies founded by Elon Musk. The very first of those is Tesla!
2) That was the point of the parent's comment! There are many pages at wikipedia that contain conflicting information.
Okay, fair point about the second part - my mistake indeed.
But I have to push back about the first part. The throwawayaug8 did say "According to Wikipedia Elon Musk is the founder of Tesla. That's how reliable Wikipedia is" - which I understood as a claim that "Wikipedia is unreliable". Then marak830 claimed that such claim is wrong and IncRnd claimed that the original claim is true because 'Simple' Wikipedia has an article with such text.
But I just have to disagree here - I believe that the 'main' Wikipedia is mostly or more accurate than any other Wikipedia - be it 'simple' or 'lithuanian' (https://lt.wikipedia.org/).
I believe that it's unfair to judge the main wikipedia project by using it's smaller 'translation' branches - the main one has hundreds of thousands of contributtors, and smaller wikipedias have way less.
In a same way I wouldn't say that whole javascript is bad because there are some bad frameworks that are based on it.
But I don't know, I am not an expert, I'm just a random wikipedia user :shrug_emoji:
PayPal was launched by a Tiel owned company that also bought another company that Musk didn't start, zip2. Musk became CEO of PayPal, and was fired a month later for incompetence.
Elon Musk is legally "a founder" of Tesla, but that's different from having founded Tesla, and that difference doesn't say anything about Wikipedia's credibility.
External users are not part of it. It's a "curated" model. IMDb clearly stakes their reputation on accuracy and comprehensive coverage. IMDb's TOS ensures that you relinquish all copyright claims and grant them an exclusive license to your content. IMDb won't cite their sources nor attribute contributors. They own and control everything on the site. Their rates for abuse and misinformation are unpublished. IMDb is an opaque, black box.
Wikipedia has a similar model for protecting articles known as "Pending Changes". Anyone can submit an edit to the article, but the revisions and new data is held back from the "front page" publication until approved by someone with the proper user rights. Almost anyone in good standing can obtain those rights, and it's 100% transparent. Every edit is reviewable by anyone with Internet access, every edit is attributed and licensed under CC-BY-SA. The servers, editors, and bots track and tag vandalism and other forms of abuse with public records. Verifiability is mandatory.
Me and my gang of companion editors, who have a long edit history going many years back (100% deleting content) shall revert your audits and reject your issues. There are 10 of us! You have no further questions. If you continue being disruptive you will be banned.
Different parts of Wikipedia are completely taken over by interest groups. Try making any factual change, they immediately revert and claim you are a vandal.
This is such a well known phenomenon I feel it falls under the "sky is blue" exception. However, here's a good example: a specific group of contributors active on pages about composers really don't like infoboxes. Despite being clear (to me) across most topics and languages that there's strong consensus on the use of infoboxes, they will not allow them on any composer's biography. Seriously pick out some random composers [1] and there's a conspicuous lack of them. If you are an unlucky editor, who stumbles upon one of these pages and think an infobox would be an easy, helpful contribution, well prepare to be bitten by a highly active, coordinated group and have your changes reverted. This has been going on for over a decade and blow up to the top levels of dispute resolution several times. [2]
The way "I have a doubt" as an Indianism is used more accurately translates to "I don't believe I fully understand/there are things that are unclear to me about <thing>"
At first I thought it was a simple grammatical thing, but I started seeing it so often that I looked it up.
I’m guessing it’s a failure of the author to proofread. The guy’s issuewire bio has a similar sentence without the repetition: “Besides being a successful YouTuber, he tried his luck in singing and music.” Seems like whoever wrote these blurbs is working from a template.
Definitely a template, and a very widely used one at that -- I've been able to identify hundreds, if not thousands, of profiles written using this template. Some highly formulaic phrases which are part of this template include:
* "He is one of the known names when it comes to [field]."
* "His incredible set of musical videos and songs makes makes him a known face in his circles and fans."
* "His expertise in making different types of songs makes his popularity soaring in the recent past few months."
* "[name] has already got verified on some leading music streaming platforms among the mentioned."
* "Since then it was no looking back for the [profession] as he kept on coming with one and the other."
* "Being inspired and dreamful by that, he wanted to be a [profession]. His deep passion and determination for [occupation] made him self-influenced and that took him a step forward."
* "[name] realized his true potential and today he's one of the [superlative] [profession] from [location]."
IMDB created a Top Rated Indian Movies section to mitigate spam [1]. However some obscure Indian movies make it every now and then into the regular Top 250 list.
I remember imdb being meticulous in its record keeping ~15 years ago/before it got bought by Amazon (though its quality held up for at least a few years after). I remember looking up details for kinda obscure movies and talent, and my mind being blown when info for either was listed. Now, it takes years to see the filmography of a given actor from a streaming show.
But when I tried to fix typo in the cast list of a movie, my submission was rejected:
> Your contribution has been declined. We have been unable to verify your contribution. Unfortunately we were unable to accept your submission as we were unable to verify the information provided.
I remember the imdb-ratings on movies from India were also absurdly high, I brushed it off as a cultural thing back then; but unfortunately [0] the rigging seems to be norm on imdb across the board (not limited to India).
After Amazon bought IMDB it became more about advertising for movies and less about being a database. Same thing as when Warner Bros and Universal Studios (via its parent Comcast) bought RottenTomatoes. Now everything brags about it's RT rating when it's coming from 2 movie studios...
I do really like the "X-ray" feature in Amazon Prime, which I assume is partially powered by IMDB. I miss it when using other services like HBOMax, Netflix, etc.
RT at least still has viewer ratings. You predictably can't sort by them but it's at least an indicator if the reviewer and viewer score are on completely different heights.
And you've got trakt.tv now too, not sure if anyone owns that
Indian fake ratings are a big thing, but from my own experience collecting good ratings, I can attest that keeping fakes out if the system is a big effort, and it cannot be done manually. I implemented a complicated but fair statistical system to keep fake ratings out from my site. But I'm only doing the top 3 film festivals, not all the crap. The manual blacklist is still huge.
In the west the biggest offender is A24 btw.
And to be fair to the Indian movies: The top Indian movies are usually better than the best western movies. But we didn't have top Indian movies for almost over a decade now.
I"m an Austrian film critic, who just watches most good movies.
Since Indian movies rarely make to to western festivals (mostly only Rome), there's not much to compare with. The ones which make it into Cannes are entirely different, and not as the good ones which make it into Rome or dominate the local markets. Berlin has nothing (but Dil Se won there ages ago, still the top Indian movie), Sundance had at least Gangs Of Wasseypur.
Hoenstly, the recent trend of specifically created accoubts posting shit like that under everything even just remotely India related is troublesome. Especially since it either to paint any, slight criticism as being anti-Hinu and anti-Modi or to paint Indians as victims of cololianism (true, but no excuse to do whatever you want and usually used totally out of cont!xt) or those evil Muslims (using the same made up shit Islamophobs in the West use). HN is no place to spread propagabda of any kind, would be nice to keep it that way.
A bit of a tangent but the unemployment crisis in India has reached unprecedented levels. Expect a lot more of "hustle" coming from young enterprising Indians who have no other avenues to earn.
"Single-handedly managed the successful upgrade and deployment of new environmental illumination system with zero cost overruns and zero safety incidents."
I wonder how many people have successfully bootstrapped acting gigs this way. Perhaps not the guy in the example, as his various poorly written bios expose him. But surely there are people that are better at this game.
Why even bother with getting an acting gig where they'll figure out you can't even act? Just fake the fame (is it fake if Google says it's real?), and get free meals, etc (hah, I guess Instagram was the platform for this a while ago).
There are people like the fake heiress Anna Sorokin who faked being wealthy, who's even getting movie deals after being caught, but never admitting to being wrong (this statement not checked for accuracy, I just noticed an interview where she seems to be claiming it's all been a misunderstanding). The world's a funny place.
A Formula 1 racer got his career started when he got himself a lift with 2 bosses of 2 different teams - each of them thought he was friends with the other guy. He talked his way into a driving job, but of course, once there, he had to show he could race.
Seo is a fair play and I don't see why we are so quick to blame young people. It is Google that should be blamed for making themselves more important than they deserve to be.
A lot of what is labeled and sold as "SEO" might as well be diet fraud. Plagiarism, false advertising, astroturfing, etc. It certainly isn't just letting the Google bot know what your website is about.
I agree, though I think it's fair play to try and do things that the Google algorithm likes...but are not directly related to quality.
Say somewhere in the bowels of their ML pipelines, features that get scored include things like "has a favicon.ico and it's unique and not seen elsewhere". Well, then doing that isn't really fraud to me. It's just adding "proxies for quality" so you aren't dinged for not having them.
Ummm, this is SEO? Because it is a hack from google's algo? This is exactly my problem with the "hackers" here and the article's author - conflating the action with content. He finds an unscroupolous usage of that hack and generalizes without any effort that all of it is fraud.
It is not okay to glide over the 'young people' part and generally not being empathetic to those trying to beat the market. If it is fraud, which is a crime, are you suggesting these people should be sent to jail? Because if not then you shouldn't use the that word. Words have meaning.
I would love to have a way to punish people for submitting knownlingly bad information to publicly editable databases like IMDB (note I don't care about Google, it is IMDB that should be protected)
Jail is too much, but it woukd be nice to have a fine of some sort, because "poisining the well" for everyone is really not cool.
(in practice any such system would be abused a lot, so we are probably better off with status quo.. but in the ideal world we'd punish those people)
Public service, if you think jail is too much. An hour for each word of the falsehood, 1000 hours for each picture included.
Poisoning the well is a deeply antisocial act, and just because it isn't the literal town water well, but is instead the common information well, doesn't make it less of an 'eff-you-all' act.
Right. We can achieve heaven if we just punish every sin. Not trusting almighty Google's algorithm is just too much sacrifice the good people are making.
Promoting publicly editable database as authoritative is high bar we must achieve at the cost of just banning juvenile behavior.
No, "we can reduce reduce bad behavior if we punish for it". This stuff actually works -- if we don't punishing bad behavior, we get more and more of it over time (which is kinda what happened with internet)
I am not sure why you keep bringing up Google here -- no one cares about it, it is megacorp and it can take care of itself. We want to protect entities like IMDB and Wikipedia. It does not matter why it was vandalized (and that's what happened here) -- to fool Google, or to impress friends, or to get to backstage -- it was bad, and it should not be encouraged.
And finally, learning that actions have responsibilities is an important part of the growing up. I certainly got some parking tickets when I was younger and it taught me an important lesson. (Of course the punishment should not be excessive, nothing that stays on your record for the whole life).
Dude. This is not public database. This is for profit multi-billion dollara corporations spending more money on marketing than security and selling a product which promises notability based on publicly editable no-oversight database.
You defending thia is really just telling more about you. Amazon sits on a domain called "international" movie database where they don't have anyone to verify the biggest block-busters of the biggest movie makers in the world. With your logic you should be out on the streets demanding criminal proceedings against this "fraud".
Nothing else for me to say. Vote me down all you want.
Online fraud is rampant across major platforms. Companies lack the resources and immediate financial incentives to combat it. Google Maps is another good example. I live in Vietnam and businesses stealing another business' unclaimed listings is common practice, or claiming the listing for a public landmark and using it to advertise their tour company for example. Then there's fake reviews... These platforms simply can't combat fraud at scale, undermining trust.
Google Maps is a mess of business icons and junk which I notice is now mandated on Street View - icons can't be hidden anymore without resorting to custom scripts like ad blockers.
Google Search tries too hard to present "facts". Take this top result snippet which messes up the difference between speedometer and odometer:
Google is using and presenting data from the top website in an attempt to "know" the functional difference between speedometer and odometer. Google pretends to be smart. I'm not surprised people are finding it easy to manipulate "knowledge" panels.
I looked my own name up on IMDB and found that I had starred in a soft-core gay porn movie. I was intrigued, but somewhat disappointed that I didn't remember any of it. Also disappointed that it seems to have been the start and end of my illustrious film career.
Pay workers of tech magazines to write about the company just like these randons guys.
Start with the cheapest bribes and move up to techcrunch etc - there's little morality in that sector so you're not the first to come to with it.
I find it interesting that nowhere in the article did the author write the name of the actor / musician he's referring to, it's only highlighted in pictures. Maybe trying not to add to this guy's SEO?
BTW since India makes a great many of medications and supplements for the USA and the world, and those factories are never inspected or products tested, do you think this "cheating" / "hacking" attitude doesn't spill over into each and every industry?
Webpage is one thing, how about things you consume?
What is the basis of your statement that the factories are never inspected or the products are tested?
I interned at a pharmaceutical company's factory in India for the summer that used to regularly export medications to it's subsidiaries in the western world including United States. The standards are super high, we literally threw away millions of medications due to small uncertainty in a Quality control check.
Besides the local regulations and inspections, a team from FDA regularly visited the factory to audit it for like 10-15 days. Just for one factory. I distinctly remember this as we had a more americanized menu for lunch when the team visited LMAO.
So yeah, when you don't know or are not sure, please don't make statements like "factories are never inspected". It makes it seem like you know something, which you clearly don't.
There is a profile for a person named Giuseppe Macario on IMDB. The profile claims he was a writer for a commercial involving Julia Roberts. It's a lie.
He created the profile prior to running for office in Italy under the political party "Free Flights to Italy" in 2018. A reporter for Rolling Stone (Italy) dug into the claim. She discovered it was fake along with many of his other claims.
The guy has a long, long history of making questionable claims about himself online.
While working on Lost in Random someone went to the iMDB page ( https://imdb.com/title/tt12545922 ) and realised the cast listing was entirely wrong. No impostors, but a bunch of us in the wrong roles. Most humorously I, our graphics programmer, was credited as all kinds of things, including director, animation director, and production coordinator.
We had a laugh about it, then someone fixed it. To this day we don't know how it happened.
This kind of happens in the podcast world as well.
Many people/companies create fake podcasts and submit to all podcast directories / apps. The main purpose is to do blackhat SEO - links in the rss feed will be syndicated to podcast directory sites / apps.
In fact, any "directory of something" sites will be gamed if user created contents are allowed, e.g., directory of movies / podcasts / local businesses / books...
I have always wondered about the ratings. It seems to me that all movies below 6 is trash. Has this always been this way? One would imagine that a 5 star rating would be ok since it is right between 0 (bad) and 10 (great). I guess some kind of inflation in the ratings is going on, but how is such things prevented in these kinds of ratings over time? Is it even possible to prevent?
L'equipe, a French sports newspaper, sticks to the traditional interpretation of the 1-10 scale when rating players' performances. In football (soccer), they rate all players on both teams who played enough minutes, so there's at least 22 ratings per match - 5/10 being average and 10/10 being truly exceptional.
Since the late 80s they have given only a dozen or so perfect 10/10 ratings. Almost half of them was given in the past five years, so I guess inflation creeps up everywhere.
I tend to view 1–10 ratings differently than 1–5. 1–5 is more like (American) letter grades where 3 stars equals a C and is average. On a 1–10 rating, it’s more like percentages so 9–10 is an A, 8–9 a B, 7–8 a C, 6–7 a D and less than 6 an F. I’ve seen elsewhere that at least one aggregator does similar to convert between 1–10 scales and 5-star scales so I think that this is a common unspoken assumption of the relation between the two scales.
I'm very proud to say we did show that in the Google Cinema Club, and in fact we had a professor from UCSC who specializes in Ray films come and show it and answer questions. He knew Ray personally.
If you wanna go by metrics, all movies in the trilogy are rated above 4.0 with more than 50,000 votes combined on letterboxd. Also they got beautiful remasters from criterion films.
This is super common amongst tons of fakers. I am sure the Indian niche is just one subsection. I have run into a ton of fake white Americans doing just this to pump up their cred count.
Will a knowledge panel on google help you get verified on various social networks? Or does anyone here have connection$ for getting verified on social networks?
it harmful for indian film growth, evently.
it is also happen in china, with real account to post a high score to bad movie,
somebody can get money from this event.
create fake data by fake account or sub account, someone even have no watch the movie in theater, just post low score, it make people angry
I'm a Swiss working in Bangkok (I'm fluent in Thai). So I'm quite a bit acustomed to people cheating in many situations of life. When we started hiring a couple of Indian coworkers for management level as well as data science roles, I became close friends to the whole group.
Whenever we discussed frauds like that, I always said that we shouldn't think people (or Indians in particular) wanna game the systems and not everyone would act in malicious self beneficial ways, tricking systems like that. But: Whenever I held this position in our discussions, my indian friends smiled at me. They were the ones saying that you usually can't trust a bunch of people to follow rules there. That most would simply game the system for their own benefit. I tried arguing that this is probably the same for all human beings, if they just have the chance and live in a system where there are no (or little) consequences of doing this.
They kept arguing that it's part of the indian mindset to just game systems like that, from state schemes, to work to anything.
It's shocking how one nation can see themselves in such a negative way.
I still believe though that Swiss or Indians or whatever nation doesn't matter. Humans will game systems if the circumstances are right.
At business school one of my living group was an exec at a prominent indian Telco. He described how, when the quarterly revenue was short, they would enable paid features on random customer accounts (at huge scale). This predates smart phones and only a small fraction noticed, complained and got a refund. He mentioned it casually and was a surprised we collectively recommended he quit that company, change that practice, or quit telling people.
I got scammed 4 times in 24hrs when I was in Istanbul. I ranted about it on my Facebook. A Turkish friend claimed it was part of Turkish culture. If you can take advantage of someone it's their fault they got taken advantage of and your lauded skills that allowed you to.
I have no idea if that's actually true but it that's what he told me.
Same here, in Istanbul we almost got in a huge fight because they tried charging us like couple hunderd dollars for a simple haircut. Also cab drivers fucked us over every single time.
I feel it's common in most cultures. As a former Rhodesian and South African, it's seen as fair game due to viewing things as a 'rigged system'. I always used to think we were far more corrupt and nepotistic than the rest of the world due to the insane scale of said corruption and nepotism in both the private and public sector, and yet when I came to the UK it's still a pretty universal thing, albeit on a lower magnitude and far more covered up.
> It's shocking how one nation can see themselves in such a negative way.
Wonder if the issue is that it's just perception, i.e. they just "see" it that way, or it is actually that way as in reality? It would seem the people who have first hand experience would be more familiar with the environment.
> Humans will game systems if the circumstances are right.
I think one interesting aspect is whether they view it as a negative or illegal thing or it's merely a cool "hack". They might not even feel guilty at all about it, and if caught would just try harder tomorrow.
In this case (with IMDb resume fraud), I don’t even see that it’s illegal. Probably in violation of some EULA but probably not fraud until and if they get an actual job based on that fake resume.
Fair point in regard to the original story. I was mainly responding to the GP discussing hiring for management level, assuming hiring had happened as well. But, yeah it doesn't have to be illegal but can still be fraud.
I find it interesting that perceptions can be wildly different. In some societies people who don't game the system or try to commit fraud can be seen as naive or stupid. In others, the complete opposite - those who try all these things, are shunned and held in low regard even if they haven't actually broken any laws, because they are breaking social mores.
Flagged for racism. You can’t justify it by saying “oh it’s well known”. If we listed all the other “well known” facts about other races, things would get abominably racist real quick.
IMDB lost all my respect many years ago when they made clear with their actions that they support fake reviews. When the problem started to grow beyond the occasional vandalism, they still had a very effective discussion section in which users soon began to expose fake reviews. Their response? Of course remove the discussion section!
IMDB today has some use for their database only; but they lost any credibility on everything else.
Comment sections on many websites across the net got scrapped around the same time. Ostensibly because some people use them to say nasty things, but really I think it's about keeping the masses consuming rather than creating. The corporations prefer that creation of content and narratives be restricted to an elite few, while the masses dutifully consume. At the end of the day it's about protecting their bottom line.
For prominent news sites, controlling the narrative was a big motivation in removing comments.
Many journalists were open about how they didn’t like how comments would question the data or conclusions in their articles. There were too many heckling comments from the peanut gallery so they closed it entirely.
For controlling the narratives comments would be great: rank agreeing comments up to show that many people share the view.
However the reality is that moderating comments is a pain. Too many people writing the most crazy stuff. It doesn't take many "passionate" commentors to ruin a section. One has to simply browse through Facebook comments on any popular topic.
> I think it's about keeping the masses consuming rather than creating.
Not really sure I see this. Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, etc. base their entire business model on the masses creating content. Sure there's a Pareto distribution when it comes to creators vs consumers, but the platforms certainly make money from (and encourage) both.
Poor boys from India game a system that was set up by Rich Tech Bros in Silicon Valley to fund their "family foundations" and 20-room houses in Atherton?
I don't call it Outrage; I call it "Slumdog Millionaire: Part II"
I hate it when people create a false narrative to back up their prejudices.
The beginnings of IMDB started in 1990 as personal files, soon moved to Usenet with a few people managing different information, then first on the WWW hosted by Cardiff University in 1993, and the company was then incorporated in the UK in 1996, and sold to Amazon in 1998.
IMDB originated on usenet. Someone mentioned a hot actress, another person made a top three of actresses... a bit later is was a top 100, and that is how IMDB started. Source: my memory :)
You're using "Slumdog Millionaire" in the same context that Indians here despise the movie for. Using it as a pretext for focusing on the poverty in India as almost a fetishized poking from the West (ironically by the British)
> Let’s say I made a movie about the US where an African-American boy born in the hood, has his mother sell him to a pedophile pop icon, after which he gets molested by a priest from his church, following which he gets tied up to the back of a truck and dragged on the road by KKK clansmen. Then he is arrested and sodomized by a policeman with a rod, after which he is attacked by a gang of illegal immigrants, and then uses these life experiences to win “Beauty and The Geek”.
> Even though each of these incidents have actually happened in the United States of America, I would be accused of spinning a fantastic yarn that has no grounding in reality, that has no connection to the “American experience” and my motivations would be questioned, no matter how cinematically spectacular I made my movie.
If it's entertaining, I'd watch that movie. It'll be a lot better than most Hollywood movies, and frankly, most Hollywood movies are pretty far off from reality (almost every movie involving the police or detectives is crazy unrealistic).
I'm not a fan of Slumdog Millionaire, but that's mostly because it's a poor story, and one that could have been a great one. Arguing it's portrayal deviates like crazy from reality is, well, like most other Hollywood movies.
Whether something is a "good story" is hard to be objective about. It depends heavily on whether the actors sell it or not. Why do you say Slumdog is a poor story?
"Poor boy makes good" is the plot of a zillion movies and books. The audience knows going in that he's going to get rich and/or get the girl. It's how that either works or doesn't.
They story had many interesting arcs that could have been richer, but halfway through it was clear there wasn't any interest in developing them, and that it was just about finding/connecting with the girl. Also, the fact that the trivia questions always seemed to align with his accidental experiences was just not that interesting.
A story about a poor boy making it big by things other than "always being lucky" would have been better.
He wasn't lucky. In fact the point of the movie was that the totality of his crappy life experiences before the trivia game ultimately led to him making it big. Essentially, it was a metaphor for karma.
(Spoiler: he almost died several times, his mom and brother died, his friend was sexually abused and he only narrowly escaped similar fates by running away, and he was working as an entry level food cart guy at the present day of the movie. He was beaten by the cops after his initial success at the show. What part of this do you consider lucky? )
The part where the questions just happened to align with his misfortunes. And not even in a meaningful way.
This definitely isn't a movie about someone who made it big by struggling hard. He struggled for sure, but the fortune came not as a byproduct of his efforts, but by being lucky. I mean sure, luck is a factor in everyone's success. In his case, it wasn't merely a factor. It was almost all luck.
The questions align chronologically with his misfortunes, essentially providing a roadmap of the major events that determined the course of his life.
Yes, they're lucky. It's a game show. A large part of trivia game shows is a matter of luck with respect to the questions asked.
But the point of the movie was that his luck on the game show was good karma for the decisions he made at the major points of his life. (Contrast with his brother.)
> But the point of the movie was that his luck on the game show was good karma for the decisions he made at the major points of his life. (Contrast with his brother.)
Sure, but perhaps very unsatisfying to a Western audience where one wants stronger connections between decisions and consequences.
Consider "It's a Wonderful Life": Although the struggles and misfortunes were not that great, it's also a movie where the protagonist consciously made decisions that led to a poor life, and in the end benefited significantly because of those decisions (and not just materially). The connection between his decisions and the outcome is much stronger.
Still, that was only a small part of why I didn't like the movie much - it merely added insult to a greater injury - that of not developing the various arcs that appeared. Imagine watching Forrest Gump where each of his life adventures was significantly reduced. The story would still be the same, but a lot less satisfying.
Slmudog Millionaire was 91% approval on Rotten Tomatoes, grossed $378 million, was nominated for 8 Oscars and won Best Picture, won 7 of the 11 BAFTA Awards for which it was nominated including Best Picture, and launched the careers of both of its stars.
Humbly, I suggest that "western audiences" enjoyed the movie a great deal and had no problems with it and that the issues you are having are your own and stem from your inability to understand the thematic issues of the movie rather than a failure of the movie itself.
Interesting that you cite Forrest Gump as your example, since your problems with Slumdog are the same problems that I have with Forrest Gump: it jumps so quickly through Forrest's life that it fails to meaningfully explore the significance of any of the individual moments of his life other than his connection to Bubba and Sarge.
I'm mostly staying out of this, but I can't resist this one:
Please don't ever use a Rotten Tomatoes score as "proving" anything.
People are entitled to their opinions, and Rotten Tomatoes is just an average of a bunch of nobodies who happened to get a "critic" gig at some media outlet. OP didn't like the movie, while I did (and you did).
The substantive arguments about western audiences and Danny Boyle are fine, too. Bring 'em on. But don't use external awards as "proof" of anything.
It would probably be a flop in India, but I'm not the best person to judge that.
I think depictions of the US in overseas movies are pretty much as silly as that, though. Everything takes place in very rich or very poor parts of NYC or LA.
As for "I would probably be accused" -- maybe in India. In the US it wouldn't even rate a review.
My family back in India loves Slumdog Millionaire. It's a relatively accurate portrayal of poverty in India.
The American equivalent was Hillbilly Elegy. The book was well reviewed (though the movie adaptation was not), and friends who grew up poor described it as relatively faithful to the general experience of growing up poor in rural America.
For the majority of my youth, I had assumed that England, Great Britain and the United Kingdom were all aliases for the same place. Thankfully I never had occasion to reveal this error to UK folks who might be alienated by it.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3345074/Man-fools-s...