Friday, August 13, 2010

I'm Addicted to Wikipedia

So one day I was looking a movie up on wikipedia, I have an app on my iphone so that I can use wikipedia at any and all times, and I realized that it told the entire plot of the movie. It not only included major summary points but also points of interest and controversy. It wasn't until later that I truly began to appreciate this feature (imdb.com, also a fave of mine, doesn't include plot spoilers), when I was watching a movie on tv and decided that if things weren't going to work out the way I thought they should then it was going to be a complete waste of my valuable time to finish it. So I wikipedia-ed the movie and found out that not only were things not going to work out the way that I wanted them to, the plot was going to get extremely cheesy towards the end. If there is one thing I can't stand, it's cheesiness. So I didn't finish the movie, but was glad that I knew what happened; I've never liked not seeing movies and books through to the end, I'm always afraid of what I'll be missing. Since that fateful day I have become obsessed with wikipedia. I wikipedia everything: movies, books, actors, actresses, music, etc. Sometimes it does let me down on newer movies or books and won't yet have entire plot summaries, but I'm far more willing to give more recent movies and books a chance so it's not too big of a let down. It's when you're watching the weird and or unheard of movies on AMC or even lifetime that it's better to look it up before wasting valuable time. I also tend to get very emotionally invested in the plots of movies and books. It takes a lot to make me cry in a movie but not a lot to put me in a seriously weird mood. I would much rather know what's going to happen going into a movie so that I can be prepared, rather than leave feeling like I just paid 9.50 to be totally depressed. A perfect example is the movie Brothers (starring Jake Gyllenhall, Natalie Portman, and Tobey Maguire). I went to go see it with Rebecca and Anna when it was in theatres (it totally should have been a rental). It was so not what I was expecting, or what the previews made it out to be. We sat in the theatre for a good 5-10 minutes after the movie ended to let everything sink in. Had I used wikipedia we could have gone to see something else and not wasted a couple hours of our time on the disappointment that was brothers.

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