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I had a long thread on Physique Photography and the photographers in autumn 2011, and I still think it's quality reading, so if you wanna know a bit more about Bob Mizer, Lon of New York, Bruce of Los Angeles, Dave Martin, Don Whitman, Chuck Renslow, Walter Kundzicz, Pat Milo and many others I can recommend my Vintage Physique-thread : http://www.gayheaven.org/showthread.php?t=220738
Thanks. Most of this stuff is way before my time, but I'm a bit of a history buff, so a few years ago I was a member of a couple of retro gay erotica groups that trades this kinda thing. I still have tons of stuff (like all those old magazine scans I've posted.) So that's where my contributions here come from.
Communism’s first gradual and then complete disintegration had multiple contradictory effects on sexual politics, and not only the persistence but also the export and expansion of Western forms of sexual liberalization were strongly evident. The process which eventually led to the rending of the Iron Curtain in the course of 1989 had already been underway from the mid-1980's on with the rise of the trade union Solidarity in Poland, with pressure for reform building within the highest levels of Hungary’s government, and with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s encouragement of ''glasnost'' and ''perestroika''. Once the Iron Curtain was gone, ''the West'' and all it stood for quickly flooded into ''the East''. Trucks trundled across the borders almost immediately, proffering pornographic magazines and sex toys. Video stores opened. Sexualized advertising filled public space. And talk about sexual matters saturated the previously so typically prim and robotically propagandistic media. From Slovakia to Russia, everywhere pornography began conspicuously to be displayed.
Yet not only the West’s capitalist economic system was exported; efforts to demand from the formerly Eastern Bloc nations commitments to democratic values were made as well – and within this wider project sexual matters accrued surprisingly high symbolic importance. For instance, within a few years, after the European Union was established in 1993, discussions about Eastern European countries’ entry into the EU sometimes turned on whether or not these nations had developed proper sensitivity to homosexual rights. This led to interesting disjunctions between the level of gay and lesbian self-organization within a particular country, average popular opinion in those countries toward homosexuality, and legal innovations made to please the Western decision-makers gathered in Brussels. As the international gay rights activist Scott Long helpfully albeit sarcastically summarized the ensuing dynamic:
''East European governments more or less look on European structures as a nephew might look on a rich eccentric uncle who is forever rewriting his will. The uncle’s every crotchet must be humored if the nephew wants to get his hands on the inheritance, and if the uncle suddenly takes an interest in the shine on the nephew’s shoes, or the cut of his hair, or the way he treats homosexuals or other nonexistent creatures, the nephew must put up a quick and busy show of improvement.''
A striking example was the case of Romania. As of 1995, it was one of only three countries in Europe that still criminalized homosexuality -including lesbianism - with the punishment set at one to five years imprisonment. Hungary and Czechoslovakia, by contrast, had decriminalized same-sex sex for consenting adults in 1961. In Poland, homosexuality had never been illegal. Under the cruel reign of Nicolae Ceausescu, Article 200 of the criminal code above all served as a trouble-free way to jail political dissidents. Small homosexual subcultures existed in the larger cities, but below the surface of public awareness. As of 1993, a survey found that 85 percent of Romanian citizens believed that homosexuality was unacceptable. EU access for Romania was made contingent on changing the law on homosexuality, but the Romanian government dragged its feet. The Romanian Orthodox church fanned homophobia further as part of its efforts to regain moral authority and deflect attention from its extensive complicity with the Ceausescu regime; homosexuality became a flashpoint in resistance to the West. In this context, gay rights groups modeled their cause on that of disenfranchised ethnic minorities, both the Roma and the minority of Hungarians within Romania. Ultimately, however, it was the pressure from Brussels that proved decisive. Decriminalization was finally enacted in 1996, anti-discrimination laws were put in place in 2000, and the age of consent for hetero- and homosexual activity was equalized – to 15 – in 2002. In 2006, Romania was named by Human Rights Watch as one of five countries in the world that had made ''exemplary progress in combating rights abuses based on sexual orientation or gender identity''. In 2007, the country joined the EU. Along related lines, as of 2009, the government of the nation of Albania was announcing that it would push its parliament to recognize same-sex marriage in hopes of hastening EU accession.
Further developments also involved importation of Western ways into the former East. A key example was HIV/AIDS prevention work. Although homosexuality had been legal in the former Czechoslovakia, for instance, awareness of safe-sex practices remained low into the beginning of the 1990's; 90 percent of AIDS cases in the Czech Republic as of 1991 were among homo- and bisexual men. It was the Dutch Ministry of Health that provided the funds for a condom promotion initiative directed specifically at men seeking same-sex in the Czech Republic; 14,000 brochures were handed out in gay and lesbian clubs and gay male saunas, as well as to male prostitutes who serviced men. The campaign was a great success. It provided not only the opportunity for greater discussion of safe sex practices within gay subcultures, but also an increase in condom sales, and – in a nice example of the possibilities for synergy between capitalism and public health – the Czech condom industry approached a Czech gay and lesbian rights organization to ask to be involved in further safe-sex promotion projects.
Within a few years, condoms began to be sent in the opposite direction, from East to West. The Polish company UNIMIL Cracow stepped up production and exported its product to Sweden and Germany. But also within Poland, condom use rose – not just among homosexuals, but primarily among heterosexuals as, in a complicated irony, precisely the rise of anti-abortion forces in post-Communist Poland prompted heterosexuals to seek to prevent pregnancies more assiduously than they had in the Communist era.
On a more subtle and complex level, the emergence within Eastern European countries of politically active gay and lesbian rights organizations based on Western models confronted both the wider public and same-sex-desiring individuals themselves with new paradigms of samesex desire. There was nothing necessarily more ''true'' about Western ideas that same-sex desire is innate in a certain subset of individuals and that those individuals should declare their preferences publicly. And also in the West, many people continued to seek same-sex encounters without ever self-defining as gay or lesbian. But by the early 1990's groups had been formed all across the former East – from Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, and Estonia to Slovakia, Slovenia, and the Ukraine – and, even if in some cases these organizations had at best twenty members, the meeting between cultures indisputably brought novel notions about both desire and rights into the discourse of Eastern countries.
The origins of Slovenia’s gay and lesbian movement lie in the first Magnus festival entitled Homosexuality and Culture organised by ŠKUC Forum in 1984. The same year, the Magnus section was founded in ŠKUC students’ cultural centre, the first such movement in the former Eastern Europe. The ŠKUC lesbian section was set up in 1987 and was the first lesbian group in Eastern Europe. In addition to culture, artistic and scientific productions, the purpose of both was the fight against all forms of discrimination.
As Leszek Bolewski, editor of Lesbian and Gay Express, the newsletter for the newly formed Central and East European Gay and Lesbian Network (based in Poznan, Poland) put it in 1994 in the first issue, ''East–West'', in evocative halting English: ''Democracy has just been born in our countries, gay movement is like a baby''. Another item in the newsletter emphasized how ''invisible'' lesbians and gays still were in Polish society since the Western-style practice of ''coming out'' was just beginning, as it also reported that the magazine Twoj Styl (Your Style) had surveyed more than a thousand Polish women and that more than 78 percent had declared that they would not like to have a homosexual as a neighbor. But that first issue also showed just how quickly the topics of legalization of gay and lesbian partnerships, adoption of children, and efforts to combat discrimination against individuals diagnosed as HIV-positive were put on the agenda for discussion by the newly formed rights groups, and how rapidly the public debates began to resemble those within the West.
The problems that formerly Soviet-controlled economies soon confronted in adapting to an ever more globally interconnected capitalism - one that was itself increasingly in dysfunction and crisis - also triggered a substantial movement of (mostly female, but also some male) prostitutes in the other direction, away from the nations of the former East and into the West. There they joined prostitutes whose countries of origin were Asian or African. Of the several hundred thousand women working as prostitutes in Germany at the end of the 1990s, for example, over 60 percent were foreigners, and of those, two-thirds were from the countries of the former Eastern Bloc.
Other developments were yet more convoluted. Into the ideological vacuum created by communism's defeat, Western European notions of secularism, sexual liberality, and capitalist free enterprise were after all not the only new political arrivals; conservative Christian and ethnic nationalist forces vied for cultural and political influence as well. Most extreme were neofascist movements gaining strength in Poland, Romania, and the Ukraine. These groups were not simply irritated by EU demands for greater sensitivity toward homosexuals; they rather believed that the EU was run by ''fags'' and therefore had to be resisted. Their homophobic imagery - along with the slogan ''Faggotry Forbidden'' - was reproduced in the media without criticism by more moderate political groupings, and slathered in multiples across the walls of buildings on city streets. The imagery could also be integrated with religious symbols - as it was for example in the counterdemonstration to a gay pride parade held in Bucharest, Romania, in 2006. The rhetoric was often violent. Youth affiliated with the ultra-nationalist League of Polish Families, for instance, taunted feminist and gay rights demonstrators with chants such as ''pedophiles and pederasts – these are Euro-enthusiasts'', ''labor camps for lesbians'', and ''faggots to the gas''. And over and over, from Cracow, Poland, to Riga, Latvia, gay pride parades met with - and sometimes were shut down in fear of or in response to - physical violence.
Beyond the shifts in product placements, legal systems, public health provisions, and new categories of self-understanding, the disappearance of the Iron Curtain was evident as well in the movements of peoples - and here the flows were by no means primarily from West to East, but rather went in several directions. A major development was the transformation and expansion of hetero- as well as homosexual sex tourism. Without question, both straight- and gay-servicing commercial scenes in numerous cities and beach towns across North Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia continued to attract visitors from Europe.
Some of the borders crossed were within Europe. In prior decades, Amsterdam had been a favorite gay travel destination. But in the 1990's, gay Austrians, for instance, also increasingly traveled to the Czech Republic, especially the ''golden city'' of Prague - imagined, in indisputably neocolonial fashion, as a fabulous ''boyopolis'' (coinage of the Canadian journalist Stan Persky, who also described his mid-1990's exploits with hustlers in Warsaw, Budapest, and Zagreb). But that's another story for another time!
If it feels like I'm just repeating myself when I say "what a great post, haiducii" it's because it's the honest-to-God truth!!!
Dense, complex nd filled with so much info - and some of it quite peculiar, he-he...I had no idea that the Polish condome manufacturer UNIMIL Cracow have been exporting condomes to Germany and Sweden - the kind of info you'll find only on GH.
To give the kind of feedback this splendid post deserves I'll have to engage in some serious slow and close reading! But mille grazie for the post!
All I can say is - THIS IS THE VERY MOST INTERESTING THREAD on GH. All these many intersting posts or parts are good for Wikipedia. So much I've learned here about the development of the Gay Life from the past until today. It's really worth to be printed to a booklet!
Thank you Gorgik and Haiducii as well very thanks too to all other guys which have written here for your great and riveting historic work.
Gorgik and Haiducii - if it would be possible I would award you with the title of a Prof. Dr. G.P.C. (gay porn cinema)!
I had no idea that the Polish condome manufacturer UNIMIL Cracow have been exporting condomes to Germany and Sweden - the kind of info you'll find only on GH.
Haiducii and I have decided that this thread will be back on track the coming weekend with myself posting some comments on Roland Emmerich's movie Stonewall; my point-of-departure will be the - in my opinion - quite crazy comments on IMDB, and I know that I'm not the only GH-member to have found the situation rather absurd.
I don't know for sure if I'll have time to post on Saturday 23 January or Sunday 24 January, but it's sometimes this weekend! See all of you in this thread this coming weekend!
Some days ago I finally got the opportunity to watch director Roland Emmerich's 2015 movie Stonewall. First I thought that I'll watch and maybe do some kind of comment on GH, but when I had watched and visited the IMDB page with all the user reviews I saw something far more interesting to comment on : the IMDB comments...
Since I'm not the only GH-member finding the IMDB ratings quite odd and rather disturbing I thought I should try my best at understanding why the ratings and user reviews are what they are.
Ratings and user reviews.
The movies average rating (on 16 January) is 3,6 on IMDB:s scale with 10 as top rank, and in the 23 user reviews you can easily find judgments to make you think you've watched the worst movie of all times. judgments as the following:
"not only one of the worst films of the year but quite possibly the most offensive", "disaster", "cringe worthy", "horribly", "profoundly offensive", "terrible script=bad film", "a total fraud", "long, boring and full of clichés" et cetera, et cetera.
There are a few reviews tilting to the other side making you think you've just watched a flawless perennial masterpiece - and I don't agree on that either, but my own tilt is definitely more to the masterpiece side than to the disaster side. It's a good movie, but it's not a perennial masterpiece. If I would rate the movie I'd probably end up with giving it a 7.
One of the not very many balanced reviews says something which rings true in my ears: "it's not what people want it to be".
I think that hits the nub of the matter: Lot's of people want this 129 minutes feature to be something else than a piece of ordinary cinematic storytelling. Some people not only want it to be an account with the highest factual accuracy, but at the same time it should paint this account in the colours of LGBT political correctness model 2015.
Well those demands together will spell out: confusion. I stand by my own judgment that it's a good movie but it has its flaws, and among the more important reason for the flaws is Roland Emmerich's own befuddlement about the difference between storytelling, ideology and historical truth.
Stonewall: some historical background.
The Alcohol prohibition in the US was repealed in 1934, so it was legal again to sell beer, wine and liquor in public, but at the same time there was kind of a replacement for the prohibition in the form of licensing policy controlled by a new state authority, the State Liquor Authority (SLA). If you owned a bar in New York you had to send in the necessary doents and ask for a license; if you and your place met the criteria you would get the coveted license.
The licensing policy was an instrument intended to keep public space and its facilities respectable and orderly, and the most fundamental strategy was - not particularly surprising - to exclude people considered dis-orderly. And guess what - the SLA thought homosexuals to be among the most disorderly of creatures. This wrought up a new kind of discriminatory strategy made up to make gay peoples lives difficult and shitty and to make a lot of non-gay people nervous to loose their job, their bar, café or restaurant.
The SLA sent a loud and clear message to all bar owners and their employees, that if a bar served a single alcoholic drink a single time to a single homosexual person, the bar could loose its license, meaning that it would soon be out of business and its employees out of job.
One of the more important reasons why many gay newyorkers would find gay life becoming increasingly difficult from the mid 1930s on, was the consequences of the new SLA policy. From having been welcome patrons of bars and restaurants gay people suddenly became very unwelcome, since their very precense in the establishment became a threat to its economic existence.
In 1967 the New York appellate court ruled in two cases that there must be an end to SLA terminating the license of a bar just because they had served a drink to homosexual people. These important court decisions came after the Mattacine Society of New York had confronted SLA in 1966 and decided to bring them to court.
So in the summer of 1969 there had recently been important positive change in the legal situation of bars serving alcoholic drinks to homosexual people.
The gay bar scene had been totally dominated by mafia owners for decades, but now different kinds of legitimate investors were moving in. The mafiosi moved away from the ordinary gay bar scene and moved on to the scene of private clubs.
One of all these mafia owned private clubs in 1969 was the Stonewall Inn, with its owner Fat Tony Lauria (through his father Ernie Lauria also connected to one of the biggest big shots, Don Vito Genovese) and the forbidding precense of its bouncer, Ed "The Scull" Murphy.
Anothe important element in the historical equation was the deeply corrupted 6th prescinct of NYPD which was on Fat Tony's payroll. When the NYPD was to to a raid on Stonewall Inn, the made a phonecall in good time to Tony or Murphy so they could get properly prepared.
The queer street kids.
But the thing that made the Stonewall Inn truly special was that it was considered the emotional home of a group of young homeless queer street kids living on Christopher Street. To the kids in this group the Stonewall Inn was one of very few places in New York where they could feel relatively safe at least for a few hours, dance with each others and play some music on the jukebox.
Most of these kids had been kicked out of their homes when their parents had found out they were queer; most were more or less effeminate young men living on hustling, panhandling, shoplifting and other petty crimes.
When those kids in the night between Friday 27 June and Saturday 28 started hearing rumors that the police maybe was trying to close the Stonewall Inn for good, things got explosive. Very explosive.
I want to play some Janis Joplin for y'all. It's a very well known song, "Me and Bobby McGee", and please pay attention to one of its most famous lines: "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to loose".
At rock bottom I think this is the profound social truth about why the Stonewall Riots happened...
Stonewall: the Riots
If you've watched Emmerich's movie without any other source of information you could be excused to think there was a single riot on a single night, Saturday 28 June.
But that's very far from the truth. Deputy Inspector Seymore Pine was preparing in the evening Friday 27 June for a raid on the Stonewall Inn intended to put the joint out of business for good (so the street kids got it right) and went into the bar with his men on 01:20 AM Saturday June 28. At first it looked as if Pine would have his way, making a number of arrests and ordering a paddy wagon to come and get the arrestants.
But the level of angry feelings among queer people outside the Stonewall had been continuously on the rise ever since the police entered the bar, and what probably could be considered the spark that changed the situation from frustration and anger to violent rioting was when a butch lesbian who definitely didn't want to step in to the paddy wagon violently resisted the officers and shouted to the gay men: "- Do something! Help me!".
(I can't guarantee that this is an authentic photo from the first riot night, but I hope you get the idea.)
When the paddy wagon had left, Pine soon realised that things could get really ugly. Coins and empty glass bottles were thrown at the police and Pine decided they should go inside the bar and barricade the door. The first night of rioting at the Stonewall Inn had begun.
(This is an authentic photo from the first riot night. The dyed blond beautie to the far left was Jackie Hormona, one of the wildest of the street kids.)
The second riot started late night on Saturday 28 June continuing into the early morning of Sunday 29 June, with as much and as violent rioting as in the first night.
Afternoon and evening of Sunday 29 was relatively calm, and Monday 30 June and Tuesday 1 July was even calmer, but on Wednesday 2 July the third Stonewall riot was on.
About the movie's ending.
The movie ends with a short sequence (at 1:57 and going on for about two minutes) about the first Gay Liberation March in June 1970, but the we get a number of very short sequences (about 20 seconds long each) about what happened after the first riot. I think this gets pretty confusing...
I want to look at one of these very short sequences in particular, starting at 2:00:04 and ending 2:00:23. We ses three men putting up a big sign in the eastern window of the Stonewall Inn with a text message from the Mattachine Society, and here's a photo from when the sign was recently put up:
Meanwhile we get a short sequence of two subtexts in the lower part of the film picture. The first of these subtexts states the following:
"The MATTACHINE SOCIETY pleaded with the homosexuals of the Village 'to keep peaceful conduct' after the first night of rioting."
And the second subtext states:
"But gays returned in ever increasing numbers for four more nights. By the end of 1970, hundreds of gay organizations had formed all over America."
These two subtexts in tandem with the text on the sign and showing the sign being put up gets very problematic in terms of historical factual accuracy.
First because the second subtext is the very first time that the movie mentions there was more than a single riot, and this in a very flimsy way just second before the movie ends.
Second because we know this sign was put up in the afternoon Sunday 29 June after the first two had already passed. Gay men turned out in significant numbers also on Sunday evening, but not "ever increasing" - that's mythologizing!
So my third point must be that Emmerich himself mixes up cinematic storytelling with historical factual accuracy and - hence - opens up himself for some of the shittiest criticism of the movie. I stand by my already stated position: It's a good movie, but with it's flaws.
"Not a white cis man named Danny!"
Much of the most vitriolic criticism centers on the question of the identity of the person or persons who alledgedly started the riots. This kind of criticism is illustrated in the following photo montage with its text:
"Marsha P. Johnson and Silvia Rivera, a black drag queen and a transgender women, started the Stonewall Riots. Not a whit[e] cis man named Danny!"
The text refers to the moment in the movie when the character Danny picks up a brick and throws it at a window (1:35:40), and I think it's grossly misleading and well nigh pointless for several reasons:
First: the statement presupposes that the riots were started by a single act by a single individual or a small limited number of individuals. I think Emmerich (following David Carter and other historians on this important point) does a pretty good job at showing that the basic cause of the first riot was a big mob of already very angry people already fed up with repression and police brutality.
Then several people did different angry things at almost the same time: throwing coins, glass bottles and maybe also a brick or two or three...
Following David Carter I've pointed to the violent resistance of the butch lesbian who refused to go into the paddy wagon as the spark to ignite the explosion.
But a spark isn't enough to get serious explosions. You need a powder keg: the emotions of hundreds and soon thousands of very, very, very angry young queers on Christopher Street.
Second: while Marsha unquestionably attended the first riot and was very active during the night, Silvia became part of Stonewall history only in some of the later riots. Silvia's non-apperance in the first riot has been stated by her close friends Marsha P. Johnson and Bob Kohler.
Third: Silvia and Marsha became in 1970 the co-founders of STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), one of many gay lib organizations to emerge out of the Stonewall Riots. It was an organization based on an explicitely inclusive ideology, fighting for the inclusion of gender liberation within the fabric of gay liberation, using the inclusive fashion now conveyed by the word "queer".
The point of the text under the photo montage is the opposite. It's exclusive and anti-inclusive. It's a text with the intention of excluding Danny just because he - in the writers opinion - is a white cis man.
****************************************
Well, I think it's time to end this lesson. As always there's so much more to talk about!
Wow Gorgik - brilliant, more than brilliant! A real masterpiece! The best what you have written until now!
That's history I like. It was gripping like a crime story to read your text. I liked the film as well. And sure I've seen the doentaries about the Stonewall Riots. I think as well that Roland Emmerich has made a good movie - but it is a movie, only a movie and not a doentary. I also believe that such a theme cannot totally correct treated in a time of two hours - the story must be tightened (call it "poetic license").
This story, so I believe, could be much more better reviewed in a series. Perhaps it will happen one day.
But to give this film a 3.7 on IMdB is an expression of still existing homophobia.
To all of you which have until now not watched this film - do it at once and generate you own judgement.
For this GREAT article Gorgik - you really should get a big KISS. Thank you!!!!
Wow Gorgik - brilliant, more than brilliant! A real masterpiece! The best what you have written until now!
That's history I like. It was gripping like a crime story to read your text. I liked the film as well. And sure I've seen the doentaries about the Stonewall Riots. I think as well that Roland Emmerich has made a good movie - but it is a movie, only a movie and not a doentary. I also believe that such a theme cannot totally correct treated in a time of two hours - the story must be tightened (call it "poetic license").
This story, so I believe, could be much more better reviewed in a series. Perhaps it will happen one day.
But to give this film a 3.7 on IMdB is an expression of still existing homophobia.
To all of you which have until now not watched this film - do it at once and generate you own judgement.
For this GREAT article Gorgik - you really should get a big KISS. Thank you!!!!
Awww, Shelter, you know I like to get big kisses :-* from cute boys :cheers:
Thanks for the appreciation!
I think two of the docus ("Before Stonewall" 1984, "After Stonewall" 1999) have been posted on GH, but not as far as know the latest, "Stonewall Uprising" 2010, written by David Carter & David Heilbronner.
If there's some things in Emmerich's movie which makes me really angry, it's how he treats the older members of Mattachine Society and in particular the movies treatment of Frank E. Kameny; it's so unfair it's damn disgusting.
I think two of the docus ("Before Stonewall" 1984, "After Stonewall" 1999) have been posted on GH, but not as far as know the latest, "Stonewall Uprising" 2010, written by David Carter & David Heilbronner.
Thanks for another amazing history lesson! I have nothing to add to your comprehensive Stonewall post.
I'd like to say a few words about the IMDb movie ratings. There was a time when the IMDB movie ratings were, well, maybe not reliable, but at least useful. During the last few years, something has gone awfully wrong with the ratings. I don’t know if they have updated their algorithm or if IMDB is the victim of ''rating spam'' or whatever, but some of the ratings are completely off the wall. Just have a look at the IMDB Top 250. If you believe The Shawshank Redemption is the greatest film of all time, then you haven't seen many movies.
I strongly believe that IMDb is actually run by a bunch of deficient money-grubbing monkeys. I've noticed fake accounts, most likely studio accounts on IMDb posting nonstop trying to sell their movies over and over. IMDb ratings has completely lost credibility now, the only way to redeem their reputation is to change the algorithms they use to calculate the ratings. I have abandoned IMDB and will never ever use their service again for anything else but to see actor names or episode list and release dates.
So, guys...enjoy the movies and don't forget that the film industry is not about what other people tell you to watch, but what you want to watch.
If you are searching for a special film, don't look around - ask Haiducii, the Master of Movies. Haiducii you are the greatest thank you. Without you, so many good films or doentaries I've never learned to know. Therefore my deepest thanks and most of all for your work to do us these favours.
Thanks for another amazing history lesson! I have nothing to add to your comprehensive Stonewall post.
I'd like to say a few words about the IMDb movie ratings. There was a time when the IMDB movie ratings were, well, maybe not reliable, but at least useful. During the last few years, something has gone awfully wrong with the ratings. I don’t know if they have updated their algorithm or if IMDB is the victim of ''rating spam'' or whatever, but some of the ratings are completely off the wall. Just have a look at the IMDB Top 250. If you believe The Shawshank Redemption is the greatest film of all time, then you haven't seen many movies.
I strongly believe that IMDb is actually run by a bunch of deficient money-grubbing monkeys. I've noticed fake accounts, most likely studio accounts on IMDb posting nonstop trying to sell their movies over and over. IMDb ratings has completely lost credibility now, the only way to redeem their reputation is to change the algorithms they use to calculate the ratings. I have abandoned IMDB and will never ever use their service again for anything else but to see actor names or episode list and release dates.
So, guys...enjoy the movies and don't forget that the film industry is not about what other people tell you to watch, but what you want to watch.
You know, haiducii, when I wrote last night that Stonewall Uprising hasn't been posted on GH, I actually figured that "someone" might upload and post it. And I'm pretty sure that you figured what I had figured... I think we know each others pretty well by now...:thumbs up:
About IMDB: my central source material wasn't really the ratings, it was the users reviews (23 reviews when I looked into it) which I think is much more interesting, since you get individuals explicitely motivate their rating.
ents and ask for a license; if you and your place met the criteria you would get the coveted license.
