I remember a few years ago spending hours and hours on the Rotten Tomatoes MD forum. Blu posts that this has now been 'torpedoed'.

This is very bad news because the postings there contained a lot of information, but also told a fascinating story of how the MD community online has grown it's understanding from when we all walked out of the cinemas in 2001 going WTF?

Is there anyway to access the historic RT forum?

It's a real shame. They did some kind of software upgrade that dumped all the threads from all the individual film forums into the 'general discussion' forum, and didn't warn anyone in advance as far as I know. Certainly not the MD board. The silver lining (if there is one) is:

1. The GD forum is still searchable and all the threads are still there in the dark recesses if you know what you're looking for and can hit upon the right combination of keywords.

2. There are hundreds of threads linked on the pages of the main site here thanks to Bob which will give you the background discussions to the extracts that make up the content of the pages.

Here's the GD board, tho I think you will have to have registered to search it.

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/vine/forumdisplay.php?f=2

I wondered if the Wayback Machine had archived it, and you can get to various versions of the forums indexes on RT (for example here: http://web.archive.org/web/200508280250 ... .com/vine/) but if you scroll down and find the MD forum link it says it hasn't archived that board.



Gone forever in its original form, sadly. But at least we have the site and forums here to keep things going.

Thanks Blu, that is a real shame.. I think I'm still in denial that it's actually true! Damn!

I guess the number of people still actively discussing this is tailing off. Even back in 2005 most of the threads were pretty old and I felt I'd missed the boat - that a lot of the work had been done.

BTW forgive me for being off topic but I can't find an equivalent collective effort to come to terms with Inland Empire. Is there one, or is it simply too big a hill to climb?

Siku wrote:BTW forgive me for being off topic but I can't find an equivalent collective effort to come to terms with Inland Empire. Is there one, or is it simply too big a hill to climb?

Too big a hill to climb? Why make a mountain out of a molehill?

My opinion aside, clearly IE did not come close to resonating with fans as MD did - thus the lack of significant discussion of the film speaks for itself.

The IMDb board for IE was still hopping last time I checked, but (at the risk of alienating any posters wandering in from over there) mainly people jostling and shouting to be heard in a bid to spread their personal interpretations rather than in the spirit of idea sharing and building - as was the ethos of RT, generally.

How about each of us just post the link here when we find it.....and perhaps replicate the thread to archive them here....ESP the more informative ones....

Over time we will slowly get a good collection of link replicated over here.