Is there a site to track showings of my to-see films?

January 4, 2008 5:15 PM

Is there a site that will enable me to compile a list of movies I want to see and notify me if any of them show in a configurable fairly wide area? Yahoo Movies lets me build a to-see list, but I have to laboriously plug in a bunch of zip codes for each film (because its range is very narrow). For example, I've only seen LOTR on DVD, and every once in a while a theater revives them as a special thing and I miss it. And, just generally, I'm interested in obscure indie flicks that release only sporadically, and I lack the patience to search each title every few days. Now.....if there were such a site that could do the above plus track showings of my top-predicted films at MOVIELENS, that'd be great (but way too much to hope for). FYI, movielens (movielens.umn.edu) is an awesome groupware prediction engine.
posted by jimmyjimjim to computers & internet (7 comments total)

I have never come across such a site, but damn, I'd find one usefull.

Lazyweb: Go!

(on second thought, it would probably only work in major metropolitan regions, and require a movie theater API that, at present, i don't think exists in any serious format aside from the exceptionally ugly hack of scraping IMDB, google showtimes, etc.)
posted by Freen at 5:55 PM on January 4, 2008

google showtimes...hm. Never really surfed it. it's vastly better than yahoo (non-surprising), AND it has wider coverage. Still no auto-alerts, but a lot easier to track down a film.

I know a few people at google...may try to suggest a watchlist and/or alert function.
posted by jimmyjimjim at 8:20 PM on January 4, 2008

Whenever I hear, read, or see anything about a yet-to-be-released movie I know I'll want to see, I add it to my queue in Netflix. Netflix usually has the movies in its database months before the films are released. Then I know I'll receive it on DVD if I forget to see it in the theater.

Movies.com has RSS feeds for current films and upcoming film release dates.

If you use Google Calendar, you can subscribe to one of Google's public calendars that adds film releases to your calendar. Then you can set it up to send you reminders via text message, email, and/or popup.
posted by HotPatatta at 11:01 PM on January 4, 2008

Subscribe to this calendar URL in Google:
http://www.ryguy.com/gcal/MovieRetriever/movies.ics
posted by HotPatatta at 11:02 PM on January 4, 2008

Thanks, guys, but I'm not so ahead of the curve that I'm watching for lots of movies that haven't released yet. What I want to do is catch movies already in release as they get to ME...or, even more typically, movies that have been out for a while which I haven't had a chance to see and are in the long tail of disappearing -- I want to chase down their last appearance before going away. I guess that's the main thing, though such a queue would also help me track re-appearances (e.g. in repertory theaters) of titles I'm sorry I missed.

I hate to resort to DVDs for anything but docs, fwiw...not the same!
posted by jimmyjimjim at 6:44 AM on January 5, 2008

I've had a lot of luck with Zap2it.com's movie showtime search - granted, it won't be alerting you, but it will show you when old classics are being shown again (and midnight movies).
posted by Lizc at 3:50 PM on January 7, 2008

Thanks, Lizc. unfortunately, the "show movies X miles from your location" feature calculates miles as the crow flies, leading to a good bit of noise (I'm near a large body of water). But, still, it's good to have a great big list of individual movie titles to fish through!
posted by jimmyjimjim at 6:24 PM on January 7, 2008