My primary goal here with cyberpunkreview.com is to create a knowledge asset for finding and understanding cyberpunk movies. Part of this involves actually providing decent reviews for ALL cyberpunk movies in existence (check out my thread in the Virtual Meatspace for my working list of all cyberpunk movies). The other aspect is creating relevant relationships between the movies so that their place in the genre can be understood. In pursuit of this, I have been tagging all my reviews in a number of different ways. I have broken down the various cyberpunk themes used, and have categorized the reviews through a number of ways. These lists are in the navigation frame to the right. Here’s what I’ve got so far:

Cyberpunk Themes

• Android Movies
• Bodyless AI
• Cyberchicks Kicking Butt
• Cyberpunk Horror
• Dystopic Futures
• Hacker Movies
• Man-machine Interface
• Memory Modification
• Surreal Cybepunk
• Utopia Surrounded by Poverty
• Virtual Reality (VR)

I also have the reviews grouped in a number of ways. In addition to the star rating and the decade the movie was released, I’ve identified a number of movie styles (animes, Japanese cyberpunk movies, etc.), and have created lists for movies with awesome visuals or terrific adherence to cyberpunk themes. So far, I have the following ones listed:

Cyberpunk Movie Reviews Grouped By

• Decade released
  
• Awesome Cyberpunk Themes Adherence
• Awesome Visuals
• Cyberpunk Animes
• Japanese Cyberpunk
• Star Rating (1 - 10)

I haven’t made “link” pages for them up yet, but I have additional categories, such as “Made for TV,” “Internet shorts,” “Soft-core porn cyberpunk movies,” “Good low budget movies” and “Documentaries.”

Again, the idea here is to provide an easy way to find similarities between movies. My question - is this helpful? Do I have too many categories, or conversely, am I missing some?

I’m attempting to upgrade to Wordpress 2.o (2.01 actually). Apologies in advance for any downtime or formatting issues. With any luck, everything will look peacy in just a few!

EDIT: Well, looks like most things worked swimingly (let me know if anything is amiss), aside for the extra space that has now crept in to all my reviews. Between the title and the year on all the reviews, there is now an extra space - this is NOT intentional, nor did it exist prior to the upgrade. I’m working to figure out how to remove it (easier said than done, I’m afraid), and hopefully will do so soon, as it looks horrible!

Hi all,

Some jerk in Milton, Australia had fun last night with comments, sticking random letter comments for a number of the reviews. I’ve changed the comments back to moderated, unless the system already “knows” you. Although, I don’t know how persistent this is. If you’ve placed comments before and you see your name showing up in the comments block, you should be able to comment without moderation - otherwise this will be held for me to approve.

I don’t like doing this, as I think this stifles comments, but I’m torn based on the bizarre spam (I’m off to work now and don’t want to return to a myriad more of these). Hopefully this weekend I’ll look for a better way to do comments. Apologies for the switch.

I’ve put together a list of about 140 cyberpunk movies, which include animes, movies and TV shows. I’ve posted the list of cyberpunk movies in the meatspace. I’m sure I’ve missed putting a couple obvious ones on there (I just noticed I missed puttin up Total Recall a few hours ago), so if you see them, tell me.

More importantly, if there is something obscure that I am not aware of, I’d really like to find out about it. Help me out, will ya? Also, if you have questions about any of those listed that I haven’t posted reviews for yet that’s about 80 of them), feel free to ask.

The forums are up now and are linked in the Navigation bar. Access and post to the Virtual Meatspace to your hearts content! This is a great place to ask about movies I haven’t yet put reviews up. I have at least 40+ more to go, and have generally left the popular ones like the Matrix movies and so forth out so far. Chances are you all have seen those and have already made up your minds, so I’ve been concentrating mostly on more obscure ones (not all are obscure, obviously).

Also, again, I am looking for other reviewers, especially for other types of cyberpunk media. I would LOVE it if one of you cyberpunk book experts would agree to do something similar for the book world, or the Manga/graphic novel folks, or the art types, etc.

In other news, I’ve moved the site development posts to the right side under Other Blog entries.

Yes, the top graphic doesn’t line up right now and looks stupid with the tag line hanging out. Please bare with me. I’m working on this. Don’t be surprised if you see the top and layout change on a pretty regular basis today.

UPDATE: Please tell me if in viewing this page, the header graphic doesn’t line up with the left side of the green navigation table. I’m viewing this in Firefox (my preferred) and in Internet Explorer, and it seems to line up right. I need to know if this looks hoaky in other browers.

And yes, I’m still trying to figure out how to eliminate the space between the header graphic and the navbar, not to mention the space on the top of the graphic. Also, I have credits for the header graphic listed in my footer.

Just a note on my Japanese Cyberpunk reviews. I’ve decided that in order to review these properly, I need to show some of the truly graphic shots. So far I’ve done this with I.K.U. and the just-updated Tetsuo, and I will certainly do this with Rubber’s Lover (review not up yet) and others as I review them. Why? Many reasons:

1. You really cannot understand what Japanese cyberpunk is about without seeing the visuals. The “no boundaries” aspect of these films involve the most intense visuals one can imagine. To me this means my reviews are incomplete unless I include the more graphic ones.
2. Chances are, most of you will never decide to watch these films. The textual reviews on the first page just don’t do them justice.
3. Worse, if you do decide to get them, and I just give you a taste (on the first page of the review) without really giving you a sense of what to expect, you really won’t be prepared for what you get. By showing you the more explicit pictures, you’ll know what you’re buying.

Again, I’m guessing for most, you will find these images beyond the pale. But, um, that’s the intent. I’m not trying to glorify what’s depicted, but I do think it’s necessary to see these if you really want to understand the genre as expressed in movies. I will clearly identify that these type of images are behind the link, so you won’t be surprised. So if you strongly object to these images (for a variety of very valid reasons), then the easy answer is don’t click on them.

And BTW, for me to decide to spend the time to do detailed screencaptures of a movie, the movie has to rank at least as high as 6 stars. I simply am not going to spend the time doing this on movies that are substandard. This rules out Tetsuo II: Bodyhammer, for instance.

I am slowly putting up the functionality that I’m hoping will work here.

I need your feedback on the movie navigation: OK, I’ve added a list at the bottom of each of individual movie pages that links to all the movies with the same “category tags” as the movie you are viewing. To get to this quickly, I’ve also added a link titled “See movies similar to this one” at the end of the review that takes you down to it, and another link at the bottom of the page that takes you back to the top.

But I need to know - Does this stuff work on your browsers? And is it intuitive?

• Common, I see that over 700 different people have come here so far in under the two weeks I’ve been up. Help me by commenting here if you like it or hate it! Thanks

Here are two representative pages you can try the links at the bottom. One has links to a second page with more screen caps. Does this seem intuitive or no?

• Review with a second page link
• Review with no second page

30 Movies up now: OK, I’m close to a third of the way done More…

Movie Review Status: So I’ve started getting reviews up. I have lots more reviews to upload (like 30-40 or so), but not all are in wonderful shape. I’m wondering whether I should get the reviews up first so that the movie link structure is more complete, and then just update the reviews as I go, or whether I should spend more time and get higher quality reviews up at a slower pace. Currently I’m leaning towards a slower pace - maybe 1 - 3 a day or so.

Site Development Status: I STILL have a ton of work to do, both in look and feel, and in functionality.

• At a minimum, I need to display some more of the categories on the left hand side, so that people have access to things like “surreal cyberpunk movies, android movies, animes, etc.
• An awesome graphic artist (Budo) has agreed to do a header graphic. Hopefully I can talk Budo into doing reviews as well.
• If you look at a single movie post, and go all the way to the bottom, you’ll see a set of categories that that movie resides in. I’ve been trying to figure out how to move that over to the sidebar for single posts, but up until now, I’ve been too stupid to figure this out. Then again, maybe it works better on the bottom. Maybe I just figure out a way to put a hyperlink anchor to take the user down to there.
• I have to put a list of credits in the footer to list all the wonderful plugins I’m using
• I need to decide what to put in the header. I think I’m going to remove the movies by decade link and just leave this on the right, unless someone tells me this is a bad idea.
• Currently, I have my site using the default setting for comments, which is “moderated.” Is this a good idea? I hear spam is a monster. Hmm…I may keep this also unless someone tells me otherwise.

Movie Categories: Currently I have one category grouping called “cyberpunk themes” that has the following sub-categories:

I have another category called “Style” with the following subcategories:

I have a few problems here. First off, I’m not sure there is enough differentiation between the categories. To me these seem different, but I can certainly imagine a list with all of these from both categories included. Second, I feel these may not cover everything. For some movie reviews, I find myself not putting anything in one of the two categories - this makes me think that maybe I’m missing something. Most likely it’s the “cheesy but sometimes decent” middle movies that are too good to qualify as B cyberpunk, but aren’t good enough to be called good. The other easy example is only having one category for anime, versus having say “anime movies” and “OAV animes.”

Finally, whatever categories I come up with, I want these to be able to work for other cyberpunk genre stuff like books, graphic novels, and potentially music. I fully get though that the cyberpunk culture stuff will need its own category, as will related scientific fields.

Thoughts?