It has happened to all of us. There is a movie that you saw many years ago, possibly in your youth, that lives in the edges of your brain, always dodging your attempts to apprehend it and find its exact name. Don’t worry, all may not be lost. If you follow these methods, it is very likely that you will end up finding them. But first, an effort is necessary: you need information! As much as you can! The more things you remember about the movie in question, the better chance you have of finding it.
How to know the name of a movie
As I said, before you start using the methods to find that movie you don’t remember, you should have as much information as possible. Every piece of your memory serves us. The more consistent and precise, the better. Think with all your might: What year or so is your film from? What gender? Do you remember any actor who appears in it? Can you hear any snippets of the soundtrack? Do you recognize any songs? Are you able to describe, even a fragment of any of the scenes? THINK! Write everything you remember somewhere and start using the methods below. They range from the simplest to the most complicated and cumbersome. If one doesn’t work for you, move on to the next.
Actors Method
Let’s start with the simplest method if you meet the main requirement: remember the name of one of the actors in the movie. If so, you just have to turn to the artist’s page on IMDB or Wikipedia itself, to find the complete list of movies in which he has appeared. Go through the list until you find the movie you are looking for. Easy as counting to three!
Method of Music
Similar to the “Actors’ Method”, but with songs. If you remember a song that was in the movie or even the band that the song belongs to, there’s a good chance you’ll find it by doing a simple search. To give an easy example: if you search for “ Aerosmith Movie ”, without the quotes, the answer to your question will appear among the first results. Armageddon!
What is my Movie Method
What is my Movie is a site that serves exactly to resolve these types of doubts. In other words, knowing the name of a movie that you don’t remember. It uses a special algorithm and indexes movie sites specifically, so it avoids Google’s junk results. It requires you to ask, in English, for the movie you are looking for with the details you remember. In my experience, it only works if the movie in question is minimally known, but you can give it a try before moving on to the next method, where we start using somewhat more cumbersome solutions.
List Method
If you still can’t find the movie, it’s best to turn to the lists created by the infinite websites and YouTube compilation videos. For example, if you are sure that the movie you are looking for has vampires, the type of search, then, would be Movies about vampires (yes, IN ENGLISH, because there is much more accurate information in that language, if you don’t know English, use Google Translate ). Thus, usually, you will get a lot of lists with several similar movies and you just have to enter each one and see if the one you are looking for is on any of those pages. Generally, sites like Ranker, Wikipedia, and IMDB user lists tend to have the most relative titles, so start with those. You lose nothing by trying!
Single Word Method
This method is useful as one of the last instances, and it works when you don’t remember more than loose details about the movie in question. Again, we will use Google to try to unravel the unknown. In my case, I always use the few clippings I have in my memory and I write them IN ENGLISH. For example Movie witch children mouse comedy. Loose little words that, if you google right now, will tell you the movie I’m referring to.
Sometimes it can happen to you that you get a movie that is not the one you are looking for, but the details you remember are still true. So, just use the minus sign (-) to remove that movie from the results and refine your search. For example, using the previous case (and if the movie is not “The Witches”): Movie witch children mouse comedy -“The Witches”. The more loose memories you put in, the more you will refine the search, although sometimes they can also work against you. The best thing is to try, putting some, removing others, etc. Or maybe you’ll have better results if you search for a movie about witches who turns children into a mouse, threading a more coherent search, it depends. At this point, everything is trial and error.
IMDB keywords method
Well, when all else fails, it’s time to get serious and turn to one of the most useful (and hidden) tools in the Internet Movie Data Base: movie search by keyword combination. It is a very powerful search engine, which works by grouping “tags”. Similar to single words, but with predefined words that group together as you select them, helping IMDB find the movie you’re looking for.
The best of all is that, in addition to the tags, it allows you to refine the search with other parameters such as the genre of the film, the period of time in which you think it may have come out, the score it may have if it was direct to TV or was released in the cinema and other similar things. The tags are also pretty specific, like: twist ending, end credits scene, casual sex, people smoking cigarettes, and hundreds more like that, all right to the point. Undoubtedly, a crucial tool for finding the name of that movie you don’t remember.
Social Media Method
Collective intelligence at your service! If you have Facebook, look for a group related to the film genre of the movie you are looking for. You will find that there are groups for all tastes: horror, comedy, science fiction, action, etc. Possibly you will get dozens of results, so it is better that you subscribe only to those with the largest number of members. Once inside the group, ask your question about the movie you don’t remember giving as much detail as possible. Genre, year, characters, actions, a scene you remember, etc. Be as descriptive as possible, and as polite as possible. In these groups, there are many people (like a server) who like to elucidate these unknowns and will be at your service. Yes, in my case, I only do it if the person asks politely and shows real interest, answering the questions they ask and following the conversations that may come out of their consultation. Nobody likes to waste time on ingrates.
Method of leaving a comment in how2do
If all else fails, well… you can use the comments in this article and I will try to help you. My specialties are horror, science fiction, and fantasy movies, but I’m also good at comedies and action movies. Dramatic or historical cinema, almost nothing. Use this option only if you have tried all the previous ones and they have not worked for you and follow the same etiquette that I describe in the “Social media method”. If you don’t, consider your comment ignored.
Conclusion
Personally, by following these methods I manage to get hold of the name of the infinities of movies that I have seen, but that I do not remember, in 90% of the cases. There are always obscure films that are almost unknown, that one has seen by chance, that continue to be elusive and resist the steps cited here. Luckily, that was not the case that inspired me to share my search process: it happened to me that I remembered having seen the movie of a bald boy who used a potion to make his hair grow, but whose name was impossible for me to pin down. . Using the “Single Word Method” I found the film in a couple of tries. Look what movie it was!
