IMDB is well known for shunning gloss and candy floss in favour of landmark cinema with substance. Its list of top user-rated movies of 2011 reinforces that fact by putting a relatively little known Iranian drama at the top of the list, and ignoring big blockbusters like Transformers: Dark of the Moon and The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 that suffered from flawed storytelling and weak scripts.

A Separation is a drama film from Iran about dissolution of marriage that has already lapped up more than a couple of dozen awards from film festivals across the world. Scorsese’s Hugo, which is a mesmerizing adventure about a boy who lives alone in a railway station, was the runners up.

IMDB also analyzed the page views of people pages to come up with STARmeter for 2011. Natalie Portman who moved audiences around the globe with her riveting performance in Black Swan was the most popular actor of 2011. The fact that her other two movies of the year – No Strings Attached and Thor, were also box office successes, also helped. In fact, 2011 was a rather eventful year for Portman who won the Oscar, got engaged, and had a baby boy in the past twelve months.

The runners-up in IMDB’s STARmeter was Portman’s Black Swan co-star Mila Kunis, who also starred in Friends with Benefits. Johnny Depp who topped the list last year, found himself at the third spot this year. Head over to IMDB for the full list.

Note: The following post was written with data available at the time of writing (12th January, 2010). The movie, ‘ 3 idiots’ is not in the Top lists anymore; it was at the time of writing.

Director Rajkumar Hirani’s Aamir Khan starrer – 3 Idiots makes it to the IMDb Top 250, ranked at #216 with a whopping rating of 8.9/10, at the time of writing. 3 Idiots is the first Indian movie to make it to the IMDb Top Chart. It’s also the first movie to be officially released and distributed on YouTube, 3 months after it’s release.

The money-spinning entertainer has been breaking box-office records right from the first day and have already swept a number of   awards and nominations. And now with the IMDb feather in it’s cap, it’s gonna’ go way much forward.

This is a clear sign of the Web making its way into the life of masses. IMDb charts consider votes from regular voters only and that means there are quite a lot active IMDb users from India who just voted a movie they loved, up the glory to the IMDb charts.

Interestingly, Abhijeet Mukherjee points out that Aamir Khan starrer blockbusters have been following a pattern. They’re all end-December releases.

• 2007 – Taare Zameen Par – Released on 21st December (nominated for Oscars)
• 2008 – Ghajini – Released on 25th December
• 2009 – 3 Idiots – Released on 25th December
• 2010 – ? :D

Update: According to devakishor on twitter, this is apparently the second movie to get into the top 250 for IMDb. An earlier Aamir Khan  starrer, Taare Zameen Par, also made it to the top 250 list. However we could not ascertain the ranking for the earlier movie, though there are some scanty reports available on the net that it was actually a part of the list. We will confirm this when we get proper news about it.

China has been on a roll when it comes to blocking websites and banning internet services. Their list of banned websites is long and their rational for doing so is questionable at best. The most recent victim of the Chinese internet filtering is the IMDB website. Amazon owned IMDB (Internet Movie DataBase) is the most popular website for movie reviews, listings and information.

China reportedly blocked IMDB over a documentary focusing on Tibet and The Dalai Lama. The documentary titled “When The Dragon Swallowed The Sun” claims to have an unprecedented inside perspective on the Tibetan community in exile. The IMDB page for the movie also contains a 3 minute video teaser for the documentary. A quick search at IMDB shows that there is a lot of other information as well about “The Dalai Lama” and “Rebiya Kadeer”, the two most popular Tibetan figures, that might have provoked Chinese authorities to take this action.

China has previously also blocked YouTube, Facebook and Flickr inside the country and just recently banned individuals from registering domains. However, most of these blocked websites can still be accessed in China using proxy servers or other tools to browse the internet anonymously.

These actions taken by the Chinese authorities can be nicely summed up in the following image by Amar Toor of Switched.com: