Movies.com eaten alive by Fandango

While much of the Web progresses into version 2.0 with user-generated sites over taking the stodgy, old paradigm of central control, some mergers and acquisitions still resemble the good ole days of brick and mortar business. One of my favorite sources for movie information and pre-release buzz has been chewed and spit out into an unrecognizably ugly ticket-selling monstrosity.
Movies.com, formerly owned by Disney, was recently bought by Fandango. In an attempt to crowd out movietickets.com Fandango bought movies.com hoping to incorporate its 1.9 million users, and it's generic, easy-to-search url. But even that goal has been poorly handled.
Fandango deleted all of movies.com's users' accounts and posted a message that they all have to come over to the (dark) side and create Fandango accounts.

Even worse, like a classic Gordon Gecko dismantling, Fandango removed all the writers, features, well-written content and industry buzz from the Web site and turned it into a fandango.com clone with a look barely better than an amature Dreamweaver skeleton.
What happened to Mike's buzz Bin? I read that weekly feature every Wednesday since 2003. What about the "8 Great _____" series that provided sharp lists and rankings of different film genres? In fact, the site no longer employs any film reviewers (all film comments are blurbs by Joe Schmo users) nor provides any function besides listing movie times (I can get that on google), posting some trailers (everywhere else on the internet) and selling tickets (that's why Fandango already existed, so I could avoid it completely).

If Fandango had any brains at all it would have left the site intact and just put links to its ticket selling services all over the damn place.

Until then, I'm never visiting one of my old, favorite Web sites again.
If anyone else's nerd rage is firing like mine you can shoot off a disgruntled email here: moviesfeedback@fandango.com

UPDATE
Apparently fandango has computers answering its hate mail about Movies.com.
Here is the response i received:

From: Jennifer Baker

We appreciate your feedback. We’re taking your opinion into consideration as Movies.com continues to evolve. We’re still working to make updates to the site and work through technical difficulties so please check back soon.

In the meantime, if you’re looking for an archive of Dave White’s past reviews, you can find it here: http://www.movies.com/ReviewsArchiveIndex.aspx. New DVD Releases and a list of this week’s Best Sellers can be found here: http://www.movies.com/DVDLanding.aspx. If you would like to add the RSS feed, you can find it here: http://www.movies.com/rss/. For weekly Box Office totals, you can go here: http://www.fandango.com/default.aspx.

Thanks for letting us know your thoughts. Your input is valuable as we move forward.

-- The Fandango Team

________________________________________

Wait, so is this from "Jennifer Baker" or the "Fandango team"? Is Jennifer Baker a real person, or a computer named Jennifer? Anyway, I love automated responses. I'm turning into that guy who writes more and more angry letters to the editor of the local newspaper as he becomes more and more senile.