When Teenagers Took Over: The IMDB Forums

I'm a subscriber to IMDB Pro, just because it's easier to get around and it has industry contacts. It helps out when I'm covering film festivals, and it's pretty reasonable for a one year subscription. And yet there's just one element of it that exists in both the Pro and regular versions that just irks me...those bloody message forums.

If you've never visited the forums at IMDB...don't. It's basically an endless amount of teenagers and young adults running around to various movie and actor pages giving ignorant, uninformed opinions about the movies that they saw. Many claim to think they are true film fans yet only go see about 5-10 films a year, all of them major blockbuster flicks and seem to be obsessed with box office numbers. It pretty much goes like this:

SuperDisturbiaFan6969: OMG! I saw, like, Disturbia and it was like SO scary i like screamed out soooo much it wasn't funny
AntiMovieLover: you suck it wasn't scary ripoff of rear window ur gay
SuperDisturbiaFan6969: omg beep you i like scared out of pants mmm cookie

I'm sorry, you're not a real fan of film if all you do is come on and whine about how much something "sucked" or all you care about is if Shrek The Third will beat Spider-Man 3 in the box office. I suppose because the place is so under-moderated that all of this garbage is permitted.

A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon the movie page for Disturbia. I was adding the film to my 2007 Film List and needed a reminder on who the cinematographer was. I don't know why, but I then clicked on the message forum (probably to laugh at the teenagers who liked the film, I suppose) and not only found the same run-of-the-mill, but I also found a few threads on people who had seen the film out of frame and were seeing those "boom microphones" in the frame. "Simple framing error," I thought, "I'll explain it to them and provide a link!"

It's a basic thing, people: depending on how a film was shot, if the film showed a boom microphone or any other piece of camera equipment, the film was run out of frame in the film's projector. I wrote about this and posted a link to a British DVD/filmmaking page that proved everything I said was correct. Yet as much as I tried to explain this, absolutely no one listened and continued to blame the editors and the filmmakers for this "stupid goof", even though editing and filmmaking has nothing to do with it. The projectionist framed the film wrong. This is a FACT, and yet still no one listened.

What is going on here? Since when was someone coming along and TRYING to help understand a situation slammed down on a message forum? Then I realized that with so many people running amok here, threads get bogged down by other, more important threads, and since people have so much to track, they're spending less time about thinking before posting. Either that or they're so in love with their own opinions that they won't let anyone else's in. If that's the case, then why are they even there?

I used to run a message forum for actress Julia Stiles and 3/4 of the battle was closing all the redundant topic headers, booting stalkers and desperately trying to keep people on the topic of conversation. It was a horrible job at times, but nowhere near the scum and awfulness of this place.

If there was a way you set up the forum filter to delete anyone's post under the age of, let's say, 16 or 17, then I'm all for it. Either way, it's time for a change, to either moderate the lousy talk-back of this great website, or get rid of it altogether.

Jason
efilmcritic.com