The IMDB disconnect

So I think it's weird when you go to look up a violent, potentially haunting movie like 28 Years Later on
IMDB, and this is what you're greeted with:

The stars of the movie goofing around as part of some IMDB interview series that IMDB believes should be the first thing you see when you come to the page.

I'm sure these people had some amount of fun making the movie, and it bonded them such that they enjoy each other's company quite a bit. I'm sure they developed inside jokes and good chemistry, and doing press is the last time they'll be together in the same combination, intermingling a certain sentimentality with their fun.

But this image in particular is out of sync with this movie, and I don't know that having it there is the best way of promoting the movie. (Acknowledging, of course, that this is a composite shot of a bunch of different moments, not a group photo.)

Not that IMDB is in the business of promotion, necessarily, though the cast, writer and director would not do these interviews if they didn't think the interviews would have a measurable impact on box office.

The counterargument is that IMDB users are, by their nature, at a level of cinematic sophistication a cut above your average moviegoer. There are many people who watch two dozen or more movies a year, who may not even know what IMDB is. They don't care who directed something and the names of the actors, and especially don't care about all the other cast and crew information available on IMDB. They just want a good story and a fun time at the movies.

So you aren't trying to make an everyday horror movie fan more excited about seeing 28 Years Later on IMDB. The horror fans coming to this page are probably coming because they've already seen the movie, and they want to know the name of that one actor who played that one guy.

Still, I think the far better use of this slot is for the movie's trailer -- which, after the movie's period of newness passes, will probably be the long-term content appearing in this space, to the right of the movie's main details on the movie's home page. Given that the trailer is designed to give you a feel for the sort of movie this is, it won't run the risk of making a zombie movie -- a zombie horror, not a zombie comedy -- seem like a constant yukfest involving the cast and crew pulling silly faces. 

I is for Incel?

A couple years ago I wrote a post about how The Shawshank Redemption was the #1 movie on IMDB, and how that made me self-conscious about my own affection for it. I may not have used these exact words at the time I wrote the post (I could go back and read it I guess), but what I meant to say at the time was that Shawshank was the equivalent of an arthouse movie for comic book nerds. Or maybe not so much an arthouse movie, since the people I am broadly generalizing about would have no use for the arthouse in this broad generalization I’m making. But instead, maybe it was a movie they knew counted as a “good movie” that didn’t have men in capes in it. Even comic book nerds being broadly generalized about know that they can’t only like movies with men in capes.

But now I’m wondering if my preconceived notions about IMDB users has a darker edge than I originally thought.

If you haven’t heard, Joker crossed into the top ten movies of all time on IMDB over the weekend. It must have been a brief incursion only, as maybe more people saw and rated the movie to bring its average score down a bit, perhaps even as a reaction to the news that it had reached that height. But it’s still knocking on the door of that chart’s hallowed top ten at #11, with an average user rating of 8.8/10.

I’m not sure how IMDB does its calculations, but I’d guess there’s a greater likelihood of a film nudging into the top ten based on an initial burst of enthusiasm, one that is typically tempered over time by a more measured approach to ranking. Or, in other words, the movie starts getting seen by the people who are not inclined to love it, and they rank it accordingly. If Joker is anywhere near this ranking two years from now, I will be very surprised.

But for it to even make it near or close to the top ten at any point in its existence means that it has to be a pretty acclaimed movie, right?

Er, no, actually.

I learned about it reaching this peak before I saw it on Saturday afternoon, and when I didn’t like it so much (that opinion may get even more negative the more I sit with it), I figured it must be yet another “me problem.” As with films like the recent Ad Astra (don’t get me started), I felt like I must have seen a very different movie than the vast majority of people.

Actually, many people – or many critics, anyway – saw the same movie I did.

Joker has a fairly lethargic 59 on Metacritic. That breaks down to 32 positive reviews, 15 mixed reviews and 11 negative reviews. So more positive than negative – hence the 59 – but only six more positive reviews than those characterized as mixed or negative combined. And even with some perfect scores of 100 mixed in there, it looks like the Venice Film Festival was more the anomaly than what we should expect from other awards bodies as the year goes on.

IMDB is a different story. On IMDB, Joker would have an 88, using approximately the same scale as Metacritic.

So that begs the question: Why is IMDB’s user base so different from the user base of critics?

I’ve suggested what I think it might be in the provocative subject I’ve used for this post. Is this, indeed, the Incel Movie Data Base?

For you to follow me on this one, we have to make what I acknowledge are a couple stretches in our logic. First we have to say that comic book nerds are disproportionately represented among IMDB’s users, which may not be the case. There’s reason to suggest it may be, though. Even 11 years after its release, another film featuring the Joker, The Dark Knight, is still #4 on IMDB, behind only Shawshank and the first two Godfathers. Two Lord of the Rings movies appearing in the top 12 bolsters the notion that people steeped in nerd culture are heavily represented.

Then we have to make the assumption that some significant percentage of the people who like Joker, like it because they feel like it is a call to violence for incels. Incels, of course, being short for “involuntary celibates,” who are considered to be a group of people prone to shooting up a school or shopping mall because the girl they like doesn’t like them. Of course, not everyone who’s unlucky with the ladies is going to shoot up a mall, but people who characterize themselves as incels are probably a lot more likely to do so. That it incites us to violence is not the only or probably not even the primary reason a person would like Joker, but to say it is no factor at all is probably not correct either, and to say the targets of this incitement are not incels is to overlook some of the ways the film is coded.

Then you have to say that there is a meaningful crossover between people who think of themselves as comic book nerds and people who think of themselves as incels. There would be some, of course, but as with anything, it’s more of a “few bad apples” scenario.

If you do go with me on all this, though, my query about the Incel Movie Data Base makes a little more sense.

Of course, as someone who doesn’t like Joker and thinks it puts bad things into the world, I’m going to question the perspective of a person who does – or their willingness to overlook some of its more problematic elements. But it could be very rational, non-violent thinkers who find the film’s filmmaking or acting first rate (they can be), or instead see a criticism of fatcats like Donald Trump. That’s in there too, which makes the messaging of this film ambiguous to say the least. Although I like it when a film can be interpreted differently by different people, in this case it feels sort of dangerous. It feels like another way it's difficult to grasp an "absolute truth" in this day and age.

But it's not a bully like Donald Trump who gets a gun and kills a bunch of people, his comments about shooting someone on Fifth Avenue notwithstanding. It's the victim of that bully. 

As I wade further and further into this post I realize I am not going to end with a totally coherent thought that I can fully defend. I suppose it takes a piece of art with some value to spin a critical thinker in circles, so they can never fully articulate their thoughts, and have to go back to just trusting the feeling they get from the art.

So Joker is that kind of art: provocative, conversation starting. Art like that should always exist.

But if Joker is engendering passionate fans, it hardly seems likely that they are most passionate about Joaquin Phoenix’s acting, or how Todd Phillips sets up a camera. It seems likely that the passion is coming from the film’s core ideas. And I feel like the uprising of the Joker is more a glorification of the loners who always felt that they were misunderstood, who might think about going to get a gun, than a criticism intended for people who feel forgotten and left behind by the rich. That second idea is put forward on a narrative level, but I don’t think it goes any deeper than that.

Not as deep as the accumulation of hate and disgust felt by mentally ill victims who see no other solution than to rise up and kill everybody.

That's not my reductive view of people with mental illness. It's the movie's. 

Incels, your hero scares me, and your apparent quantity scares me even more.

And I really hope I’m getting all this wrong.

IMDB's outlier

The 50 highest ranked movies by the users of IMDB reads like a typical list of the usual suspects -- The Usual Suspects actually being one of them, at #25.

And then there's the one that comes in at #38, which I suspect most of the fans of the other 49 have only heard of because of its inclusion on this list.

It's Eric Toledano and Olivier Nakache's The Intouchables, a heartwarming French dramedy from 2011 starring mostly people that IMDB's heavily American viewership have never heard of, which would also describe the film's co-directors. Or so we would think it was heavily American, if The Intouchables didn't prove to the exception to that rule.

I myself had actually heard of these directors, as I have seen their follow-up film, 2014's Samba, which also stars the outrageously charming and charismatic Omar Sy. But before yesterday, The Intouchables was one of only two of the IMDB top 50 I had yet to see, the other being The Green Mile just behind it at #40.

In fact, I'd guess most viewers would figure this as a French remake of Brian De Palma's 1987 film, The Untouchables, about Elliot Ness and Al Capone. The two have nothing to do with one another, of course. This is a story of a French billionaire paralyzed from the neck down, who invites one of the least likely candidates for the job -- a Senegalese immigrant with a healthy distrust of authority and a wicked sense of humor -- to be his arms and legs, as it were.

Having now finally seen the movie, I can understand why its broad populism would have earned it a place on this list -- but only just. There are certainly far more effective crowd pleasers that are nowhere near this list, and that were made in Hollywood, seemingly making them far more likely to climb a list featuring the likes of Star Wars, The Dark Knight and The Godfather in the top ten. In fact, its 8.5 star rating makes The Intouchables the fifth highest ranked foreign language film on IMDB, behind only Seven Samurai, City of God (itself an unusual inclusion), Life is Beautiful and Spirited Away (though many were likely to have experienced this last with an English language dub). But even if we narrow it down to French language films based on real-life paralyzed people, I'd like to see The Diving Bell and the Butterfly a lot higher than this.

So what, did a bunch of French viewers just stuff the ballot boxes for what became the country's second biggest box office hit of all time?

Something like that must be the case, but if so, why don't we see that phenomenon occur more with Bollywood films? We already know that Indians represent a powerful voting bloc on IMDB, as more than 44,000 of them engaged in a movement to make a movie called Gunday the all-time lowest rated on IMDB -- not because of the film's astounding ineptitude, but because it had some political affiliations that they found objectionable. Yet their best efforts have only managed to push a nearly three-hour 2009 comedy called 3 Idiots to #113 on IMDB. (For reference, Deadpool is already up at #78).

A little googling might discover the answer for me, but for now I'm just interested in musing about these statistical anomalies. They always fascinate me. Some movies' successes in an open and democratic forum like this are just kind of inexplicable, as are some movies' total failures. At #67, Citizen Kane seems to have claimed a particularly low spot on this list, since it is almost always in the top five of any critics' list of all-time great movies. Though that said, Vertigo -- the current title holder for best film of all time in the 2012 Sight & Sound poll -- is three slots lower than that at #70. If you go four slots lower, you get 1957's Witness for the Prosecution, a film I've heard of but am not even really embarrassed about not having seen. Before clicking on it just now, I could not even have told you its director (Billy Wilder) or any of its stars (Tyrone Power, Marlene Dietrich, Charles Laughton). Who can explain it? Not I.

As I said earlier, though, I can explain the appeal of The Intouchables. It's a warm and fun movie. Still, it's a bit broad and does almost nothing unexpected, other than delivering us an absolutely joyous Omar Sy performance. Given how predictable it is, I gave it "only" 3.5 stars on Letterboxd.

I guess people's love for this movie is one of its intouchable aspects.