Damning with faint praise

I know that Wikipedia is written by countless dedicated volunteers who may not all have the same editorial sense, but the content is remarkably consistent overall, isn't it?

Occasionally, though, you get sentences like this one:

"Opening the Virginia Film Festival, Big Stone Gap (film) was ranked among the top 250 grossing women-directed films of 2014."

I messaged this to a friend of mine telling him he didn't need to know the context of the sentence to find it funny, but that's because I didn't want to bother to write it all out at the time. But I'm happy to tell you.

I was researching the director Adriana Trigiani, who directed the film I just reviewed, Then Came You, which opened here in Australia today but which opened in the U.S. last October. Turns out she's primarily a novelist, though she did direct one feature and one documentary before now. 

The documentary was Queens of the Big Time from 1996, which Wikipedia tells me was quite good. It's Big Stone Gap, though, that concerns us today.

I'm not going to ding it for opening the Virginia Film Festival. I'm sure that's a fine festival.

No, it was the attempt to big-up the movie by talking about its box office performance that made me laugh.

In 2014, we'd be lucky if there were even 50 films released that were directed by women, let alone the 250 implied by that comment. That this film, or any film, should be lauded for finding itself among the most profitable 250 movies directed by women in a single release year is just absurd. 

It makes me wonder if the person who wrote Trigiani's Wikipedia page was intentionally having a laugh at her. I had to, of course, check Wikipedia to see what that box office take was, and it was barely over a million dollars -- worldwide.

Taken out of context, that may not seem too shabby, but the context here is important. The film also stars Ashley Judd, Patrick Wilson and Whoopi Goldberg. Seems like getting the fans of each of those people, who are not an inconsiderable number, to contribute only about $333,000 apiece is not a particularly tall order.

Trigiani is a novelist, and Then Came You suggests she should probably stick to that. And without stars Kathie Lee Gifford (!) and Craig Ferguson, I probably wouldn't have praised it at all, faint though my praise may have been.