On Film Reviewers Who Insult Filmgoers.

I like watching movies, and I like reading the reviews of people who watch movies. Sometimes, when I like a reviewer well enough, his or her opinion can spell the difference between watching or not watching a movie I'm not sure I want to see.

Now, as much as I like some film reviewers, there are others whose work I simply cannot stand to read, particularly those who hate some movies so much they feel the need to insult the people who enjoy them. As strong as my opinions can be about some movies, I recognize that at the end of the day, they are still opinions and would never try to pass them off as fact, nor would I try to take cheap shots at someone who disagreed with my opinion, but there are movie reviewers who do just that; proclaiming that people who do not agree with their (usually negative) assessment of a film are idiots.

I actually see their logic; after all, people wouldn't make films I hate like Epic Movie or Meet the Spartans if no one paid to see them, so it would make sense for me to blame the people responsible for Jason Friedberg and Aaron and Aaron Seltzer's continued employment in Hollywood by calling them out in my reviews, but truth be told it still seems to be in bad taste to me. I know better than to think I'll be changing the minds of the fans of movies I don't like by insulting them for their choice in films, so I won't bother; my only concern is giving my own opinion, which I try to form strictly upon watching the full film and without prejudgments.

Thanks to the internet the negativity is reinforced when angry fans of a given movie, who take the insults to the audience personally, start slinging venom right back at the reviewers, some of whom engage them and some of whom don't, thus giving rise to even more enmity and ill feelings in a world that already has way too much of them.

I felt pretty annoyed when some self-important fanboy took a couple of swipes at me some years back for my review of Speed Racer, a movie most of the world hated but which I still gave a chance, only to be disappointed by what I felt were oddly-staged racing sequences. I deleted his comment but the irritation lingered for quite a while, not because someone had disagreed with me, which I could certainly have lived with, but because he had the temerity to make it personal. Of course, it would have been much worse had I proclaimed "the people who like this movie are idiots" the way that troll had insinuated that I and most audiences and reviewers were idiots because we didn't agree with him.

In short, film reviewers who insult audiences are a disgrace to their profession because they aren't contributing anything to a meaningful discussion on film; they're simply trolling, baiting people to get upset with them. If their goal is to get people to stop patronizing the films they don't like then they know nothing about human nature; as a rule people don't really enjoy being told what to do, especially not by some self-important, elitist pricks.

People will like the movies they will like, and the phrase "agreeing to disagree" should be something to bear in mind, especially for people who are paid to give their opinion on a film and not its audience. Anything else is simply unprofessional.