16 Days of Birthday, Day 8: Social Networking and Movies

I feel as if I have done way too many posts in this marathon which are just lists. So why not ramble on a bit today? After all, it's Sunday, there's a 'snow storm' headed our way, and I'm very tired. Therefore, rambling sounds good to me.

Anyone remember when I did this post back in May? It was all about the war between Avatar, the highest grossing movie of all time, and The Hurt Locker, the little war movie that 'robbed' it of the Best Picture Oscar. But that wasn't the only war I talked about in the post. There was a bit of hate going around for The Hurt Locker, which came in the form of Facebook 'like' pages. Which just goes to show that people now have a new platform to unleash their hate towards a movie on...even though it is so so wrong.

Okay, so you all know me. I'm a teenage girl, on the cusp of reaching the legal age, who spends a fair amount of her time lurking around the internet. The essential websites I can be found on most are: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr and of course, Blogger. Now these are all websites that don't deal with movies specifically, unlike IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes. In those places, it's perfectly natural to unleash a bit of negativity towards a movie, because those sites are based around people's opinions towards a movie. Blog sites are made for opinions too. Most of the movie-related comments on YouTube are spammers anyway, going on about "how great the van dropping off the bridge in a layer of dream" was in Legion. Twitter is pretty good to the movie lovers. Facebook is the one social networking site I have a real problem with.

Okay, maybe I just have a problem with those damn 'like' pages. Like, seriously? Why would you even 'like' a page just to say you hate a movie? Actually, why would you even go to all that effort to make a page like that? I think it's just ridiculous.

Let's go back to the Avatar and The Hurt Locker war on Facebook. I'll start by saying this: I like The Hurt Locker a lot more than Avatar. Yes, that probably makes me one of those 'film snobs' in the Facebook like page maker's eyes. But I do have to agree that Avatar did something great with film-making, and I guess the fact that it lost Best Picture to a tiny movie that most people hadn't even heard of was pretty...er...surprising. However, I can't imagine these Facebook page makers would even really care that much about the Oscars. They only cared in this situation because they'd never heard of The Hurt Locker (and probably hadn't seen it before the Oscars) and pretty much everyone on Earth has seen Avatar. There are a lot of people who love Avatar to death, and everything else just looked inferior compared to it. So no, its not a matter of 'hating' The Hurt Locker itself. Its a matter of resenting the fact that the cat got beaten by the mouse...or something like that.

On the flipside, Tumblr is a site which tends to over-love a movie. When I first got myself an account on there, it was back in July last year, which just so happens to be when Inception was first released. You think I was obsessed with this movie? You should have seen the people on Tumblr! First came the many memes...the 'Strutting Leo' (as pictured to the right), the 'squinting Leo', the 'we need to go deeper'...the list is just endless. Some of them were really funny, I admit, but they quickly got old. The next thing was the many 'ships'. Now, if you're not up with the 'hip kids on the internet' lingo, a 'ship' is a relationship between two characters in the same movie that is endorsed by a person on the internet. In Inception, there are a lot of characters, so there were plenty of 'ships' to go around. There were the generic ones like Cobb and Mal, Arthur and Ariadne, and Yusuf and his cats. But the ship that was endorsed the most was one between Arthur and Eames. Out of this ship came many gifs, many graphics involving the two and even rather graphic artworks. You know, I've never seen anything like the Arthur and Eames ship. It spiralled out of control, and it was a little bit embarassing after a while. Ever since then, not one movie can escape these kinds of 'ships'. But nothing, absolutely nothing can beat the amount of fandom that Inception got on Tumblr (except for maybe Harry Potter).

There have been plenty of other movies to get all of this fandom. The Social Network had the famous ship between Mark and Andrew. Along with that, you could pretty much watch the entire movie in gifs on there because every line was so quotable. X-Men: First Class has had a little ship between Erik and Raven, and a huge ship between Erik and Xavier. Plus, the Tumblr universe has gone mad on Michael Fassbender, mainly comparing him to a shark because of his rather big smile (it's the 'new thing' to be one of Fassy's teeth). One of the newest ships that has just rolled around is for a movie that hasn't even been released yet: The Avengers. Which lucky superheroes get a ship? Captain America and Iron Man. Which is weird, considering Iron Man is Howard Stark's son, who like, gave Cap his powers.

So I'm going to wrap this up now since it's snowing in Dannevirke properly for the first time in eight years and I'm too excited to form coherent sentences. Social networking has it's ups for the movie industry...people have the power to easily tell people what they like and dislike about a movie without being a critic. But most of the time, social networking is a place where people can either unleash their hate in an extremely unhealthy way, or obsess over a movie in an unhealthy way. Either way, I'll just stick to my blogging.

What do you think about the relationship between social networking and movies?