The Internet Movie Database Daily Poll: Proving Today's Movie Fans Have No Knowledge of Film History
Internet Movie Database (IMDB.com) presents a daily poll. These polls can range from the wastefully stupid like "To me Matt Damon will always be..." to the genuinely interesting like "Favorite movie involving amnesia" to the surprisingly educational: "Which actor are you shocked to discover is 5'7" or shorter?" Along the way the IMDB daily poll offers questions about TV shows, film history, directors, actors, and just about anything else having to do with celluloid or video. The polls can really run the gamut, in other words, but there is a common theme to the poll results that can always be relied upon and says volumes about the importance of demographics and advertising.
Almost every IMDB poll that asks people to make a choice over movies or personalities that span the decades has a very predictable result. The more recent the choice-regardless of the general consensus of talent or ability or fame-will be found near the top and the choices more distant from the date of the poll will be found near the bottom of the results. The most recent and stunning example of this was the poll featured on August 18, 2007: Which decade produced the best movies?
Almost every IMDB poll that asks people to make a choice over movies or personalities that span the decades has a very predictable result. The more recent the choice-regardless of the general consensus of talent or ability or fame-will be found near the top and the choices more distant from the date of the poll will be found near the bottom of the results. The most recent and stunning example of this was the poll featured on August 18, 2007: Which decade produced the best movies?
- IMDB poll respondents said that this decade has been the fourth greatest decade ever for movies.
- The person who came up with that particular poll didn't even include the 1930s, the actual greatest.
- These IMDB polls consistently show an utter lack of film history knowledge.
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Comments
Excellent, well done! Yes, the mere mention of a black & white movie to the younger generation today brings either shrugs or a grimace of distaste. If the entertainment is not "state of the art" color, complete with gasoline explosions, super loud effects, non-stop action and pretty but inept actors, the collective noses are turned up and away from any suggestion to sample the classics. The directors of the classics were masters, employing the best cinematographers of light and shadow, writers with a sharp ear for dialogue, and actors with more substance than simply a pretty face and plastic-enhanced breasts. The proof lies in the ever growing glut of inane and lame re-makes, which even high tech CGI cannot salvage from the dustbin of Hollywood's flameouts.
Hear! Hear! (or is it Here! Here!?)
What Rubbish, thanks for pointing this out Tim. My first reaction was also the 70s, but even the 60s really produced much more thoughtful and innovative cinematic explorations than the 80s, 90s and 2000 combined. Given, there are some truly creative writers, directors and actors working today. Though most of them are drawing on the past, or relying on special effects. Nothing wrong with a romp with some eye candy, but it'd be nice if more films dared to dive into the depths of the human soul nowadays. I'm hopefully though, as long as people are reading classics, and they still are, they will keep watching the classics of the silent era as a pillar of personal enrichment.
Other than the information they provide (and I can sometimes find better info on movies in reference books I own or other sites)--IMDb.com has annoyed me more than I've ever wanted it to. The worst part of the site is their message boards that have turned into little islands of lost souls who find some kind of bizarre pleasure in tearing down other people under the internet cloak of secrecy. So those are the kind of people voting on those movie polls. Many of those people who hang out there frequently can't even spell right--so how can we expect they've been educated on movies? Unfortunately, those in the 18-34 demographic get convinced by other powers-that-be that older movies are "boring." That's right...black and white=boring...and proves we're living in a strictly visual-oriented world rather than a thinking one.
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