Letter to the Internet Movie Database

This is a letter written to the Internet Movie Database, IMDB.com, on December 27, 2009. It was prompted by my response to the new "Sherlock Holmes", which in my opinion was an unwatchable mess. (My review is here.)

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I have been an IMDB follower for as long as I can remember, for at least 12 years. What has always attracted me to it is that the reviews are done by amateurs, people who want to express their personal opinions about films. Most of the time, that's still apparent. The reviews don't see to come from people in the business, or connected to individual movies, or from professional reviewers, or from the ivory towers of academia. We can find those kinds of reviews elsewhere; that's what makes IMDB special.

This particular review of "Sherlock Holmes" is an exception.

• It has a total of 993 words. Clearly written to be just short of the IMDB limit of 1000 words.
• The last line states that the review is from another movie review site. Sure enough, the same review is posted there.

I realize that IMDB is not run as a strictly "commercial" site, and thus doesn't have traditional competition. But this is not in the spirit of amateur reviews.

Finally: The whole tone of this review reeks of somebody who is being paid to push the movie. That's certainly subjective and harder to prove, but it's true of more and more of the reviews written for recently released movies.