I deserve better trolls

/ Alex Good

Just had some fun responding to a couple of troll comments I received over at Alex on Film. Sometimes people have raised good points correcting things I’ve said about movies, but more often it’s just randos on the Internet popping off. Still better than spam, but perhaps not up to today’s AI-generated commenting. Anyway, this time the strays I was catching came in response to my notes on Bunraku. And if you’re interested here’s an earlier exchange I had in the thread following my take on Key Largo.

16 thoughts on “I deserve better trolls”

  3. I like the one comment about leaving it to the pros. The pros are the people who see hundreds of movies a year and get so bored and burnt out that they elevate absolute crap to elite status. They’re the people (like Kael and Ebert) who feel it’s necessary to point out that though Planet of the Apes is fine entertainment, by golly it’s definitely not ART. They’re the dumbasses who read a book and give it awards and then find it was written by AI and deny it and bumble around while in the meantime it is revealed that the author has been a serial plagiarizer for YEARS.

    (I wish he’d said that to me……)

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    • I actually did a bit of a double take when he mentioned that line about leaving it to the pros! I mean, are there any “pros” left? The days when a handful of critics were actually household names (like Kael and Ebert) are long gone. Now I don’t think there are many if any left who are getting regularly paid for the job. The pull quotes you find on DVD boxes and the like are all just sourced to some webpage and the author isn’t even named. Meanwhile, individual voices have been absorbed into the hive mind of review aggregators to come up with average scores. Most reviewers (of anything) at the newspapers that are left running reviews are freelancers, which I guess makes them pros in the sense that they’re being paid (a pittance) but that’s it.

      If he meant leave it to a critic who is an academic somewhere, well, that really is laughable.

      Bottom line: if you’re going to troll someone I think you need to come up with some fresher material than “leave it to the pros”!

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      • Oh, the “pros” now are all online on social media and YT and I guess if you mix with that crowd (which I emphatically do not) you’ll know who they are. Your troll evidently does, and since they are their own gatekeepers they get to decide who is and who isn’t. I’ve noticed an uptick recently in the disdain with which those aggregators are treated, so I think the online community has completely turned against whatever old guard remains.

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