IMDB 250 has ADD; or, 50,000,000 Movie Fans Can't Be Wrong

If you're like me you enjoy a really good movie or a REALLY bad movie, but don't really have much time for the stuff in between. I mean, there's always room for an action or a comedy that may not stick with you yet is an enjoyable ride, but for the most part you avoid sequel movies, superhero movies and rom-coms (a douchy, but quickly typed, abbreviation) not because of some deeper moral reason, just on the grounds that they will BORE YOU INTO A COMA!
A problem I have encountered with this view on pop-culture is that you tend to run out of new influences pretty fast. There's only so much stuff that's mind-blowing available to watch and only so much no-budget garbage you can put up with, so after awhile you're scouring the internet looking for fresh ideas on both grounds.
Eventually you'll will encounter the IMDB top 250 list.
This encounter will probably be very, very early in your search because literally ANY search on Google (and we all always use google every single time I don't care what anyone says to the contrary) with the word "movie" in it will bring up their website.

See?

Plus it's a pretty cool resource for finding out about movies and movie related information, ie. Was Edward Woodward, star of the original "The Wicker Man" "surprisingly impressed by the quality of the script" for the remake, starring Nicolas "Johnny" Cage? You bet your ass he was!

Plus anyone willing to pay a fee (?!) can vote on the quality of movies, ranking them on a scale of 1 to 10 and even provide their own critiques, and they can even plagiarize from MST3K and act as if THEY came up the with jokes about the CRAPPY movie listings there (It's so easy it can't be cheating). Since hundreds of thousands of millions of billions use this system every single day, voting up and down every single movie ever made, it should provide a pretty good resource for finding the elusive unwatched great movie, right? Wrong. Instead of functioning as a scale of merit measuring the quality of movies it serves as a perfect meter of both the wisdom of the crowd and the dementia of the mob. Its' ranking service fills no function other than filling you in on these too pieces of data.

Take, for example, the very first 10 movies on the list:

#1) Schindler's Li...what the fuck? Shawshank Redemption? I guess so...I mean, it was pretty good, great actors, a story that really moved the characters along a path and a happy ending you felt the characters earned. But the absolute favorite movie ever? Really? Ever so slightly better the fucking gOdfather? Doesn't that seem a little bit off?

You move down the list after this initial weird-out and notice that things get a little more reasonable. The first two gOdfathers, yes they're likely choices, Inception, Pulp Fiction, yes yes, you expect those to be there. Then. at number 7, just a little better of than Star Wars, but not quite on par with Heroin addicts jamming each other in the chest with needles, sits the modern day super-movie; Schindler's List. Well, at least it's above Star Wars 5.

So that's a little peak at just what we're dealing with. The next 20 are a much weirder bag:

From 11-30 we see this list jump all over the damn place, there's the ultra-post-utopian "The Dark Knight (2008)" doing just slightly better than the pre-bomb-tension of "Casablanca (1942)", which then scores the same as "Fight Club (1999)", which itself is just slightly better than "Rear Window (1954)". I mention the year because I think it helps to illustrate how schizophrenic the list is. Maybe that's the problem; having all these movies competing on the same scale doesn't really make any sense at all. Can you objectively rank a movie just in its' movieness? Is there an ultimate state of movieness which movies seek to achieve? I don't know, but if there is, it's NOT FUCKING DARK KNIGHT! That movie was cool, yeah, but I sure as fuck didn't walk away from it thinking "what a life changer! I'll never look at playboy billionaire vigilantes the same way!", or, "You know, that Joker was crazy, but he made some very fine points about the conditions of man";

"Am I crazy, or is MA-A-AN crazy, man?"

What I did walk away thinking was "That was some enjoyable eye-candy. I'm glad it didn't get TOO preachy or moral-heavy, I mean, both the stars were dressed in superhero costumes." After I watch Casablanca all I can think to myself is "Man, I don't really know why, but that's an awesome movie" and I think alot of other people feel the same way too. But I don't think they feel that way about other ones in the same grouping, say, "Toy Story 3". Not even the original. No no, the threequel. One of Hollywood's best movies, apparently. Change your life.

And here's the problem that I have with this resource, is that it suffers from the fact that it didn't exist when all these old movies were in their heyday, and thus they will never get the same representation as movies filmed after its creation. And as the list gets lower questions reguarding it's authority only get worse and worse. For example: Pans' Labyrinth is just slightly better than 2001 while Bladerunner is exactly on par with The Social Network. There's no logic to it at all. If you had a random generator make a list of 250 movies you'd be able to glean the same amount of insight into Movieness that the list provides.

The IMDB 250 is a useless ranking system that accidentally serves as a perfect metaphor for the internet. Nothing means anything, quality is dead, and in a sea of everyones' ideas nothing will make sense to everyone, or even anyone. As for a source of good movie ideas, I'm still searching and I'll let you know when I find it.

PS: I checked it out, and Jackass 3-D is rated 7.4, only 3/5's of the way to being ranked as one of IMDB's top 250 movies of all time. No lies.