top 250 Tagged Articles at Cinematical

You may recall that on the very weekend of its theatrical release, The Dark Knight rocketed to the top of the Internet Movie Database's user-voted Top 250 movies, with an average rating of 9.5 out of 10 after more than 47,000 votes. Observers marveled at how quickly this happened, noting that the previous #1 film, The Godfather, had held its spot for a decade.

Now an event nearly as miraculous has occurred: After only a day and a half in theaters, Disaster Movie (reviewed for Cinematical by Sir William of Goss) has already climbed to the top of IMDb's Bottom 100 list, with an average score of 1.3 out of 10. It has received more than 4,000 votes so far, 3,500 of those (including my own) being 1's, which is as low as the scale goes. About 280 people have given it a perfect 10, too, but those must be studio shills and pranksters. You get some of those in every crowd.

IMDb's Bottom 100 changes more often than the Top 250 does. Paris Hilton's The Hottie and the Nottie was #1 for a while earlier this year, and Bratz, Who's Your Caddy?, and something called Ben & Arthur (now the #2 film) have all been champions at various times. While the Top 250 only counts scores from "regular voters" (still not sure what that means) and requires that at least 1,300 votes be cast, the Bottom 100 takes all scores from everyone, and there's no minimum vote requirement. Many of the titles on the Bottom 100 are obscure, foreign, and/or straight-to-video features. I guess ranking terrible movies isn't quite as scientific or important as ranking great ones.

Well, it is. Or so say the Internet Movie Database users, who have already rocketed the film to the #1 spot on IMDb's Top 250 list with a rating of 9.5 out of 10 and about 47,000 votes. It displaces The Godfather -- a film that doesn't even HAVE a pencil-wielding psycho-clown -- which had held the top spot for about a decade (according to our pal Peter at SlashFilm).

The rest of the top 10 on IMDb's list isn't as depressing as I thought it would be: Shawshank Redemption, The Godfather Part II, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Pulp Fiction, Schindler's List, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Empire Strikes Back, and Casablanca. I was expecting to see nothing older than about 1990, and certainly nothing in black-and-white.

IMDb notes that for the Top 250 list, "only votes from regular voters are considered," but they fail to define "regular voters." Does that mean people who vote regularly? Or do they mean "regular voters" as opposed to "guest voters" or something? Either way, these apparently aren't people who, in a rush of enthusiasm for The Dark Knight, hurried home and gave it a 10 out of 10 despite never having rated anything else on IMDb before. Apparently they have exercised their right to vote before, and presumably they know what they're doing.

Now, I loved The Dark Knight and all, but come on: the best film ever made? Surely that is not an opinion held by very many people, if any.