Today I was reminded why I stay away from message boards.
Now that I've seen "The Dark Knight" I wanted to go onto a couple of geek movie websites to see what other people thought of it. The first I went to was Ain't It Cool News. Big mistake. I wandered onto a thread where AICN head, Harry Knowles, was raving about some people complaining about the supposed portrayal of mentally disabled people in the upcoming Tropic Thunder. Wow. Except for a few reasoned individuals pointing out that the movie wasn't getting cut and that complaining about a portrayal of some group is not the same as censorship, it was all insane vicious screeds about the evils of liberals and political correctness that reeked of a bunch of spoiled punks who didn't know a damn thing about history or other people outside of their little stoner-movie geek world, parroting poison they had picked up from the likes of Rush Limbaugh. That's not counting the long tangent where they were calling Knowles a hypocrite because he had temporarily pulled a review of Star Wars: The Clone Wars at its studio's request.
Reading stuff like this I have to struggle to remember that these yahoos are actually a very small part of the population and that there are plenty of decent people in this world who don't scream bloody murder every time someone tells them that a bogus boogeyman is out there trying to take away some of their toys.
Eventually I got away from that madness and looked up a near 300-page Dark Knight thread at Comic Book Resources that started way back when with the posters being underwhelmed at the first announcement that Heath Ledger was going to play the Joker. What I read skimming through this thread was generally more civilized even from the people who found fault with the movie's tone or some of the plot devices, generally more civilized...except for the bright sparks who started calling Maggie Gyllenhall "ugly".
The internet...where common sense goes to die.
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