Plugging the Geek

So, I write for this totally other website, Cinegeeks. In its early stages, it was meant to be a forum-type deal, where a bunch of us online movie writers (mainly guys culled from the Ain't It Cool News chat rooms, an extremely complex and nuanced community I barely knew existed one year ago) would review films and provide up-to-the-moment film-related news.

It didn't quite happen this way. What wound up happening was that three of us actually did any sort of work. I provided some reviews, the site's founder (and my fellow Laser Blazer clerk) Ari wrote some news and reviews, and his girlfriend Jenn did the web design, and everyone else immediately jumped ship.

Now, hey, that's fine. These people, I don't even know, except that one guy who trashed me on his blog for writing a negative review of Serenity, which is just childish. But I'm past that now. I've moved on.

And so has Cinegeeks, which amazingly still exists. It doesn't have nearly as much actual news content as we had hoped. One of our previous collaborators was an actual really real for honest entertainment journalist, so we were sort of counting on him for the occasional scoop, such as you might hear at a press junket. Of course, having done the press junket circuit myself for three years, I can assure you that no news more exciting than the barometric pressure reading ever comes out of those things. Utter wastes of time.

Anyway, we thought he might write some articles containing news, but he never did, so we've been left to our own devices. (Our own devices consisting of reading news stories on Ain't It Cool and then copying them over with a paragraph of our opinion.)

But I personally think the review section is already among the best of the movie websites I regularly visit. Here's a good example of why: Ari's review from today of the Jean-Paul Belmondo French farce classic Le Magnifique. This is an awesome, hilarious and surprisingly broad French spoof of James Bond-type films that most people probably haven't even heard of, which is exactly the sort of information I want from a website.

All you people who go to video stores and ask the guys behind the counter what to rent? You could just visit Cinegeeks, which is written by those very same guys when they're at home and therefore more enthusiastic and entertaining! When they're at work, they're focused on just getting you rung up and out of the store as quickly as possible, so they can go back to counting the nano-seconds until the end of their shifts.