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the b stands for bull$h1t
04/07/2006 = 02:33 PM

Thanks to everyone who rocked my 35^th Annual Avoidance of the Bus™ hardcore yesterday.

Today, I found the damnedest review on IMDB for the Larry the Cable Guy movie.

Damnedest, in that it was neither more nor less than a blatantly plagiarized version of James Berardinelli's 1993 review of Schindler's List, with "Larry" substituted for "Schindler".

While I wish the plagiarist had been a little more sensitive to the historical matter of the original film, and to the insult he or she was perpetrating in associating the horrors of war and victims of genocide with the crassness and toilet humor of the "git 'er dun" movie, I can understand how he or she required an extremely effective and influential film (both for its merits and for its impact on the cinematic industry) in order to achieve his or her obvious goal: to test the IMDB editorial staff to see if they actually read the reviews' contents before they approve them for their site.

Apparently, they don't.

Which renders every review I've ever written for them more or less worthless. Anyone else's, too, for that matter.

I do feel bad for James Berardinelli. No one wants to put in a lot of effort and heart into writing something, only to have someone else claim it as their own, or even just to copy and paste it without saying who gets the credit for actually doing the hard part.

We're seeing more and more of this happening every day, from students all the way up to supposedly ethical journalists. (Including some kid who won a prize for writing a poem and had to return it, about which some grown-up said, "She didn't realize she hadn't written it." How do you not realize you just got rewarded for copying something as opposed to having created it yourself? But anyway.)

In the film Finding Forrester, the protagonist borrowed a paragraph from a decades-old magazine article to open his creative processes, and expanded it into a work of his own. He was caught immediately and nearly expelled for it. For one paragraph.

Finding Forrester is only a few years old, and its message is already, for all intents and purposes, anachronistic. Nowadays, it seems that there is more of a stigma attached to pointing out the thefts than to perpetrating them.

I personally think that looking in the other direction when someone's ripping someone else off is worse than saying, "That's permissible," it's almost like saying, "Copying is the same as writing it yourself."

Which better never be true, because that would render anything I've ever written more or less worthless. Anyone else's, too, for that matter.

Shame, thy name is IMDB.

(As for the Larry the Cable Guy movie, no one ever expected it to be on a par with Schindler's List anyway, so I'm not too worried about this review's effect on Liam Neeson's or Steven Spielberg's reputations.)

Tags: IMDB, plagiarism, review, Larry the Cable Guy, Schindler's List

drinking: ice water
listening to: Rick Wakeman, Journey to the Centre of the Earth
birthday dvd score: king kong