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Schumer hate a little bit fake

Coeur d'Alene Press | UPDATED 7 years, 5 months AGO
| August 18, 2017 1:00 AM

The Amy Schumer-Goldie Hawn comedy “Snatched,” now available on home video, isn’t particularly good — it’s a mildly diverting Redbox rental with a few good jokes and a forgettable, slapdash story.

But on the Internet Movie Database, it’s one of the most reviled movies of the year (excluding “The Emoji Movie,” of course).

The film’s user score on IMDB.com sits at a meager 4/10. While that number seemingly matches its 35 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes and its lukewarm performance at the box office, it doesn’t represent a typical score on the site.

As someone who has studied the IMDB website more than history, science or math, I can tell you user scores almost never get that low, not without a reason that exists outside the actual merits of the movie. The majority of movies score above a six, and, generally, even ones as terrible as “Batman vs. Superman” get inundated with so many perfect scores from uber-fans that it takes several months for the final score to settle somewhere reasonable.

Just a little more perspective — last year’s atrocious “Independence Day: Resurgence” boasts a score of 5.3. The reviled “Zoolander 2” sits at 4.7. Remember the infamously unfunny and obscene “Freddy Got Fingered” from 2001? Its score is 4.5.

Investigate the IMDB page for “Snatched,” specifically the User Reviews section, and the score becomes clear. The page is flooded with people trashing Amy Schumer and her raunchy comedy, but not necessarily the movie itself.

Just a sampling of reviews posted near the time of the film’s theatrical release in May:

- “At some point Hollywood is going to realize that the quickest way to kill a movie is to include Schumer.”

- “I just kept wondering how that Amy chick gets cast in anything other than an extra on the walking dead.”

- “This comedian, actor is irrelevant, puerile and really not funny. It was excruciating to watch and I felt embarrassed for her.”

- “Pig Amy was terrible and it starts and ends there.”

- “Just like Schumer, this movie has the appeal of day-old oatmeal.”

- “No one will convince us that what Amy Schumer does is intelligent. She’s the worst person in Hollywood right now.”

- “Schumer is a washed-up comedian and this movie is as good as her career.”

- “What an unpleasant woman to look at.”

- “The equivalent of the holocaust in Hollywood.”

Those aren’t even the worst of them.

Everyone is entitled to an opinion, and yes, I’m sure there are people out there who genuinely hated the movie. But comments like this are from people who didn’t like Schumer before “Snatched.” So why would they go out and see the movie in a theater?

They wouldn’t, and they didn’t.

Anyone who has spent 20 minutes on the Internet won’t be surprised by hateful comments about innocuous subjects. It happens to everything, and even the most universally beloved movies get their share of trashy, trolly remarks. But like the nonsense over last year’s all-female “Ghostbusters,” there is a disturbing amount of misogyny woven into some criticism of Amy Schumer.

(For your information, 2016 “Ghostbusters” has a 5.3 score on IMDB, compared to its 73 percent fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes. It’s also, objectively, a thousand times better than “Independence Day Resurgence.”)

I understand that Schumer’s comedy offends people, especially in how she talks about sex. But 95 percent of professional comedians talk like her, and the men conveniently only get a fraction of the hateful remarks.

If you don’t like someone like Schumer, why waste the energy in trashing her? And why bring her looks or sexual history into the conversation in the first place? Kevin Hart and Will Ferrell made a terrible movie called “Get Hard” with plenty of dirty sex humor, but you don’t see too many comments about Ferrell’s stomach or how Hart talks about sex in his stand-up. “Get Hard” has a 6.0 IMDB user score, by the way.

I’m not going to spend any time defending “Snatched” as a quality piece of cinema. And, like most things on IMDB, the score will probably settle into the middle numbers once more people actually see the movie and provide honest opinions.

I just see little stuff like this and don’t understand when people fervently deny the existence of misogyny and sexism in popular culture. I’m not even looking very hard.

• • •

Tyler Wilson can be reached at twilson@cdapress.com

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