Simon Brew - Movie Geek: The Den of Geek Guide to the Movieverse

Some years ago, I wrote a book called Hatchet Job which was described (quite correctly) by one reviewer as the sound of someone worrying out loud about his profession.

Having started out in film journalism back in the 1980s, at a time when magazines were designed and edited with scalpels and spray-glue (rather than on laptops and desktops), Id become somewhat anxious about the future of film criticism in an age when online content was rapidly superseding print journalism. Everywhere you looked, people were blithely declaring that old-school film criticism was dead, and the internet had killed it. In the age of Twitter and Facebook, did anyone really need (or want) the kind of specialist knowledge that once thrived in movie magazines?

As part of my research, I started subscribing to diverse movie websites, trying to find out what movie fans were getting from the internet that they werent getting from the printed word. I asked around about which sites people found to be the most reliable, the most useful, the most entertaining. Among the numerous responses, one name popped up over and over again: Den of Geek. As one respondent to my questions noted, Theyre pretty much the gold standard here in the UK. They take it seriously. But theyre funny with it

In the years since I first visited DoG, I have found this assessment to be absolutely on the money. Not only has the site supported and encouraged some of the best upcoming film writers on the net, it has also become a proud flag-waver for the kind of old-fashioned journalistic integrity that we are blithely assured no longer exists. With their winning blend of well-researched news and unashamedly nerdy humour (smart without ever being snide), DoG have built up an impressive readership; at the time of my writing and researching Hatchet Job in 201314, they were attracting nearly three million unique users per month, a figure that has doubtless grown since then.

Eschewing anonymous snark in favour of accountable wit, the DoG editors under the leadership of the estimable Simon Brew also adhere to a code of conduct that puts many of their printed contemporaries to shame. Championing a sense of equality and community, they have a healthy disdain for anything that smacks of clickbait, and an eagerness to seek out the alternative view. Their features (many examples of which youll find collected in this book) balance a delightful interest in obscure movie trivia with a prevailing desire to seek out the best, rather than the worst, in movies.

That sense of enthusiasm and positivity was evident when I invited Simon to join me as a guest at one of my regular onstage movie talks. Id asked him to speak about online movie journalism in general a broad remit, admittedly, but one about which I knew he could hold forth with passion. In fact, he turned up with a string of carefully chosen clips from Superman III, a film which is generally regarded (with some justification) as being quite terrible, but which Simon had decided to re-watch in the hope that he might find something of value lurking therein.

And somehow he did. Even when delighting the crowd by pointing out how utterly shoddy the entire production had been, and how little sense the movie made (not just scene-by-scene, but line-by-line), Simon still managed to inspire in the audience a desire to rush out and re-watch Superman III forthwith. His enthusiasm was infectious, his responses honest, his attention to detail frankly alarming. It was an irresistible combination, and the crowd responded with glee. In short, Simon was the star of the evening, and I became little more than a warm-up act.

That blend of surprising fact and quirky opinion runs throughout the DoG site, as does their enduring love of Jason Statham another thing we have in common. As an unabashed devotee of The Stath, I was delighted to discover that DoG was similarly infatuated with the silver screens most entertainingly muscular presence. Debates about whether Hummingbird or Wild Card represents the zenith of Stathams underrated oeuvre flourish at DoG, along with discussions of the iconic clifftop striptease sequence from the otherwise uneven Transporter 3. When Paul Feigs satirical romp Spy proved to mainstream critics that The Stath had always had a wry awareness of his on-screen persona, DoG was one of the few outlets that could rightly claim to have got on board this particular train years ago, leaving other, more cumbersome publications playing catch-up.

When it comes to their reviews, DoG writers tend to strike an admirably uncynical balance between hoping for the best while being ready to call out the worst, always remembering that an enthusiasm for the medium should lie at the heart of criticism. From its news reports to its long-running Geeks vs Loneliness strand, DoG has fostered an air of collegiate co-operation which fans clearly appreciate.

As journalism moves increasingly from the printed word to online content, its encouraging that sites like DoG are thriving, reminding us that while the medium may have changed, the message (good work will rise) remains essentially the same. Back in 2000, the American site Film Threat (which began life as a printed fanzine) published its own Acceptable Code of Behaviour, which included such basic ground rules as a pledge not to review films until they are finished, and a rejection of anonymous content rules that clearly distinguished it from less reputable sites. Writing about DoGs editor in Hatchet Job 14 years later, I stated that the fact that Brew has a name worth protecting is of course the key to his integrity, and indeed to good criticism.

Thats a claim by which I stand, not just for Simon, but for DoG as a whole. The irony of this book being a rare foray into dead tree journalism is not lost on me, and Id be lying if I said I wasnt quietly reassured by the sites desire to produce something substantial in print after all these years in cyberspace. But whether I read them on the page or on the internet, Ill proudly wear the T-shirt as a die-hard DoG fan.

AN INTRODUCTION

There was a point, just a few months after the Den of Geek website came to life in 2007, that I got access to an analytics tool for the first time. My background is in print magazines, where you used to have to wait weeks to find out how many copies of your latest issue had sold, but this newfangled tool would tell me how many people had read our work the previous day! Within a day of publishing something, Id have an idea as to whether we were on the right track, and whether people were reading it! It felt new. It felt exciting.

It was soul-destroying. The number on that screen is burned into my brain: 14 people, in one day 12, if you discount myself and my mum. Several new articles had gone up on the site, but only 14 people had popped by to read them. It was a crossroads: do you battle on, and believe in what youre doing? Or take advantage of the hostelry on the corner, and re-evaluate a few life goals? But then what would, say, Jason Statham do? The Stath would surely stay on and fight. And so did we.