Virtual Community Report

Pajiba is a virtual community devoted to movie reviews that are slightly out of the ordinary, perhaps best explained by the site's slogan; "scathing reviews for bitchy people". Pajiba is made up of a team of five chief reviewers from professional critiquing backgrounds (most also critique for 'mainstream' publications as well) who analyse, dissect and evaluate movies with absolute honesty. There is no pandering, no hesitation and no concessions made, as the pajiba team valiantly set out to arm their community with the truth about the latest blockbuster or indie film.

The community is in the form of a blog, whereby the reviews are posted in reverse chronological order. The 'comments' function is (thankfully) enabled, and it is there that the heated discussion and zealous debate begins, with vehement agreement/disagreement with the review being the usual basis for a post. Members can only communicate in the 'comments' section, and submissions are moderated to ensure discussion is on topic and appropriate.

A recent review was posted about a documentary concerning September 11, right-wing politics and conservative Christians, called 'Loose Change'. In his preamble, the critic noted (with bewilderment and bemusement) that it was the reviews concerning religion and politics that generated by far the most hits and the most vociferous debates, (sometimes resulting in unpleasant post exchanges), even though they were still 'just movies'. I think that this is where Pajiba really succeeds: through analysis of movies as vehicles of contemporary culture, it sets up an environment for more broad, rhetorical analysis of greater issues, in an environment and context that is very accessible. Indeed, Pajiba originally started out in 2004 as a hybrid politics/movie review site. On dropping the politics element, Pajiba greatly increased its site traffic. Yet it is the political (and the religious, moral, ethical, racial...) discussions, applied to and extracted from movies, that have kept me coming back for more than a year.