Everything Wrong with Nitpicking

The Cinema Sins website has a popular YouTube series called Everything Wrong With... that meticulously identifies the flaws in movies. Unlike Mystery Science Theater 3000, the movies being scoured for sins are often pretty good, and this makes the task of nitpicking more difficult given the inverse relationship between quality and flaws. The problem with the video series is that the relentless pursuit of errors inevitably leads to the scrutiny of non-errors. This is illustrated in the Everything Wrong with Les Miserables video.

The Paris Uprising of 1832 is sympathetically portrayed in the various incarnations of Les Miserables and the 2012 film adaptation riffed by Cinema Sins is no exception. The real life uprising occurred shortly after the death of General Jean Maximilien Lamarque, a champion of the poor. At his funeral a group of students with aspirations of inciting a nationwide revolution hijacked and re-routed the cortege. This was an actual event and, considering Les Miserables is a musical, was portrayed about as accurately in the movie as anyone could reasonably expect. Even so, this is documented as a movie sin at the 4:19 mark of the video. The accompanying text states: "So they're (sic) protest is to interrupt a funeral parade honoring a guy they loved?" Ridiculing the movie for featuring a dramatization of something that actually happened is ironically erroneous, and with this example we of how relentless nitpicking can be more annoying than funny.

The above error is about as far from a sin as you can possibly get. Les Miserables makes the logic behind the funeral protest exceedingly clear. As the song goes, the rebels needed a sign to rally the people and bring them in line. The death of Lamarque provided the sign and the students seized it. The historical action is worthy of criticism, and Les Miserbles does this implicitly by portraying the students as idealists who do not have a good grasp of what they are actually doing. Within the movie the motives of the "sinful" act are adequately described and its actors sufficiently admonished through their development as misguided rebels.  Taking these things into consideration, this sin should have been overlooked. 

To be fair, the top two goals of Cinema Sins are two generate views and be funny. The latter goal gives them license to have a liberal perspective on what is or is not a goof. Moreoever, the sin in question grabbed my attention and caused me to watch the video multiple times, so the people producing Everything Wrong With clearly know what they are doing. Even so, the videos fail when they make fun of non-errors. Pointing out idiocy is a foundation of comedy, but jokes are only funny if they are ridiculing something truly idiotic.

Nitpicking is perfectly good if actual flaws are being pointed out. However, it becomes unfunny and annoying when the focus is so intense that relevant context or basic historical facts are ignored. When this happens you are left with snark instead of humor, and excessive snark has a way of getting tiresome quickly.