There is so much to loathe about Harry Knowles and his crappy excuse for a web site. Probably so much because there is so much of him to get around! If you’ve never seen a picture of this guy, let’s just say when he sits around the computer… people move it out from underneath him.

He’s fat, okay?

I find Knowles one of the most contemptible personalities of the “dot com” era – right up there with Matt Drudge and The Hamster Dance.

Like a lot of people, Knowles found fame and fortune not because he provides anything of substance, but because he got there first. Knowles is the embodiment of every geek stereotype there is. A fat virgin living with his parents basement, squawking so loudly about matters so inconsequential, people just had to turn and look.

Amassing a following of those like him, Knowles built his empire around the hard work and weaseling of others. What scoops did he ever gather on his own? He’s in the middle of Texas, for crying out loud!

I think the Aint It Cool News phenomenon really reached its apex around the time Knowles start portraying himself as some kind of internet success story and the parlayed that into some kind of faux-celebrity. I remember him guesting with Roget Ebert in the interm after Gene Siskel had died and before he had been replaced with that dolt Richard Ropert.Watching him butt heads with Ebert in some act of cool defiance, I thought to myself, “This is it. I’m watching the end of irony.”

Knowles is the worst kind of “rags to riches” story because he has no compunctions about being flown out on the studio’s dime to see some crap movie and give it a passing grade. As long as they’re handing out extra-extra large promotional t-shirts and the free briquette is being offered, why not belly up, as it were?

In my opinion, the minute Knowles decided to turn himself into a brand — host conventions and have books ghost written for him –, he should have developed some journalistic ethics. His whole “I’m a fan” defense is bull – masked, I might add by his persistent refusal to update the look of his site past the standards of 1996.

Knowles is a cyst on the movie-loving community. And I’m not preaching from the mount when I say this. I’m a fan with my own biases and opinions just as he. But the minute you start to exploit the system that is putting food on your table, you’re no longer one of us – you’re one of them. You are no longer reacting to manufactured buzz, you are helping to create it.

Eventually, I see Knowles loosing it all — never knowing the taste of the validation he so clearly seeks.