Website Of The Week – Empire
http://www.empireonline.co.uk/
Empire magazine is, as you all know, shiny colourful and lightweight – a fluffy compendium of Hollywood gossip and glossy pictures of attractive stars. It’s cinema glamour as seen by teenage boys and romance as imagined by girls infatuated with Leonardo Di Caprio (why? Why?).
So I was expecting the online version to be full of shockwave plug-ins, QuickTime downloads and shovelfuls of animated GIFs, with a few words apologetically placed here and there; I was completely wrong. EmpireOnline is an encyclopaedia site, focused on setting out masses of information as simply as possible, and with very little interest in elegant design.
The front page makes some concession to the magpies among us by scattering a few bright colours here and there, and even a couple of smallish pictures, but the core of the site is lots of bits of disconnected text, which lead on to long columns of long articles.
It’s clear enough, and easy to navigate, and I am glad they’ve avoided the usual gimmicky trappings of commercial websites. But it seems uncomfortably stuck between two audiences, and likely to appeal to neither.
The standard Empire reader will probably find it dull and time-consuming. Despite the competitions and the fascination with lists of any kind (from the 10 worst films ever to the 10 best Kubrick movies) there’s little instant gratification here. Cahiers du Cinema and even Sight And Sound readers will probably think it’s just a little too commercial.
The films covered are pretty much all mainstream Hollywood, and the websites featured are the standard fare of large media websites: from discussion groups to merchandise sites, from an archive of film reviews to a selection of favourite links. All moderately well written, and useful enough if you like knowing the plot before you rent a video, but, perhaps not very exciting.
The true strength of the website is hidden: the shameless targeting of trivia obsessives and conspiracy lovers. The rolling news service has a few nods to standard gossip (Tom Hanks has hurt his knee, Di Caprio’s single again) but what it is really all about is interminable discussions of the most tenuous rumours about movies in the making. The unraveling of Star Wars‘ secrecy is played out in all its details, and Eyes Wide Shut is constantly dissected although nothing is known of it.
As EmpireOnline stars in conspiracy theories, I’ve decided to come up with one of my own. Here goes: the site was actually set up by an internet fanzine writer who cunningly tricked a massive corporation into employing him by pretending to be a normal web designer, and then set up a massive framework for his underground ramblings.
For all its oddness, the site is pretty successful, both as an entertaining read and as a practical guide; an unusual example of fanzine obsessions and commercial imperatives working well together. And it has, hidden away in the top right hand corner, one of the most useful things on any website: the ‘cinema guide’ made in collaboration with the wonderful Scoot is the best way to find out which movies are playing anywhere in the UK.