Who is Pajiba?

Quite simply, Pajiba is an eclectic set of critics and eloquent readers. Check out the staff page if you simply must know more.

What of Pajiba?

For reasons we’d rather not go into, we can’t actually tell you what Pajiba means but, should Pajiba catch fire and become a national phenomenon, we would like you to know that it is pronounced like a part of the female anatomy, if you have a bit of a cold, which makes it an awfully enjoyable word to say (try it, out loud, in your cubicle). Any other pronunciation makes us bristle, hack, and contort our faces in very unpleasant ways, particularly those pronunciations that involve long e’s. Please do not pronounce it Pajeeba in front of the publisher; he has a felony record.

Based ostensibly in Portland, Maine, Pajiba has offices (and by “offices,” we mean guys and gals writing reviews on kitchenette tables in their overpriced hovels or in their cubicles during office hours) around North America. If you lurk in the comments section for any length of time, you’ll also notice that we have several regular commenters (often referred to as The Eloquents) who make their own valuable contributions to the Pajiba experience. They are scattered across the country, and you can add your place among them, geographically.

Pajiba is a film, book, and television review site, though we used to feature weekly political commentary as well. Unfortunately, our political column was shut down by the Bush Administration through a little-used clause in the Patriot Act. (We still attempt to sneak a few political pieces by Homeland Security, on occasion.) For real, though; in May of 2006, we were temporarily shut down when DHS seized our hard drives.

If you are a regular visitor, you might notice that, unlike other movie sites, we don’t post most of our reviews until the afternoon a film opens. This is because, in many cases, we have decided to forego advance screenings for critics. Why? Partly because film critics make for extraordinarily annoying company when you’re trying to enjoy a movie. But more importantly, critics’ screenings are arranged through the movie studios’ public relations firms, and we would rather not feel beholden to them. This is why we don’t do junkets, set visits, or interviews arranged through public relations people. This approach gives us the freedom to express our feelings about appalling Hollywood releases in colorful language without offending a studio go-between.

A final note: Many readers write and ask us to include some sort of rating system in our movie reviews, like stars, bones, hula-girls, or bloody eyeballs. We don’t do this for a few reasons: 1) There aren’t any cute symbols for a Pajiba; 2) Our goal is to represent more of the filmgoing experience than we could communicate through such a system; 3) We’d prefer you actually read the review and not just jump to the rating; and 4) It’s kind of lame, to be honest. If you’re interested in getting a quick idea of how much a movie does or doesn’t suck, there are plenty of other sites (and even what they call “print publications”) that will give you that, and you’re welcome to use those, either in addition to, or to the exclusion of, Pajiba. We won’t be offended.

If you have any comments or questions, please email the publisher, Dustin Rowles, or visit our contact us page, and thanks for visiting our site.

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