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Scene Stealers

By BROOKS BARNES

LOS ANGELES — The rage was immediate. As soon as the Hollywood trades reported that Sony Pictures was going to reboot “Ghostbusters” with women in the lead roles, internet trolls tumbled out of their caves to insta-condemn the effort.

As with most online nastiness, the face of the outcry was a blank one. Most of the negative comments and social media posts were anonymous, courtesy of peaches like Grungemaster93, GargoylePhlegm and Neanderthal101. Reinventing their beloved 1980s-era comedy? With women busting the ghosts? Not on their watch!

Then came James Rolfe. And with him arrived a lesson about the digital age.

Mr. Rolfe, whose YouTube channel, Cinemassacre, has 2.1 million subscribers, posted a video last month that takes aim at the new “Ghostbusters,” which is set for release on Wednesday.

Looking into the camera, he criticizes the visual effects shown in an early trailer, and, with flashes of anger, condemns Sony for sweeping the 1984 original movie “under the rug like it didn’t happen.”

Mr. Rolfe, 35, advised his followers that Cinemassacre, known for movie and video-game reviews, would be sitting this one out.

“I refuse to watch it,” he said, sitting with his rimless glasses amid a gumball machine, “Star Trek” memorabilia and bookcases stacked with old VHS tapes.

With that, the furor around “Ghostbusters” had a focal point. His video racked up 737,000 views in its first day, on its way to 1.7 million. Mr. Rolfe, who sometimes posts videos as a character called Angry Video Game Nerd, became a Nerd King among a certain crowd.

“He will almost certainly be on the right side of history” read a sympathetic article on Heat Street, a libertarian website owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, reflecting the tenor of many of 22,000 comments on the video nonreview.

“This isn’t about feminism,” Danika Lee Massey, a YouTube star known as Comic Book Girl 19, said in a supportive post. “This is about greed. This is about a bad idea.”

But a lot of people, including a significant number of men, immediately blasted Mr. Rolfe as a misogynistic jerk, with some of the blowback taking on a very personal tone. “I keep fixating on his wedding ring,” the film critic and humorist Eric D. Snider wrote on Twitter. “Someone MARRIED this man-baby.”

Writing about Mr. Rolfe’s “tantrum” on the website Death and Taxes, part of the SpinMedia empire, Maggie Serota said he looked as if he were “sitting in a wet diaper.”

My swift reaction to Mr. Rolfe’s video was similarly severe. Without so much as pressing play, I decided that his position was garbage and that he represented the worst about geek culture and the internet. I considered leaving a hissy comment on his site: Somebody’s mom apparently forgot to teach the judging-books-by-their-covers lesson.

Instead, I did something very old-fashioned.

First, I watched his six-minute video, which surprised me. While not saying much that I agree with, Mr. Rolfe does express his opinions in a rather calm and articulate way. It’s not overtly sexist — though there are whiffs — and his points are rather tame compared with a lot of the other “Ghostbusters” muck online. (Hard stare toward Reddit.)

Next, I sent him an email. I wanted to know what he made of the furor. His response was astonishing. He was offended by some of the blowback — because, as he wrote in an email, it seemed to him that those angry over his video “have not watched it, or have been misquoting me or twisting my words.”

Mr. Judging Before Seeing was mad because people were judging before seeing.

Mr. Rolfe also seemed agitated that the people ripping him apart, some of whom went so far as to threaten his life, had no interest in his complexity as a human being.

Yes, he makes a living through sometimes caustic reviews and rants. (A former wedding videographer, Mr. Rolfe sells ads on Cinemassacre.com and on YouTube, where his videos have a cumulative 858 million views.) But he is also a husband and a father; his daughter, Darcy, now a toddler, was injured at birth.

“My good deeds go largely unknown,” he said in an email. “I just had a charity event, auctioning items/props/memorabilia from my show.” The auction, which concluded on May 6, raised about $20,000 for Shriners Hospitals for Children.

Hmm.

When finally coaxed to the phone, Mr. Rolfe, who works from his East Coast home, did not want to talk about his “Ghostbusters” video, saying he thought it spoke for itself, and he didn’t want to address the fallout. “When people attack me, it’s always about trying to get a reaction,” he said.

But he did talk about his childhood. As a high school student growing up in New Jersey, Mr. Rolfe said, he was “extremely shy and didn’t have too many friends.” Movies, both the Hollywood kind and the homemade variety, got him through.

He used the family camcorder to make horror films, later studying cinema at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where his junior-year movie was called “Curse of the Cat Lover’s Grave.”

“I wanted to make a really big cult sensation,” he said, with a laugh.

The new “Ghostbusters,” which, by the way, has been generating positive reactions in test screenings, according to Sony executives, finally gave him his wish.

Even the comedian Patton Oswalt weighed in on Mr. Rolfe’s nonreview review. “I really wanted to hate this Cinemassacre Ghostbusters review but I’m such a fan of noisy, thick-saliva swallowing it won my heart,” Mr. Oswalt wrote on Twitter.

Getting serious, he added: “I like @cinemassacre. I’m just tired of pre-emptive criticism. Society imploding. It’s gross.”