'Rediculous' Customer & Critic Reviews

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

Fat Girl surprisingly has mostly well thought out comments on the imdb, but there was this one by "taniav" from Toronto:

What is wrong with everyone???? The actress in this movie was only twelve!! How could have a studio have released this movie, or any actor have worked in it is beyond me. I really doubt any of them will work again, who would hire them? The director should be arrested for exploiting children.

I feel sorry for people who would watch this.

Just because a movie is critically acclaimed does not mean its good. Directors get knighted as artists when in fact its just a way of bringing attention to their work and making more money off young people who need something to look up to. There are good movies out there but please don't believe that because someone has enough money to make the lame movie they want, that they are any good (movie critics are the lowest strata of society). i promise you these exploitive directors probably all started out in pornos inorder to support their drug habits. Why would we watch their movies and promote whats noxious in this world ?

But it's a feminist film so the exploitation merely reflects negatively on patriarchal exploitation of women in the first place! Regarding that porn film comment, I take it that the viewer hasn't seen Romance?

[mfunk9786]

I beg to differ, I think this is the one [grammatically horrifying as it is] grain of truth in that diatribe:

How could have a studio have released this movie, or any actor have worked in it is beyond me.

[Morbii]

the scent of jack's death was so deep.

LOL

[zedz]

For some reason, referring to movies as "shows" has always been a pet peeve of mine. I suppose it's because I think of shows as things you see on Broadway or on television. I realize that it is a relic of the term "movie show," which I think was once common in the midwest. Even the otherwise estimable Glenn Erickson (DVD Savant) uses it regularly. It's fingernails on a chalkboard for me.

Wasn't that term pretty common in Hollywood itself, going all the way back to before TV? Although now that I think of it, interviews with old-time Hollywood people tend to involve the word "picture" more than any other single term for a movie.

When I come across it it's almost always people on the outer fringes of the industry trying to impress you that they're "in the industry" - which probably makes me even more annoyed than Jeff, if that's possible. Whether or not 'show' is indeed an 'industry term' or not, I have no idea. I don't think I've heard an actual filmmaker use it in this sense.

[Binker]

http://www.aintitcool.com/node/37469

I'd provide highlights if I could. The entire piece is nothing but a jumbled mess of flabbergasted praise, inane comparisons (its better than this, better than this, better than THIS!!!!11!), hamfisted attempts at employing the most cliched and overused of literary techniques, (the wonderful alliteration at the beginning of the second paragraph, the well thought-out momentum building effort of starting sentence after sentence the same way) and dramatic lines that fall utterly flat (THIS ISN'T A COMIC BOOK MOVIE, THIS IS A GRAPHIC NOVEL..... movie?)

The Empire Strikes Back of terrible reviews, if you will (a comparison so good he had to use it twice)

[cdnchris]

I'm reminded as to why I've only visited that site maybe five times in my life since 1997, counting me clicking that link just now.

[Binker]

That's the first visit for me, although I'm looking forward to many more.

[jbeall]

God, it's like a less-literate version of Bill Walton. My hyperbole meter just exploded. Someone cyber-slap me if I ever even think about visiting that site again.

[domino harvey]

It’s like a fine aged wine after a steady diet of hamburgers and French fries.

He somehow managed to one-up comparing apples and oranges.

[Binker]

"It is an apt, deliberate description of what you have just watched that carries so much weight by the time you get around to processing it."

How much weight? So much weight.

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

My favorite part is where one is called a comic book and one a graphic novel. Anyway, it wasn't that bad - at least they liked the film and had a good case for their feelings. However, my hyperbole meter exploded, too.

[nyasa]

Was just checking the Angelopoulos page at IMDb to see how his trilogy's doing. There's a synopsis there for The Dust of Time with a spoiler warning. I clicked anyway. This is what I got:

People do stuff.....and the stuff gets done.....and then the movie is over. Good movie....was worth the download.....
Page last updated by sonic_the_hedgehog_c-1, 4 weeks ago

[Donald Trampoline]

This article from Senses of Cinema on Henry Hathaway's Seven Thieves (1960), by someone called Pedro Blas Gonzalez is as ridiculous a piece of writing as I have ever seen (OK, maybe not ever but close). Apparently he is an "Associate Professor of Philosophy at Barry University Miami Shores, Florida."

I watched the movie last night, and then sought this out. I think you have to see the movie to know how ridiculous this article is, but if you substitute your memory of any particularly mediocre Henry Hathaway film, you may get a sense of the general silliness of this absurd piece of nonsense. On a side note, I'm disturbed when people can write at this length with such a high degree of lunacy.

[tavernier]

Lou Reed vs. Abba

Armond breaks it down for us.

[domino harvey]

Do you think there's anyone who reads Armond White's reviews that agrees with him? I think his entire audience is just people who hate him, which is understandable but sort of feeds into his whole persona and makes us all enablers.

[tavernier]

I admit that there is a certain fascination with his contrarianism--"Of course he's going to rave about (Spielberg's) (DePalma's) (Chereau's) new film"--"Of course he's going to trash (X's) (Y's) (Z's) new film."

There are also the many pop culture references that pop up almost arbitrarily in his reviews, along with his way of shoehorning his often nonsensical comparisons between filmmakers he loves with those he loathes.

(BTW, can we make a separate Armond 'rediculous' thread? He surely deserves it.)

[neal]

From DVDTalk's review of High and Low:

NOTE: Unlike many of Criterion's recent DVD releases, High and Low has not been window-boxed to compensate for overscan. Given the somewhat controversial nature of this practice among purists, I'd imagine most folks should be pleased.

Has Criterion made a practice of windowboxing films that aren't ~1.33:1 and I just missed it?

And check out that strong language-- "somewhat controversial," "among purists," "most folks," "should be"...

[mfunk9786]

It's funny, 2.35:1 releases probably have more reason to be slightly windowboxed, due to the fact that most widescreen TVs crop them on the left and right a bit.

[cdnchris]

I think Seduced and abandoned was picture boxed and it's in 1.85:1.

[Perkins Cobb]

Do you think there's anyone who reads Armond White's reviews that agrees with him? I think his entire audience is just people who hate him, which is understandable but sort of feeds into his whole persona and makes us all enablers.

Thank you! I've been making the same argument for years now.

[neal]

I think Seduced and abandoned was picture boxed and it's in 1.85:1.

Well I'll be damned. I haven't gotten around to seeing that one.

[Kirkinson]

I'm stretching the boundaries of the thread title with this, but it seems more appropriate here than in the film school thread, and I can't not talk about it.

At the end of a basic Film History class my classmates and I were instructed to give a short speech about how our perspective changed during the class or how we expect our filmmaking process to change because of the films we watched. Most of the speeches were actually pretty good, but one individual complained about the lack of attention paid to special effects films, cited James Cameron and George Lucas as his biggest influences, and then started going into specifics about a few of the films covered in class. In the course of this bewildering speech, he said he disliked Bicycle Thieves because there was "no conflict" in it and he hated The Seventh Seal because it lacked a both a "goal" and a conflict, and especially because "it wasn't really visual."

[domino harvey]

Definitely belongs in the film school thread. It used to bother me a lot when people in my film classes said something stupid, until I realized that these people are my competition for academic publishing and teaching jobs. So now it's like, "Oh, you think Charlie Chaplin is boring? Do go on!"

This article, however, is perfect for this thread. Besides spelling Eisenstein's name wrong, there's this sublimely bad choice of words:

US actor Danny Glover, who plans an epic next year on Haitian independence hero Toussaint-Louverture, said he slaved to raise funds for the movie because financiers complained there were no white heroes.

[swo17]

In the course of this bewildering speech, he said he disliked Bicycle Thieves because there was "no conflict" in it and he hated The Seventh Seal because it lacked a both a "goal" and a conflict, and especially because "it wasn't really visual."

Wow. Well, with any luck, maybe once Lucas is done toying around with the Star Wars movies, he can get to work on a Special Edition of The Seventh Seal.

[colinr0380]

Definitely belongs in the film school thread. It used to bother me a lot when people in my film classes said something stupid, until I realized that these people are my competition for academic publishing and teaching jobs. So now it's like, "Oh, you think Charlie Chaplin is boring? Do go on!"

Ah yes but the one thing this thread seems to be telling us is that publishing jobs actively go for people who'll write articles about "why black and white sucks" and so on (I'm sure that the Guardian blogs are attempting some sort of active provocation with titles like "Just say 'non' to pretentious French art films" or "Are all art movies long and boring?") - it makes them more 'down with the masses' I suppose.