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OK, we've all spend weeks/months/years laughing at the inanities in the 'Rediculous Customer & Critic Reviews' thread, but how about starting a variation in which we own up to our own embarrassing howlers?

To start the ball rolling, here are a few exhibits in my personal hall of shame:

Andrei Tarkovsky (Usenet) - thankfully, this seems to have disappeared into the web's memory hole, but I got involved in an excruciatingly embarrassing flamewar on Usenet in the mid-1990s when I just decided to be contrary for the sake of it and disagreed vehemently with someone who was wibbling on about how great Tarkovsky was. On the contrary, I said, he makes vacuous, tedious drivel about profoundly uninteresting people, told in agonisingly long takes that are designed more to cover up the fact that he has so few ideas than for any other reason. In my defence, I was deliberately being provocative, but I was quite rightly jumped on by several people I admire. (I can't even plead youth and ignorance - I must have been nearly thirty, and I'd already seen Tarkovsky's entire oeuvre, much of it more than once, and usually on the big screen).

Transylvania (Sight & Sound, August 2007) - God knows how this happened (the omission was in the original piece, so I can't blame the subs), but I somehow failed to mention, in either the review or (worse) the synopsis, the narratively and psychologically crucial point that the Asia Argento character was pregnant by the lover for whom she was searching. I do mention that she gives birth at the end, but the earlier omission implies that it's by the Birol Ünel character. Someone quite correctly wrote in to the magazine to highlight this, and while I was given the option of a right of reply, I decided that it was a fair cop and he'd got me bang to rights and no mistake.

The World's Fastest Indian (Sight & Sound, March 2006) - I started my original review with a pretty toe-curling, borderline racist joke that tried to link the film in with the then-current Douanier Rousseau exhibition that was playing in London - Rousseau's paintings being full of dark-skinned people being chased by tigers and the like. (The reason for this rather stretched comparison was because I was making the point that while the film and its protagonist were undoubtedly naive, they offered the same kind of pleasures). Anyway, the sub-editors very sensibly tried to tone it down, in the process eliminating most of the original joke and just making me look demented - but I'm happy to take the blame!

Love Letters and Live Wires (Sight & Sound, November 2008) - I have no excuse for this, as I was reviewing off a DVD screener and should have checked, but I said that the action in the short A Midsummer Day's Work involves laying an underground cable between Amersham and Oxford. Actually, it's between Amersham and the far closer Aylesbury - it's the telephone company's head office that's in Oxford. (What really annoys me about this mistake is that 99.9% of people won't care... apart from British documentary scholars using my review as evidence!).

The Round-Up (commissioned programme note, Curzon Mayfair screening) - in my defence, I wrote this at extremely short notice without a copy to hand, but my attempt at a vivid evocation of the film's opening shot was marred by the fact that instead of just two horsemen (as I claimed), there are in fact two whole columns of them thundering past the camera. I may also have used the word "unforgettable" to describe a shot that I'd... partly forgotten.

Drugstore Comedy - the Everyman Cinema apparently played this little-known Gus Van Sant film, in a double bill with My Own Private Idaho. At around the same time it also screened Thelma and Louse. Other crimes from my rep cinema days include offering a double bill on November 31st and using a still from The Godfather Part II to illustrate a screening of Taxi Driver. This last one was the programme designer's fault, but I should have spotted that the Sicilian cloth cap wasn't Travis Bickle's style.

And this one's relatively trivial in most circles, but probably not round here!

Saló: The 120 Days of Sodom (Sight & Sound, November 2008) - in a short aside on Blu-ray in general, I mentioned that since Artificial Eye's Hidden was shot on HD, the Blu-ray "should be identical to the original". I meant to write "should look identical to the original", because of course even a Blu-ray is going to be compressed from the original master. Once the mistake was pointed out, I dug out my original submission, hoping that a sub or designer had shortened "look" to "be" to save a line... but no, it was my fault.

Years ago I once remarked that watching Nosferatu on fast-forward was just as good as watching it at normal speed.

That was a good one.

To my utter shame, I once wrote in a (p)review of FORTY GUNS and BIGGER THAN LIFE that there were literally only a handful or so of movies I had yet to see. Oh, the pretentiousness!

MichaelB wrote:...I just decided to be contrary for the sake of it and disagreed vehemently with someone who was wibbling on about how great Tarkovsky was. On the contrary, I said, he makes vacuous, tedious drivel about profoundly uninteresting people, told in agonisingly long takes that are designed more to cover up the fact that he has so few ideas than for any other reason. In my defence, I was deliberately being provocative...

Isn't that now known as the Barmy-Shreckian paradigm?

I'll submit most of the comments I have made here (I particularly liked one of my earliest comments where I confused Anna Karenina and Anna Karina!)

The best thing about these kinds of mistakes though is that remembering them can act as a spur to keep from making the mistake again. I use my mortifying memory of the Karina/Karenina debacle as a sort of meme to aid remembrance! (It also helps that since then I've had the chance to actually see some of the films Anna Karina was in)

The topic reminds me that during a course at college the tutor showed clips of Mr Vampire 2 to illustrate cultural differences in comedy and typically I just had to pipe up with the comment that I had seen Mr Vampire a few years before and it was by far the better film. It may have been but the tutor would have been justified in calling me a jumped up know it all!

I also remember lending a tape of Jubilee to a politically Conservative friend with the recommendation that it contained particularly rousing renditions of Jerusalem and Rule Britannia! Luckily my rather mean spirited tease all worked out for the best since the tape of Jubilee also had The Bed Sitting Room recorded on it, which my friend thoroughly (and surprisingly) enjoyed!

kidc85 wrote:Years ago I once remarked that watching Nosferatu on fast-forward was just as good as watching it at normal speed.

I agree, but the film must have been "Metropolis" in the current 25 fps transfer....

colinr0380 wrote:I also remember lending a tape of Jubilee to a politically Conservative friend with the recommendation that it contained particularly rousing renditions of Jerusalem and Rule Britannia!

Then again, one of the film's great champions was the late Alexander Walker, who's no-one's idea of a firebrand radical.

But this reminds me of the glorious occasion when I saw Patrick Keiller's London nestling among tourist videos with the same title in the Piccadilly Circus branch of HMV - I do hope someone bought it by mistake!