In fact, one of the negative reviews should probably be disqualified, since it's by the always-irritable Walter Chaw, one of the critics for Film Freak. I've quoted from his reviews a few times in the past, and discussed his 4 tendencies in a blog on March 11, 2004. To quote from that update, here's a slightly modified version of what I said:

Walter Chaw of Film Freak:
1) hates virtually everything,
2) fills every review with massive spoilers,
3) writes in intentionally confusing and thesaurus-happy style,
4) never fails to find misogyny and/or racism to comment on.

It's interesting to find that every single movie ever made is chock full of racism and sexism, and to read the writing of someone who so completely hates virtually everything he has to watch for his job, but #3, his intentionally-Byzantine prose and impenetrable metaphors that always draw me back to Walter's reviews. Here's an example, taken from his 1/2 star review of Spartan, in which Walter is talking about the style of the film's writer/director, 

Uh huh. Seriously, does anyone have any idea what he's talking about?  Does anyone find a movie review with writing like this in it of any use at all?

Here's another good one, from his 1/2 star review of Around the World in 80 Days.

Chaw is making a valid, if familiar, point about how few Asians there are in any Hollywood movie, unless they're filling some Kung Fu fighting role, or acting as a ridiculous stereotype. But why does he spend the time to shape his point into this off-putting, academic-ese presentation?  Is he auditioning for the movie review role in the sort of hoity-toity literary magazine that would never hire him since it's desperately trying to change its old, unbearably-pretentious ways in the face of ever-declining subscribers?

But even though the above is just one of several examples of Walter Chaw tactic #3, it's his inevitable time spent on #4 that really makes his Around the World review worth reading.  Because Jackie Chan's in the movie, and he's Chinese, and he's playing it for comedy, Walter starts off saying how he's not going to complain about Jackie becoming just a comedy relief sidekick... after which he spends a very, very long paragraph talking about how much he hates that Jackie has become just a comic relief sidekick. I'd quote the whole paragraph, but since I doubt more than 10% of you would slog the whole thing, here's an excerpt. It fits well into Walter's #3 tactic as well, as you'll see.

He starts off by calling Jackie a yellow Stepin Fetchit, and then segues into a personal anecdote.

It's a good thing that Film Freak only writes about movies, not TV or popular culture, since I don't think Walter Chaw's computer could survive an article on the William Hung phenomena. Though when he eventually sent in his crayon-lettered article on William Hung, kindly mailed by the nice man who brings Walter food in his new padded room, I would pay actual cash money to read it.

I talk about his reviews fairly often though, and since I wanted somewhere to post them, this page is it, for now, anyway.  Entries are tagged with the date they were originally posted, with more recent updates on top.

It's been said, (frequently by me) that Ebert's reviews aren't as much fun anymore, since he now likes everything. Well, he might not "like" everything, but he's started giving out a bloated number of three-star reviews, since by his metric, if a movie more or less succeeds at what it aimed to do, and will be enjoyed by its target audience and should therefore be mildly-recommended. I think he should tweak his star system to turn a mild recommendation into about 2 or 2.5 stars, but whatever.

His "logic" and aging/growing tolerance is put on display again this week, with 3-star reviews for Rumor Has It (19% on RT), The Ringer (39% on RT), and even execrable family-friendly swill Cheaper by the Dozen II (11% on RT).

There is something he doesn't like though. The new no-budget gore-fest from Oz, Wolf Creek, a film he awards with zero stars, and about which he says:

I like horror films. Horror movies, even extreme ones, function primarily by scaring us or intriguing us. Consider "Three ... Extremes" recently. "Wolf Creek" is more like the guy at the carnival sideshow who bites off chicken heads. No fun for us, no fun for the guy, no fun for the chicken. In the case of this film, it's fun for the guy.

..

There is a line and this movie crosses it. I don't know where the line is, but it's way north of "Wolf Creek." There is a role for violence in film, but what the hell is the purpose of this sadistic celebration of pain and cruelty? The theaters are crowded right now with wonderful, thrilling, funny, warm-hearted, dramatic, artistic, inspiring, entertaining movies. If anyone you know says this is the one they want to see, my advice is: Don't know that person no more.

Q. It seems that in past year most of your reviews end up awarding three stars or more. I had confidence in your three-star ratings until I realized that so many of them are mediocre films. For example, "Star Wars: Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith," which is composed of bad acting and unimpressive dialogue. Please be more critical of average films.

Bud Schauerte, Austin, Texas

A. I often hear I am "getting soft." A correspondent helpfully writes: "My friend says that since you had cancer, you give every movie three or four stars." A New York weekly critic says I "like everything," and he must be right, because I even liked the film he cited as an example of how much more discerning he is than critics like me.

I did some math, and found that my average rating for a feature film in 2005 came to about 2.7 stars. On a bell curve, the average should be 2.0, but consider that I reviewed 284 movies in the last year, and the extra titles were independent and foreign films that tended to skew higher. I am content with my 2.7 average.

The problem is with the use of stars as a rating system. Star ratings go back to that simpler time when film critics stood on far hillsides and signaled to the grateful peasantry with torches and brightly colored flags.

Indignant readers write me: "How could you give Film A three stars and Film B only 2-1/2 stars? I will never read your reviews again." I reply: "A wise decision! My reviews are for those who are stronger in literature than math."

Sky Captain is running at 72% on RT now, with 91/127 reviews positive, so clearly most critics are okay with it. I guess I'd recommend it, but only if the previous paragraph doesn't turn you off entirely. You've got to have a lot of un-jaded ten year old boy in you to buy into the movie, but if you can unplug your logical nit picking for the duration, it should be good.  If not, you'll wind up like Michelle Alexandra of Eclipse Magazine, and spend your entire review embarrassing yourself with comments like this:

These robots are out to take over the world, but the film fails to explain why. Well it explains it, but it’s a pretty lame explanation. Paltrow’s Perkins character was like nails on a chalkboard, she was whiny, dumb, stupid, retarded, not at all someone you want to spend 90 minutes with. In the very beginning of the film where instead of running away from the killer robots, she runs right into the middle of them and then try to get away, you know you are deal with a very special brand of stupidity. There’s a running joke about whether or not she cut the line on Captain’s plane. Why this is supposed to be funny, and pass for witty repartee is beyond me. I would think cutting a plane line might endanger the pilot, but what do I know? Ha, ha, it’s pretty funny, she cut my line.

You have to have seen the movie to grasp why her comments here are so misguided, but trust me, everything she says here makes perfect sense in the film. To be fair, I only noticed her review for Sky Captain since it's one of the few negative ones, was on top of the RT reviews page, and since I remembered her laugh out loud comments about LotR:RotK where she was completely puzzled by why the film repeatedly cut between Faramir riding towards Osgilliath and Denothos messily eating tomatoes while Pippen cried and sang a sand lament.  Nevertheless, another one of those and she'll find herself compiled on my Wacky Movie Critics page.

April 6, 2004

I never got around to posting the following in a daily blog, but here's a little story and an email I sent to a movie critic a week or so after seeing Ladykillers. In response to this (I think) very misguided review of Ladykillers, I was moved to actually email the author. His review says things like this:

To make matters worse, the acting is just god-awful. The actors involved in this train wreck have given much better performances and in much better movies. Marlon Wayans as the homeboy Gawain MacSam plays into the stereotype of the bling-bling gangsta type who can barely utter a coherent sentence. J.K. Simmons (TV's Law and Order) is Garth Pancake, the explosives expert with IBS. Tzi Ma, who was outstanding in The Quiet American, is the General, a martial arts expert whose primary role is to endlessly repeat a running gag with his cigarette. Ryan Hurst (Remember the Titans) is Lump -- his name says it all.

But the worst performances and roles are reserved for the two leads Hanks and Hall. Hanks plays Dorr as if he were channeling Truman Capote and Joseph Cotten giving a fractured interpretation of Colonel Sanders. In a word, it's an acting travesty. Hall's performance is less an outright disaster but is so clichιd and stereotypical that it borders on the offensive. That it is rendered in such a manically dull way just blunts and negates it. We're sort of hoping that she gets bumped off just to end the agony of the entire enterprise.

Which make it sound as though he completely missed the fact that this was a comedy, rather than a drama. The performances were supposed to be ridiculously stereotypical and outrageous, and I thought Hanks' work in the movie was brilliant, as were most of his lines. Great writing and dialogue and delivery of dozens of impossibly-complicated and lengthy lines of dialogue, all crammed full of multi-syllabic utterances and extremely complicated sentence structure.

Anyway, my mail to the clueless critic is reprinted here.  I did not receive any reply.

Regarding your review of Ladykillers, which I saw posted on the box office mojo site. I certainly wouldn't argue that it's a great film, but a D? Your comments on it seemed very misguided, as you spent most of the review criticizing the comedic elements of the film for not being dramatically convincing. Of course all of the criminals, not to mention the not-so-little old lady, are ridiculous stereotypes. That's the whole point. It's a comedy, and in this comedy the joke is that they are so broad and absurd and cartoonish.

Now it's certainly open to debate whether or not this is funny, since humor is entirely subjective. But your review seems to criticize the movie for accidentally doing what it clearly does on purpose. Ebert didn't think it was funny or compelling either, and he spent most of his review (pointlessly) comparing it to the original film (that I suspect about .05% of the US population has actually seen), but he at least acknowledged that he got the joke; he just didn't appreciate it.

If your review had pointed out that they were all exaggerated caricatures, and said that you didn't care for it, I think readers would be more likely to take your comments seriously, rather than just wondering if you somehow didn't grasp that it was sarcasm and comedy, rather than drama.

I didn't mention it in my own brief review, but on the way out of the theater my girlfriend and I passed a couple of women who were talking about the movie, and one of them said, "I didn't care for it. Jocks aren't really that stupid."

We (my girlfriend and I) traded a look and started laughing like hyenas, astonished that an educated adult could sit through the entire movie and come away so clueless. And I hate to say it, but I had the same reaction after reading your review, which seemed so earnest in its incomprehension.

Cheers.

Flux
blackchampagne.com

Funny how a mail I thought was relatively sincere and just slightly teasing reads so much snarkier and smugger now. Also, that anecdote we supposedly overheard on the way out of the theater is partially fictional, though I did hear a few confused people making complaints more or less along those lines.

December 23, 2003

Looking at RotK on Rotten Tomatoes, the current tally is 167/172 positive reviews.  I've read quite a few of them, mostly before the movie was released, but after seeing it myself and enjoying it so much, I had to go and look at the people who dared to give it a bad review. Where they clueless?  Haters of action?  Haters of fantasy?  Eager for attention whatever they had to do to get it? A little of all the above, as it turns out. You can read them yourself if you like, and if I were a bigger Tolkien fan or had more time to kill or were running a LotR fansite, I would eviscerate them in all their idiocy.  However I'm not, so I'll just comment in brief, at least on four of them.

Oddly enough, of the five negative reviews, two are from San Diego papers.  One is from the only major newspaper in town, by a critic who I read regularly while living there, but can't remember a thing about his preferences or anything interesting he ever said. His review is pretty bad, mostly because he says he's read the novels, and then goes on to complain about aspects of the movies that were taken directly from the novels. Bright lad.

The other San Diego review is from something called the San Diego Metropolitan, which I've never heard of, despite living in San Diego for most of the past two decades. Their critic says it's too long and he can't keep the characters straight and he's glad the trilogy is over.  Which makes you wonder why he sat through it in the first place, if he didn't like or understand the two prior films.

The guy in the Christian Science Monitor didn't like it and was bored, and seems to much prefer the novels, though his complaint about the movie is that it's too long and too much happens. (Hint, the novels are a lot longer and a lot more happens in them.)

The fourth negative review is from the Newark Star Ledger, and I'd read it but they require you to accept non-secure cookies and I can't be arsed to turn down/off my browser privacy settings just for their stupid asses.

The fifth negative review is the one I can't resist commenting on.  It's from something called Eclipse Magazine, it's by a reviewer who goes by the unwieldy handle of malexandria, and it gives the movie a final score of C, at the end of an embarrassingly bad review.  It's amazing that someone would spend the time to write two pages about a movie they so clearly dozed through, or just didn't pay attention to.  But more than that, the ignorance of basic film techniques is laughable.  Here's a quote:

The entire stuff with Denethor (John Noble) was just bad - bad acting, bad writing, bad motivations, just bad. We all know that he's crazy and not all there, but there's no real explanation for his behavior. Sure he is upset that his son was killed, but it felt like I was missing a vital part of his story arc. There is a powerful moment in the film, where Denethor commands his son, Faramir (played with a quiet dignity by David Wenham) to send his troops into a battle that everyone knows will bring certain death.

They build this moment up, make you care about it. When Pippin sings his song of despair and they cut to Faramir and his troops riding off. I'm there with this film, I'm connecting with it, really caring about his fate, I'm getting goose bumps, but the scene is totally ruined by two editing choices, one where they cut between Faramir, Pippin singing (great), and then to Denethor EATING! I couldn't help but laugh during this otherwise powerful moment. It was a perfect moment ruined by a stupid, stupid, STUPID, editing choice. And then the worst part, they cut away from this to go to something else for 15 or 20 minutes (we don't get to see the battle), so any emotional momentum built is totally lost.

I'll grant you that his motivations were lacking, but that's partially since they didn't have enough time to devote to him in the long movie and had to turn him more into an insane wanna-be king rather than going into depth, but given how he's presented, his motivations are entirely logical, for his character.  I thought the acting was fine as well, but it's the second quoted paragraph here that's just pathetic.

The scene with Denethor eating while his son rode off to an (apparently) suicidal battle was cut with him eating and Pippen singing for a reason, honey.  It wasn't some sort of accident in the editing room; it was meant to convey the utter content and unconcern the insane Denethor felt while his only surviving son rode off to die in a hopeless assault.  Did you think Denethor was just a really messy eater when he kept biting into tomatoes and letting the bloody red seeds spill down his chin?

And the reason there wasn't any of the "battle" shown was because there was no battle. Did the sight of about 5000 orcs drawing arrows and letting them fly from fortified positions not tip you off to the outcome of that particular engagement?

I first read this review a few days ago, and ever since them Malaya and I have been cracking each other up by asking, in a mock-confused tone, "Why did they keep showing the king eating while his son rode to battle? I don't understand."