'Rediculous' Customer & Critic Reviews

[Forgotten Goldfish]

But we amateur reviewers haven't realized the true problem with these movies. The professionals, as you'd expect, delve deeper. Here is Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide (1990 edition) on the subject of Gérard Krawczyk's Je hais les acteurs (I Hate Actors):

Set in Tinseltown, yet all of the dialogue's in French.

Not that I'm necessarily trying to defend Maltin, but taking that quotation in context, I got the impression that he was merely trying to alert readers that it's a foreign-language film and not done in English.

It's also worth remembering that most of the reviews in Maltin's Movie Guide aren't written by the great man himself. (See its preface.)

It used to be said of Alexandre Dumas (another prolific employer of ghost writers): "Nobody has ever read everything that Dumas has written -- not even Dumas."

No doubt the same could be said about Leonard Maltin. Plainly he doesn't have time to check everything that goes into his books. I'm sure the sentence I've quoted wasn't written by him (its prose style is quite different from his), and I'm pretty sure it wasn't even seen by him.

[souvenir]

DVD Beaver reviewer gone wild YEF in his review of Disturbia:

I'm not even a fan of Rear Window (much too long for my tastes)

I can't imagine what kind of attention span makes someone consider Rear Window's 112 minutes to be "much too long."

[Svevan]

Yunda Eddie Fung is full of 'em.

Here's his criticism of Zodiac:

Unfortunately, the movie is also very, very long. A lot of scenes are meant to show us how futile the investigative work was. However, we don't need to be reminded every five minutes that the policemen and the journalists only have dead ends on their hands. In this instance, the pacing and the length are two separate matters. The leisurely pacing is welcome, but the length is not.

And here's another for Letters from Iwo Jima:

I have two quibbles. First, the movie is a tad long.

Or look at his review of Babel, which is full of stupid lines:

Traffic, Crash, and Babel are what I would call “emotional pornâ€

[AZAI]

Is this the same guy that said

Against many odds, I actually enjoyed this little gem.

about the wedding date.....not only am I wondering how a arguably decent executed romcom becomes a gem, in all my subjectiveness it is the worst piece of mishandled trite garbage I happened to sneak-preview in 2005....

[starmanof51]

When reviewing Ghost, he lifts a criticism straight from Roger Ebert's review:

Every time that I watch this movie, I wonder why the moviemakers never showed shots of Whoopi hugging and making out with Demi.

To be fair(why be fair you ask? I dunno) I don't think Roger had the market cornered on that particular observation. I wouldn't assume YEF got it from Roger in particular or that he even needed to have it pointed out to him - it's a blatant BS moment (in a film peppered with minor BS moments).

[tryavna]

I'm not much of a fan of Feng's reviews either. Didn't he used to (or perhaps still does) write for another review website?

But he still can't top DVD Verdict. Thanks to Person (Gordon?), I came across this howler from their review of The Hill:

It's unfortunate that The Hill was filmed in black & white, because the blinding sun and endless expanse of sand would have provided a far more intense backdrop if they could be seen in color.

Damn the aesthetic limitations of black and white photography!

(Actually, it seems immediately clear to me that the starkness of black and white makes this film even more intense.)

[Ledos]

Well Ive just read some of my reviews and a couple of them stink!

Why not quote them in this thread? That's what it's for

[MichaelB]

Funnily enough I watched Amadeus last night and it seemed that Simon Callow was doing an American accent! I wonder if he did it so that an English accent would not seem like a wrong note and out of place with Tom Hulce, F. Murray Abraham and the rest of the cast? If that was the case it seems like an interesting example of an actor doing an accent not to stick close to the reality of the period, but in order to keep the whole 'they're speaking English' debate in the back of people's minds and not consciously remind them of it.

I suspect that almost certainly was the reason - it obviously wasn't accidental.

Incidentally, I once saw Amadeus in dubbed Italian, and it worked very well for me - it made linguistic sense because the entire film was effectively narrated by an Italian (Salieri), so he'd doubtless have remembered it in that language.

[Forgotten Goldfish]

I wonder which internet account of a movie contains the greatest number of factual errors per square inch. One candidate must be the account of The Man Who Lost Himself (1941) at a website called Allmovieguide, which has the support of no less an institution than the New York Times. I quote it in full:

In this humorous adventure, a Puerto Rican explorer shares a drink with his oddball millionaire double. For a lark, they decide to pull a switcheroo and exchange places. Unfortunately, the millionaire is killed in a car accident. His poor grieving wife, doesn't realize that the dead man is the explorer. Meanwhile the real rich man endeavors to prove his true identity.

Every sentence of that is wrong.
1. Nobody in the film is ever said to be an explorer.
2. If we're trying to be accurate, nobody in the film is ever said to be a millionaire, either. (I'll grant, though, that 1930s Hollywood sometimes seems to have believed that every rich man was a millionaire.)
3. The Puerto Rican and the rich man don't “decide to pull a switcherooâ€

[Mr Sausage]

Here is a review of 300 that is sure to boggle the minds of a lot of board members (including some, like me, who did enjoy the thing).

Here are the second and third sentences from the opening paragraph:

Director Zack Snyder, the man responsible for a superlative remake of George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, adapts Frank Miller's graphic novel with passion and creativity, proving that classical storytelling will never go out of style — especially if more filmmakers are able to make it look as cool and exciting as this. Combining old-school mythmaking with ultramodern technique, Snyder has crafted a one-of-a-kind masterpiece that is unlike any movie audiences have seen, and in so doing he may have sealed his own fate as a possible redeemer of modern moviemaking.

People! Kneel before your redeemer, for He has been named, and his name is, er, Zack.

Ultimately, this film combines an archetypal conflict, an ancient storytelling tradition reaching back as far as the Greeks themselves, and technique that makes it relevant to modern audiences. In other words, it's not clear whether great movie myths are born or bred, but 300 is unequivocally one of them.

I honestly cannot decipher what he's talking about.

It seems like [Snyder's] only (or maybe most obvious) predecessor would be Ridley Scott, who broke into the mainstream with a similar sort of genre-movie deconstruction and whose last big commercial success no doubt served as at least a vague template for some of the style on display here. Suffice it to say that Snyder could do worse than follow Scott's career path, rewriting rules and changing the landscape with each new effort. But keep in mind that it took Scott 22 years to follow Alien with a Gladiator, and it took only four for Snyder to go from Dawn to 300.

There are a few other howlers lurking about if you're up to reading the whole thing.

[starmanof51]

There are a few other howlers lurking about if you're up to reading the whole thing.

Thank you, but no, that will probably be enough.

[amateurist]

In distilling the film to a series of formal, representational episodes, Dumont condenses the essential images of quotidian documentation into an abstract, yet instinctual composition - transforming the literality of the often blunt, crude, and awkward encounters into a potent and indelible crystallization of human cruelty, desire, and longing. Inevitably, it is perhaps within this interpenetrating cycle of war and growth, violence and intimacy, death and renewal that Dumont also invokes the impassioned, elegiac sentiment of John McCrae's famous Great War poem, In Flanders Fields in its contours of memory and eternally transforming landscape that define the inalterable shape of the human heart.

[kevyip1]

DVD Savant review of "Ashes and Diamonds":

In fact, it was on Oscar night that I realized the director's name is pronounced An-dray Vie-dar ... when I'd been wrongly calling him Wadge-da for twenty years.

[souvenir]

Maybe DVD Savant should avoid showcasing his DVD collection one by one on YouTube in the future.

[tryavna]

Funniest post in months!

[Matt]

DVD Savant review of "Ashes and Diamonds":

In fact, it was on Oscar night that I realized the director's name is pronounced An-dray Vie-dar ... when I'd been wrongly calling him Wadge-da for twenty years.

But even that's not right. I remember Jane Fonda very carefully pronouncing his name Ahn-jay Vie-dah. Still, better than Wadge-da.

[Forgotten Goldfish]

An internet synopsis of Dieterle's Magic Fire (1956):

Magic Fire
German composer Richard Wagner's (Yvonne De Carlo) stormy music reflects his love life.
Directed by: William Dieterle

It's good to know that De Carlo wasn't always typecast....

[zedz]

An internet synopsis of Dieterle's Magic Fire (1956):

Magic Fire
German composer Richard Wagner's (Yvonne De Carlo) stormy music reflects his love life.
Directed by: William Dieterle

It's good to know that De Carlo wasn't always typecast....

Now that's a film I want to see. Ken Russell, eat your heart out!

[MichaelB]

DVD Savant review of "Ashes and Diamonds":

In fact, it was on Oscar night that I realized the director's name is pronounced An-dray Vie-dar ... when I'd been wrongly calling him Wadge-da for twenty years.

But even that's not right. I remember Jane Fonda very carefully pronouncing his name Ahn-jay Vie-dah. Still, better than Wadge-da.

Actually, the correct pronunciation is somewhere between "An-dray" and "An-jay" - to get the 'rzej' bit right, you have to pronounce 'r' and 'zh' more or less simultaneously, a common sound in Eastern Europe but unknown in anglophone countries. (The composer DvoÅ™ák is probably the most familiar example).

'Vie-dah' is pretty much spot on - though it should be made clear that 'Vie' rhymes with "cry".

Mind you, when discussing his work with a particular friend of mine, I always pronounce his name 'Wadge-da'. She's Polish, and it amuses her.

[Musashi219]

I'm not sure if many folks on here use Facebook, but they added a new application not too long ago by the name of "Flixster" that is essentially a reviewing community. Oh there is some gold to be mined in them thar hills. Observe:

Citizen Kane

it's overrated! i mean...well...why should it always be praised? there's not very much in it! I'm sure...

8 1/2

I really really don't get it. I don't like it, and I don't feel like every watching it again to give it a second chance. The imagery may be nice, but the story and the connectivity between characters is non-existant and wierd. I just stop caring.

The Godfather

I was beyond myself in boredom while watching this. If it is not visually interesting (as in not old men talking harshly in poorly-lit rooms) then ADD takes over and the movie is finished.

Do the Right Thing

Why was this movie so hateful??? I don't really understand what Spike Lee was trying to do here. I think he took the racism thing too far.

That last one is a personal favorite of mine, mostly because you can replace racism with any word and apply it to any film. These folks think they're capable of being the next Roger Ebert, when they're really going to be the next Pete Hammond. A fellow critic and I are going to be doing an opinion editorial for our paper on this Flixster business and I'll gladly post a link once it hits the web.

Trust me, look to Flixster for your comedic needs.

[patrick]

These folks think they're capable of being the next Roger Ebert, when they're really going to be the next Pete Hammond.

Being the new Pete Hammond would mean that they like every movie they see and sum it up in the vaguest terms possible.

[Musashi219]

These folks think they're capable of being the next Roger Ebert, when they're really going to be the next Pete Hammond.

Being the new Pete Hammond would mean that they like every movie they see and sum it up in the vaguest terms possible.

I should've clarified that a bit. You should see the stuff they write about movies they do like. Alot of them could be the future DVD back cover writers of America.

[lord_clyde]

In regards to the new Lindsay Lohan thriller "I Know who Killed Me", Jim Ridley of L.A. Weekly said:

Watch the mallrats' jaws drop as they pay to see the same old teen slicer-dicer, only to get this wacko hodgepodge of the Brian De Palma horror filmography and -- I swear to God -- Kieslowski's The Double Life of Veronique.

[patrick]

What is it with wannabe Anglophiles and making themselves look foolish?

From the IMDB page for Hot Fuzz:

First off, for those who don't know what "Anglosized" means (though it isn't a word), it is a translation for "British-ized." I am a large fan of British cinema and TV, and just find the comedy the way I like it: eccentric, yet subtle. This film embodied all that is right with comedy in general, poking fun at all the bad cop movies out there and adding their own small bit of "Spaced", "Shaun of the Dead", "Big Train", etc., humour. Americans who call this film boring are usually those who enjoy watching Steven Seagal in action movies.

[Matt]

comedy the way I like it: eccentric, yet subtle

Yes, because Hot Fuzz is a paragon of subtle humor.