'Rediculous' Customer & Critic Reviews

[med]

The cat clearly didn't enjoy being picked up and being held over wherever it was being held over—the implication (thanks to careful editing and camera placement) is from up several flights of stairs—but the cat was not physically assaulted in any way. I'm sure the person who wrote those comments let his or her own hypersensitivity to the treatment of animals make it seem worse than it actually was.

[dx23]

A friend of mine found this gem on Netflix:

Netflix user review, “Boardwalk Empire”

Why are Hollywood, MTV and Showtime so hostile to heterosexual males? Hollywood, HBO and Showtime fell that they must show a mans penus in every thing they make, but NEVER a females vag!na! They just keep showing same stupid lame female breast shots or sometimes (very rarely) a bush shot. HBO and Showtime have a double standard when it comes to full frontal nudity. And for all those females who want to say that Hollywood has been showing breasts forever, well breasts are in no way equal to showing genitals. How could any heterosexual male viewer set and watch this crap! Why is it that heterosexual males continue to watch this anti-male crap without an equal amount of female genital nudity? Just another hateful anti-heterosexual white male movie by liberal Hollywood! HBO wont even let us see ring girls on boxing, but they feel the need to blast us with pen!s programs and scenes over and over again.

[Cold Bishop]

????

The show stars Paz de la Huerta, for crissakes!

[knives]

Than it must be really hateful to straight men. Putting them through that face.

[Brian C]

This guy makes a good point - is there anything more anti-male than a penis?

[matrixschmatrix]

A penus, apparently

[knives]

Somebody doesn't understand that bad adaptation =/= bad movie.

Tintin: The secret of the unicorn

if you're a fan of the comic book... stay the hell away from this movie, this piece of cinematic trash is NOT Tintin.

They should have called this Indiana Jones V: Secret of the Unicorn

everything about this movie made me facepalm

Tintin is not about high speed action and one liners, yes, sometimes some of the things he does on the comics border on it, but the comic book is meant to be slow paced and methodical

the movie is too fast, the story was butchered, Haddock passes off as a complete buffoon, it's just a horrible interpretation.

Just so we're clear, i'm not criticizing the animation like most negative reviews I've seen, the animation and voice work were top notch. But as someone who read the comics this was a complete butchering of Hergé's work, it's ironic Hergé himself claimed only Spielbierg could accurately portray his character in the big screen, but in reality, spielberg failed... big time

[Zot!]

Cinematography was perfect, scenery great, acting great and music was solid too, but all this falls into water because Lars Von Tier with his slow (I mean very slow), pretencious and amateur shots turn this movie into uninteresting and bad movie, who has flop with a good reason...

Pitty because this could be a great art masterpiece, it had great plot, solid cast (even I am not a big fan of Kirsten "wooden" Dunst) and good director, I really don't know what was he thinking. Why did he made such a long scenes, why? For example in one scene Kirsten Dunst looks at the sky for about 4 minutes, I mean WTF? This is not art, this is Tier's ego trying to tell us, "I want to be popular, I want to be cult..." Well Mr. Tier, you definetly won't know.

This movie was so boring that even my sister who digs art "malick-type" movies says it was bad, and belie me or not, it means BAD than!

[knives]

And here I was thinking he has a tendency to cut too much. Oh well, can't be right every time.

[tarpilot]

Using ESL reviews is dirty pool, no?

[Zot!]

Using ESL reviews is dirty pool, no?

Okay, you're right, but the stabs at conversational English have some kind of unintentional comic poetry (Von Tier), while the general boneheadedness behind shines through (If you don't believe me, you know you can trust my sister!).

[The Narrator Returns]

Review of Punch-Drunk Love:

worst fowl [sic] language ever! do they have to say f bomb every word!

It was the worst movie I have ever seen. I am so mad I actually bought the stupid thing. they say the f word way too much

[Lemmy Caution]

Review of Punch-Drunk Love:

worst fowl [sic] language ever! do they have to say f bomb every word!

It was the worst movie I have ever seen. I am so mad I actually bought the stupid thing. they say the f word way too much

Yeah, fuck those fucking fuckers.

[Michael Kerpan]

Yeah, fuck those fucking fuckers.

What an [ex]Treme thing to say.

[Perkins Cobb]

Every other Netflix customer review, and the occasional comment on my blog, are either a complaint about the overuse of "swears" or a proclamation that old movies are better because there aren't any swears in them.

[colinr0380]

Hasn't anyone shown them those foul mouthed outtakes from My Man Godfrey?

[knives]

France's so-called New Wave was a confluence of pretension and mediocrity. It was first and foremost a mid-fifties school of film criticism that postulated that (1) cinema was of great intellectual import, probably too good for the masses, and that (2) most successful French directors before the publication of its fanzine, "Les Cahiers du Cinéma" (Marcel Carné, Julien Duvivier, Marcel L'Herbier, Jean Gremillon, Henri-George Clouzot, Jean Delannoy, Henri Decoin, to name a few) should be despised, shunned, bullied, ridiculed and persecuted or at least treated with suspicion while most American directors of the same period (except for Wyler, Zinnemann and Stevens) were to be considered as "geniuses" and "pioneers". It was therefore based on a misunderstanding which made it more important to talk intelligently and pretentiously about films (thereby excluding most people from film appreciation) than to make films that people would actually want to see.

The movement had two cliquish firebrands, Jean-Luc Godard - who made increasingly unwatchable and solipsistic films all through his career - and François Truffaut - an acid-tongued journalist who attained a certain commercial success with the help of snobism, in spite of his idiotic and dogmatic principles and his obvious lack of talent and humanity. They will always be remembered as the two vindictive and parochial "mean girls" of French cinema and judged by posterity as "dwarves standing on the shoulders of the giants that preceded them" (e.g.: Jean Renoir, René Clair and Sacha Guitry). Their main legacy is the sad fact that very few of France's really important films (i.e. pre-New Wave) have been preserved and restored for posterity, unlike their own idiotic opuses. For good measure, Truffaut also despised the work of Jean Gabin, Michèle Morgan, Gerard Philippe and Michel Simon.

This misunderstanding also means that all the more successful, quietly innovative or truly revolutionary films of the period have been claimed as "New Wave" when they simply were not (e.g.: the best films of Chabrol, Malle, Varda, Demy, Resnais and Rohmer) and their directors have repeatedly said so, while the films of their "enemies" were excluded from any form of recognition (e.g.: Marcel Carné's "Les Tricheurs" and Julien Duvivier's "La Fête à Henriette").

"Le Beau Serge" is a case in point. It can only be considered "New Wave" in that it is made with no money by a young, dedicated but inexperienced director who tried to imitate his elders and betters and made many mistakes along the way. At that point, Malle didn't know how to sustain attention, direct actors or put a final product together (look at the editing and listen to the music, all dreadful).

This film is only watchable today because of Gérard Blain's heartfelt James Dean impression, Blain having been exploited by the New Wave for his charm and screen presence (and the fact he was married to Bernadette Lafond) and then vomited as soon as he started producing intelligent films that didn't carry the official New Wave label (e.g.: "Les Amis", 1970).

Everything I wrote here has been written countless times before but it can never be repeated often enough.

Chabrol himself once said: "There is no new wave, there is only the ocean."

[MyNameCriterionForum]

That makes sense to me. Nicely delineates the risks and pretensions of attaching yourself to any sort of adolescent "movement". And I did laugh at the mention of Cahiers as a "fanzine", nice touch. Now if only that person would work up a similar analysis of Pauline Kael.

[domino harvey]

The fanzine line is one of the funniest things I've read in some time. The rest is equally idiotic in a less amusing way, but oddly keeping in spirit with the Cahiers writing it decries, which might be the point-- either way, it gets a pass for style alone

[MichaelB]

As polemic, I think that's pretty good - obviously, I disagree with a fair proportion of it (though some of it is uncomfortably nail-on-the-head), but the writer clearly knows his stuff and knows how to push people's buttons.

And yes, this is very much in the Cahiers tradition of taking potshots at sacred cows - so there's nothing 'rediculous' about it at all.

[aox]

I am a big fan of Godard's work from the 60s, but I kind of agree with the assessment of François Truffaut. :-#

[Gregory]

And yes, this is very much in the Cahiers tradition of taking potshots at sacred cows - so there's nothing 'rediculous' about it at all.

That's also the tradition of undistinguished, immature snobs, not to imply that most of Cahiers overlaps with that. It also fits the Internet tradition of posturing like an lecturing expert but getting crucial facts wrong, such as who directed the film being "reviewed."
I love good polemic as much as the next person, probably more, but it's overused on the Internet just about everywhere one looks (and I've no doubt contributed to this too), due to people's agitated egos. And the skill of seeing subtleties and exceptions, as well as problems and complications within one's own viewpoint is something that's underused just about everywhere, not just on the Internet.

[knives]

I was mostly just amused that he thought Le beau Serge was directed by Malle. If you're going to decry, decry accurately. Also a few of his 'not cool to the new wave' directors are inaccurate.

[Michael Kerpan]

I'm with Gregory and domino. While this may have a certain verve, it strikes me as almost entirely drivel (even aside from outright factual mistakes).

[MichaelB]

I was mostly just amused that he thought Le beau Serge was directed by Malle.

True, he does rather shoot himself in the foot there, especially coming immediately after his declaration that Malle wasn't part of the nouvelle vague. But that makes it pretty clear that it's a silly slip-up rather than an error made out of ignorance.