'Rediculous' Customer & Critic Reviews

[The Curious Sofa]

So what is blu-ray.com’s pitch exactly? Come write for us and we won’t pay you? Lombard watches ungodly amounts of garbage anime for this site and he’s not getting paid? Dude must have no life or bills.

"Garbage anime" is his passion, and I think Blu-ray.com has twisted his arm to write reviews of classic movies as well. Often it's all too obvious that at best he just had a brief glance at these films.

[MichaelB]

I think I've been asked maybe twice to return the checkdisc - obviously in both cases I did it immediately, and in at least one case I was given a specific reason; they'd only run off a limited number, and demand from reviewers was greater than anticipated.

But otherwise the labels do indeed not care in the slightest.

And on a more general note, I imagine a fair number of paid professionals started out similarly - I wasn't paid for any of the hundreds of reviews that I wrote for DVD Times between 1999 and 2003, but it was an excellent platform on which to hone my writing to the extent that when a paying gig came along I had a pre-existing portfolio to point to. I've met a couple of people who were deluded enough to think that they could go straight from no track record at all to paid reviews, but it simply doesn't work like that - these days, it's hard enough getting paying gigs if you already have an existing and sometimes even a substantial reputation, so there's no way you're going to get any on the back of no proof of ability whatsoever.

[tenia]

I've been paid exactly ONCE for a review, but it was in a French printed newspaper (Le Figaro), it was 60€ to review L'année dernière à Marienbad, whose latest BD I received from Chanel directly. That's what I remember the most fondly about (this and bragging about it to my parents).

[Matt]

I got paid more ($10) for publishing one poem than I ever got paid in ten-plus years of writing film reviews online. But I got tons of free discs, including awards screeners.

[domino harvey]

I got paid from McSweeneys almost 20 years ago and as far as I know my piece has still never been published. That was more money than I ever saw all the years I did music reviews around the same time

[MichaelB]

On a per-word basis, subtitling pays a fair bit better than film criticism, which in turn pays much better than audio commentaries.

[P-Rock]

Blu-ray.com sure has a knack for employing the worst reviewers.

There used to be this reviewer (Greg Maltz) who for some reason hated Oliver Stone, and - wouldn't you know it - he became the main reviewer of Oliver Stone movies.

For example, here's his awful take on Natural Born Killers: Review

[jazzo]

On Etsy, “Stephen S” had this to say about the bootleg DVD set of Black Mirror seasons 1-7:

“I ordered the dvd box set as a gift for my dad, but unfortunately my dad is in jail so I had to send the dads into the jail for my dad. They have to be inspected before passing them to my dad and they were confiscated as fakes! And because it was officers who inspected the items, my dad had a lot of questions to answer! Not happy at all as they weren't cheap! Be careful what you order from what I thought etsy was a reputable company, but clearly not as they don't vet their sellers correctly!”

[MichaelB]

I forget where I read it (otherwise I'd link), but there was a hilarious review of Walerian Borowczyk's Immoral Tales that revealed rather more than I expected to read about its author's weird hang-ups about... well, naked women looking completely normal.

Which reminds me of one of the funniest arguments I've ever seen online. It was about contemporary female pubic hair fashion, and the two most vociferous participants were this man whose samples seemed to come exclusively from porn (so biased towards exhibitionists who might have professional reasons for shaving it off), and my wife, a midwife-turned-obs-and-gynae ultrasonographer who even then had notched up over a decade's experience. In other words, her data set ran into the tens of thousands, comprising women of all ages and backgrounds, teens to geriatric, and you'd have thought that most people would accept this as pretty clinching. But no - the bloke was the kind of man who would never accept that a mere woman could possibly know more than him (even when she clearly did, and for absolutely obvious and unquestionably clinching reasons) and so he kept it going, digging his hole deeper and deeper with each successive post. I'd link to it, but sadly the forum that hosted it suffered a terminal crash a couple of years later and lost everything.

Forgive the off-topic indulgence, but when idly trawling through this thread in search of nostalgic LOLs, I stumbled upon this post of mine, which is particularly resonant now because anyone who's met her will know (or easily believe*) that my wife is not one to back down from a fight, and this online spat - which I think happened fifteen years or more ago - ended up directly inspiring her recent MRes degree, which was ostensibly about the dramatic rise in labiaplasty, but ended up primarily being a reflective look about how even genitalia have developed "beauty standards", a concept that would have seemed totally bizarre to her when growing up in the late 20th century when such things were essentially invisible as far as the wider public was concerned. It may also underpin a follow-up PhD that she's currently discussing with potential supervisors.

(*This includes poor Peter Strickland, who I don't think was remotely prepared for the sheer volume of technical questions about lesbian BSDM that she fired at him - in his capacity as director of The Duke of Burgundy, one of her all-time favourite films - when we had dinner with him last autumn. Our poor host Johnny Mains, who hadn't met her before either, didn't know where to look!)

[Mr Sausage]

ended up directly inspiring her recent MRes degree

So when I googled that degree I left off the -S and had a moment of bafflement trying to square your wife's degree subject with Master of Religious Education.

[MichaelB]

Master of Research, and there was a ton of research along the way.

Which led to the following exchange with our thankfully then 19-year-old daughter:

Daughter: Mum, can you...?
Wife: <quickly> Don't come round to my side of the laptop; I'm watching porn for research.
Daughter: <ignoring her as usual> Oh. So you are.

At about the same time I had to issue a warning about what she'd risk seeing if she burst into my office without knocking as per her usual practice, what with me being deep in Jean Rollin disc production. She probably now thinks that both her parents are total perverts, but seems happy to carry on living with us.

[Walter Kurtz]

Master of Religious Education.

Utterly appropriate considering I worship my wife's from time to time.

[domino harvey]

But it was Natalie Wood who rightfully earned the Academy Award nomination for, as much as anything, whining like a cat in heat and moaning in a steaming hot bathtub while her unbroken hymen vibrates like a tuning fork.

[Zot!]

But it was Natalie Wood who rightfully earned the Academy Award nomination for, as much as anything, whining like a cat in heat and moaning in a steaming hot bathtub while her unbroken hymen vibrates like a tuning fork.

While this is a wonderfully florid (and surprisingly accurate) retelling of the scene from Splendor in the Grass. I was reminded of this perhaps apocryphal Natalie Wood bathtub story:

In the biography, "Natasha," the author recounts an incident that occurred at the time REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE was filmed. Natalie and some of the other actors including James Dean and Dennis Hopper decided it would be fun to take a bath in champagne. So they filled the tub and Natalie got in first, not realizing what the alcohol would do to her "nether region." She jumped out of the tub in short order screaming.

[Never Cursed]

I wonder, does Natasha go into any details about Wood's alleged (and if true, extremely illegal) affair with Nicholas Ray before and during the filming of Rebel? The only place I've seen discuss it is Douglas Rathgeb's excellent book on the film.

[bottlesofsmoke]

I wonder, does Natasha go into any details about Wood's alleged (and if true, extremely illegal) affair with Nicholas Ray before and during the filming of Rebel? The only place I've seen discuss it is Douglas Rathgeb's excellent book on the film.

Yes, there’s a lot about it in there. Wood’s mother encouraged her relationships with powerful older men, “pimping her out” as people who knew them described it, mixing it with Wood’s ambition to be a great actress and a great artist and creating a unhealthy combination to say the least for someone so young. Ray seems to have been more of Wood’s idea rather than her mother’s, her way of taking control of her life, as sad as that is, and more about how he made her feel (he “made love” to her while all the other guys just wanted to “screw” her) and that he worked closely with her as an actress and took her seriously as an artist, which was all mixed up with her idea of sexuality. But yeah, it seems there’s little doubt that it took place; Ray was well known to surround himself with young people up until the last years of his life so it fits with that pattern too.
Her mother might be the ultimate terrible stage mothers, she even took Wood’s young sister, when she was like 8 years old, with her to spy on Wood with men. There’s a really sad quote about how she’d sit in the car outside wherever Natalie was, praying that they could go home so she could go to sleep.

[domino harvey]

Thank goodness.
It's not real. Thank god ,no person should have that much power. Good movie.

Spoiler

Bell, Book and Candle

[TechnicolorAcid]

I’d think their point would be stronger if the person holding said power was anyone other than Kim Novak. I’m just saying, she could run me over with a train and I’d be okay with it.

[domino harvey]

Sparse book with little new revealed about Ford or his movies. Ford's film methods and his hard and cruel treatment of many actors (which is well-known) are covered. The book doesn't really let the reader know much about the man. It was interesting to find out Ford had a love affair with Katherine Hepburn. You have to wonder how many men she did sleep with to get parts in pictures?

[Red Screamer]

Notorious womanizer George Cukor

[TechnicolorAcid]

Technically the commenter is right since you could argue that for her films with Spencer Tracy although I don’t think they married just so star in pictures together.

[The Curious Sofa]

Tracy and Hepburn never married; Tracy remained married to his first wife his entire life. The idea that a well-established movie star like Hepburn had to sleep with powerful men to get roles at that point in her career is laughable.

[beamish14]

Tracy and Hepburn never married; Tracy remained married to his first wife his entire life. The idea that a well-established movie star like Hepburn had to sleep with powerful men to get roles at that point in her career is laughable.

It’s insane. She made ONE film with John Ford, so obviously that didn’t work, lol

[Beloved Aunt]

Here is a line from Gary Tooze's new review of Shoeshine, that indicates that, not only is he a terrible writer, but that he's actually AI:

Additionally, the release boasts a new cover by F. Ron Miller, providing contextual depth and historical insights that enrich appreciation of this neorealist classic.

[Lowry_Sam]

Tracy and Hepburn never married; Tracy remained married to his first wife his entire life.

Well if the rumors are true, what Hepburn & Tracy shared was that both were not predominantly interested in the opposite sex and that their very public affair was an affair for show publicized by the studios to cover their real affairs (with members of the same sex).