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The parts about Lucas are funny, though.

No one's willing to admit that many of Kurosawa's films are among the greatest ever made -- despite some truly wretched acting?

Kurosawa wouldn't be the first major Japanese director to be dismissed as "a no-talent"...

That said, "assclown" is new.

I think this review of Being John Malkovich might be a joke, but here it is anyway:

Very confusing Biography indeed.

I am still terribly confused. I wondered if this biography was even authorized, but John Malkovich was in it, so it must have been. That makes me worry it was autobiographical, he seemed so lucid and sane in other movies. Also, the building with a floor at half height, what building inspector signed off on that? Talk about a fire hazard. The thing could not have been structurally sound. I am just glad no actors got hurt filming in that strange building. There are a lot of good reviews though, so maybe I am missing something.

For some reason, the capital B in Biography makes me think it's sincere. But I have no idea why.

I read some of his other reviews and he is obviously trying to be funny.

So unfunny it's almost bizarre.
His review for the SketchBook Mobile app:

I saw this app and immediately thought "Whose line is it anyway", sketch comedy gold. It turns out this app is about actual sketching. Not really that funny at all. I was able to draw my disappointment with the app though, so that's a plus. Then I started to draw scenes from "Whose line is it anyway", that made me feel much better. It is a pretty decent drawing app with many features, sadly comedy geniuses like Ryan Stiles, Colin Mochrie, and Wayne Brady are not to be found.

For some women's UGGs:

These are listed as Australian boots. But as any American knows from geography class, Australia is on the other side (bottom) of the world. So everything is clearly upside down there. Since up in America points `up' here, then up in Australia must point down at the ground to point the same way. So reasonably, Australians must walk on their hands. So boots, or any footwear really, acts as a type of hat for them. QED. I can see paying $200 for a good pair of comfortable shoes, cause I need those, but not for a hat! That is outlandish. Still they look pretty rugged and probably are really comfortable, but still they are the equivalent of a hat. Seriously.

What a card!

MyNameCriterionForum wrote:No one's willing to admit that many of Kurosawa's films are among the greatest ever made -- despite some truly wretched acting?

This thread really is not where we conduct serious debates about the merits of films. Rather it is a repository of infamous critical comments (by everyone in the world other than Armond White -- who gets his own dedicated thread). ;~}

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1534085/reviews-8" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

"The extremely dull first half of this movie is only tempered by the extremely stupid second half.

Particularly entertaining is the scientist suddenly becoming a leather queen - complete with an awkward coming out scene to his wife and then a repressed-homosexual killing. His killing of Jack Black as he sublimates his homoerotic urges by spouting words devoted to his asexual object of projection (the original object of homosexual attraction being the girls father who is dying of AIDS) is then quickly upped by his hilariously limp wristed DEATH BY FALLING OVER. Also in the later part of the movie we run into the scientists bondage zombie pal wrapped up in a sleepsack which made me kind of regret that they didn't make this movie an all out gay parade. Imagine the level of greatness this movie could have achieved if they made it a psychosexual thriller like In A Glass Cage with some hot boy in the flower of his youth as the prisoner and Marisa Paredes as the lab assistant. Amazing.

They should have taken all the allegory out of "Beyond The Black Rainbow" and just made it out and out gay."

From the IMDB:

Lol Doesn't this movie remind you of anything ? You can clearly see that this movie is a copy of ***prison brake*** but a more cheap and bad one He looks the same like the main actor from ***prison brake***, he falls in love with the nurse , story with the brother again and he even get a phone in jail same like ***prison brake*** the only thing they came up with is the part with the mother witch is ***s**ht*** Anyway I haven't seen the whole movie I have only seen the trailer but you can clearly see that they took their imagination from ***Prison Brake*** Maybe one day they will make something of their own and stop stealing from others ...

The film is If I Want To Whistle, I Whistle, and it has nothing in common with Prison Break. But I'd love to see this guy review Skolimowski's Essential Killing on the basis of its slambang action trailer!

MichaelB wrote:witch is ***s**ht***

Am I the only one who can't figure out what word that's supposed to be? I mean, I guess it's "shit" if he's keeping the three-asterisk thing consistent, but that is impressive

Reading that review made me imagine hanging around with someone who in every conversation is like:
"Hmm, that sandwich was good, but not as good as ***prison brake***. Well, what should we do now? Hey, let's watch ***prison brake*** again!"

tarpilot wrote:

MichaelB wrote:witch is ***s**ht***

Am I the only one who can't figure out what word that's supposed to be?

It think the full sentence is "Witch is Messiah tabu." Probably a reference to the Christian attitude to witchcraft.

RossyG wrote:It think the full sentence is "Witch is Messiah tabu." Probably a reference to the Christian attitude to witchcraft.

I think that's the only explanation that makes truly perfect sense.

Not a review, but I do love the book description for David Kalat's book on J-horror given by this Norwegian e-tailer:

During the first year on the job, a young idealistic teacher tries to persuade a shy, virtually autistic boy called Tetsun to give up his obsession for flies. She changes her mind when she becomes aware of the breadth and depth of his knowledge of various flies. When a local food-processing factory begins to suffer from a fly problem, it is young Tetsun to the rescue.

The last paragraph of this IMDb review got weird..
Someone from Prague, so a good dollop of English problems, but I was mostly impressed by the ambitious word choice, odd assertions and the all-in-one-sentence quality of the thing.

From a technical angle, the gauche SFX is a far cry from top notch, some CGI blemishes could be well-conceived by any spectator, one embarrassing moment arrives when all actors are frozen into a stop-motion pause, all the horses could not stay put as their human counterparts, their carefree optimism may betray that great paintings are earnestly not in need of any reinterpretation and an overstatedly pedagogic preaching cannot service the aim of converting a person's religious belief, while the film clearly cannot differ idiosyncrasy from ridicule and its excess of self-esteem only stands for a superfluous waste of energy, time and funds.

Almost has a Czech-Armond thing going at the end.
The film: The Mill and the Cross (Lech Majewski, 2011).

I think I'm going to start using "excess of self-esteem" in my own criticism from now on. Watch out, Fincher!

Lemmy Caution wrote:The last paragraph of this IMDb review got weird..
Someone from Prague, so a good dollop of English problems, but I was mostly impressed by the ambitious word choice, odd assertions and the all-in-one-sentence quality of the thing.

From a technical angle, the gauche SFX is a far cry from top notch, some CGI blemishes could be well-conceived by any spectator, one embarrassing moment arrives when all actors are frozen into a stop-motion pause, all the horses could not stay put as their human counterparts, their carefree optimism may betray that great paintings are earnestly not in need of any reinterpretation and an overstatedly pedagogic preaching cannot service the aim of converting a person's religious belief, while the film clearly cannot differ idiosyncrasy from ridicule and its excess of self-esteem only stands for a superfluous waste of energy, time and funds.

Almost has a Czech-Armond thing going at the end.
The film: The Mill and the Cross (Lech Majewski, 2011).

If your writing is bad and your thoughts incoherent, just throw a thesaurus at them! Fixed! Anybody who has had to mark undergraduate essays will recognize this style of writing.

I'd also like to point out that the wobbling horses (etc.) in the tableaux vivants are sort of the whole point of the movie! Or does this guy honestly believe that, in a film that features extreme digital manipulation in every single frame and is entirely predicated on the capabilities of that technology, Majewski couldn't figure out how to do a freeze-frame?

I wasn't a fan of the film, but I thought it used its CGI very well and all the kooky attributes were intentional. The review speaks to the superiority most folks feel to material they don't "get"

Only undergraduates? I've read some graduate papers that unfortunately did the same thing.

Domino: I think I had a similar response to you (shock! horror!) - a fascinating technical experiment, that works very well at what it sets out to do, but I was less enamoured of the film as a film. Which might as well be my default review of most of Majewski's work.

Knives: Sshh! You're going to give away the deep, dark secret of academia!

knives wrote:Only undergraduates? I've read some graduate papers that unfortunately did the same thing.

Ditto professional writers. When I edited regularly, I much preferred dealing with journalists to dealing with academics.

I just ran into that situation about five days ago actually and heavily agree. It had some technical issues, but thank god it was at least readable.

Academics, for at least a couple of decades now, are routinely taught to write in this jargon heavy, impenetrable style, to the point where I think a lot of them feel kind of exposed without it, like the intellectual content has been stripped away. This has the side effect of allowing writers who really don't have any content to hide that fact through this jargon heavy style.

I keep hoping for the day when academic writing will swing back towards the lucid and logical style favoured pre-1970, when even the heaviest academic piece could be completely readable.

Couldn't agree more, Mr. S.