January 04, 2005

The New Yorker review of the Phantom of the Opera movie is a fine example of the a bad review as an art. Som have taken a critical look at the bad review, while others have simply found a place for bad art.
posted by patita 19 years ago
  • I don't think I have ever enjoyed reading a review as much as I enjoyed that one.
  • I'll second Skrik's comment.
  • Anthony Lane is a genius...he kicks David Denby up and down the street every other week. Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses, by Mark Twain, is my all-time favorite writerly takedown:
    Cooper's gift in the way of invention was not a rich endowment; but such as it was he liked to work it, he was pleased with the effects, and indeed he did some quite sweet things with it. In his little box of stage-properties he kept six or eight cunning devices, tricks, artifices for his savages and woodsmen to deceive and circumvent each other with, and he was never so happy as when he was working these innocent things and seeing them go. A favorite one was to make a moccasined person tread in the tracks of a moccasined enemy, and thus hide his own trail. Cooper wore out barrels and barrels of moccasins in working that trick. Another stage-property that he pulled out of his box pretty frequently was the broken twig. He prized his broken twig above all the rest of his effects, and worked it the hardest. It is a restful chapter in any book of his when somebody doesn't step on a dry twig and alarm all the reds and whites for two hundred yards around. Every time a Cooper person is in peril, and absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute, he is sure to step on a dry twig. There may be a hundred other handier things to step on, but that wouldn't satisfy Cooper. Cooper requires him to turn out and find a dry twig; and if he can't do it, go and borrow one. In fact, the Leatherstocking Series ought to have been called the Broken Twig Series.
  • Beautifully constructed post patita - )!
  • Yeah, well Twain himself stole that women-throw-their-knees-apart thing from Charles Reade's The Cloister and the Hearth. Glass stones. houses.
  • Roger Ebert has a search page on the Sun Times site that lets you search by number of stars given in his reviews. Many of his pans are very funny. I think critics look forward to the bombs as much or more than the greats.
  • Betcha Lane's review is more fun than the movie, though I'm a sucker for brocades, and I'll probably see the film...someday. I like the fact that Rebecca West was bitching about the lack of non-nicey-nice criticism as long ago as 1914; I've been ascribing the prevalence of nicey-nice to the cost of managing a culture weaned on a multiculti "I'm O.K., You're O.K." pragmatism. It's good to be reminded that standards seem to have been falling as long as there's been gravity. Still, I've got a high tolerance for and appreciation of bad art in its place (which is to say, in my home and studio) so I'm just gonna sit back and wait for the mailman to bring me the DVD of Dario Argento's Phantom of the Opera that I ordered recently. That one's supposed to really suck!
  • I wanted to share the review, but in and of itself it didn't seem worthy of an fpp. your compliment is kind, petebest, as I'm doing this in the haze of cold medicine and not-enough-oxygen to the brain. jimbecile, that is one fine quote. Twain had a knack, as did Dorothy Parker (or was she just knackered?) Little Durian, you've just given me an idea for how to spend the rest of the day--bad movies ahoy!
  • I give you my candidate for Funniest Review Ever. And I can't see it from here because of my draconian work filters, but Mr. Cranky used to be kinda fun for movie pans, if it's still in operation.
  • This one is my favorite so far.
  • As was superbly pointed out in the MeFi thread about Lane's Phantom review, the greatest pan in history was probably this NY Press review of Sphere. (Scan of the article.) It's absolutely sublime, a genuine work of art. I love Lane's stuff - and he's as good when praising something as with panning it. His Return of the King review nearly made me wee my pants from giggling so much. And as I've said elsewhere, I was very fond of Wesley Morris's pan of Alexander in the Boston Globe recently:
    "The new Oliver Stone movie, Alexander, is full of brilliant highlights, and they're all in Colin Farrell's hair. His coif begins a mere flaxen mop, full of life (and sand), as he smolders through the young-adult years of Alexander the Great. Nearly three hours (and 13 years) later, it's gone wild, turned into the mane of both a warrior and certain Camaro owners. In those salon-treated locks, you can see the movie that Alexander is -- long and unruly -- and the one that it longs to be: layered and unforgettable."
    Classy.
  • i have been saving this snip from a review in the SF Chronicle for a while now, i think it's relevant... well at least it's funny....
    Like most French films, "Secret Things'' begins with a scene of a beautiful woman masturbating. But "Secret Things'' goes beyond most French films. It soon tops this with a scene of another beautiful woman masturbating, and quickly trumps that with a scene, set in the Paris subway, in which the two heroines help each other masturbate. Ten whole minutes go by before the next masturbation scene, but it's a good one.
  • Not to mention the whole Brown Bunny saga. Great post Patita!
  • Here's a much less ugly and non-cached version of Lane's Phantom of the Opera review.