Gary Floyd said:
Try more of his reviews. Especially the ones of "The Dark Knight", "The Wrestler, and "Hellboy II." Especially his review of "The Wrestler", where he trashes it and unironically calls "Ready to Rumble" a superior movie. He's pretty much the most hated critic on Earth at the moment.
And reading through some of his reviews there, jesus
christ he deserves every single ounce of hatred he gets. Okay, he's an elitist NYC critic who loves foreign cinema and hates Hollywood blockbusters, I understand that part. He overwhelmingly hates far more movies than he likes, fine, I can be a picky bastard too. But what gets really puzzling is his utterly scattershot opinions on more mainstream stuff.
He gave negative reviews to: Knocked Up, Sunshine, Stardust, 3:10 to Yuma, Eastern Promises, Michael Clayton, Zodiac, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, American Gangster, I'm Not There, I Am Legend, Sweeney Todd, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, There Will Be Blood, Cloverfield, In Bruges, Redbelt, Son of Rambow, Iron Man, The Fall, The Incredible Hulk, Encounters at the End of the World, Get Smart, The Dark Knight, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Frozen River, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Changeling, Zack & Miri Make a Porno, Slumdog Millionaire, Milk, Gran Torino, Doubt, Che, The Wrestler, Watchmen, Star Trek, and although there's no official review he seems to spend a lot of time bitching about Wall-E.
He gave positive reviews for: Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, The Nanny Diaries, War, Never Back Down, The Forbidden Kingdom, Chaos Theory, What Happens In Vegas, The Foot Fist Way, War Inc., The Wedding Director, The Wackness, Swing Vote, Death Race, W., Quantum of Solace, Transporter 3, Bedtime Stories, and Confessions of a Shopaholic.
Okay. Now. Would
anyone here think that list #2 is superior to list #1? No? Didn't think so. My next question would be, how in the
bloody fucking unholy hemorrhaging asshole of hell did this tastleless pair of pastel clownshoes ever actually become a paid critic associated with something as good as NPR's fine show Fresh Air?
EDIT: upon actually reading some of his reviews, he's even worse. For one thing, he spends way, way too much time in his articles talking about other movies besides the one he's supposed to be reviewing. He spends practically the whole page in his Coraline review bitching about Wall-E, seriously, he spends at least a couple sentences complaining about Pixar in every single paragraph. He especially seems to have a weird haterection for There Will Be Blood, he brings up that one a
lot in order to whine about it for no apparent reason.
And to top it all off, he's a fucking horrible fact-checker with plenty of blatant inaccuracies. Like, in The Incredible Hulk: he claims that Banner is being taught by "a Muy Thai martial arts expert". First of all, it's spelled "Muay Thai". Secondly, that ain't no Muay Thai master. I don't have a particular problem with anyone who didn't recognize Brazilian Jiu Jitsu legend Rickson Gracie in that part, only MMA fans would really know who the guy is. But how the hell do you choose to specify exactly what martial art he's a master of, and then get it completely wrong? (Hint: Muay
Thai comes from
Thailand, not South America.) Furthermore, he completely misreads some scenes in a visually illiterate manner, claiming that Tim Blake Nelson's character dies when he clearly does not (and apparently doing a simple Wiki search for background material was too much work for him, or else he'd be hip to this being an obvious origin story for the character of The Leader). And all that is on top of a review where he keeps talking about how Ang Lee's Hulk movie was so much better than this one and Eric Bana is so much better than Edward Norton and fucking Hit Man was allegedly a great action flick and MOTHERFUCKER, MY BRAIN HURTS SO MUCH I THINK I JUST TURNED SCIENTOLOGIST.
