SamElliot said:
There's actually not that much of a difference. I pointed out much, much earlier that film critics do this all the time. Don't believe me? Go on Rotten Tomatoes, and look up any random movie, and you will find at least a dozen or so reviews, all from professional newspapers or magazines, that make far more harsh comments about not only films and filmmakers they don't like, but also the very people who go to watch these movies. Hell, Roger Ebert, A.O. Scott, and Armond White (especially Armond White) have made long and storied careers out of spewing far more vitriolic rhetoric than what Bob has used in his Expendables review, and they all have far more clout than he does. The reason for this is because criticism, unlike journalism, deals entirely in the subjective, and even with editors moderating comments, you're going to get lots of mud-slinging and incendiary jabs at the 'common folk' who flock to brain-dead films and ignore whatever film they happen to love at the moment (it's very rare, like in the case of Ebert's digs at gamers, and most of White's rants lately, for people to get up in arms about them, since most of the time no one cares).
Okay, let's step back a minute, and see if this makes sense. You can read Roger Ebert's review of
The Doom Generation [http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19951110/REVIEWS/511100301/1023] or
Caligula [http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19800922/REVIEWS/9220301/1023], go ahead, I'll wait...
Okay, now, watch Bob's review of
The Expendables. Now, what specifically was bad about
The Expendables? What did it do well? See, what Bob does is spend five minutes and 13 seconds throwing a tantrum. You learn nothing about the film except who's in it, and that it pissed Bob off. But, what we don't have is a "why". There's no explanation to what is actually wrong with the film, except that it beat out Scott Pilgrim at the box office. Now, let's look at
Roger Ebert's Bill Roeper's review of
The Expendables.[footnote]Ebert didn't do this one, so I picked off the reviewer from the
Chicago Sun Times who did.[/footnote]
What you may notice is that with
The Expendables review from the
Chicago Sun Times is, there's a bit about the plot, a bit about why it should have worked, why it didn't. There's a slight tone of disappointment in the reviewer, so yeah, you're right, he's human, but it's not an outright failure of an attempt at a review. Seriously, read it. [http://www.suntimes.com/news/roeper/2592500,expendables-movie-roeper-081210.article]
Now, look at Bob's review. What's wrong with the film? According to Bob "the worst kind of people like it". What does that even mean? Fuck if I know, because Bob's not saying. This isn't a review. Its a man in his mid-twenties throwing a tantrum. That's not "being human" that's just fuckin' sad. Oh, right, and there isn't enough blood in it, because blood makes a movie better. Right, now, you read the
Caligula review a minute ago, right? Right.
See, there's a reason I picked that one in particular. Because Roger Ebert
does spend the first two paragraphs talking about his own nausea and disgust at the film. And then he does something else, he analyzes the film. You remember that? We've seen it from Bob before, just not recently. If anything, his
Caligula review is pretty close to what Bob's review of
The Expendables could have been like, if he actually behaved in a professional manor. Do you see and understand the distinction?
SamElliot said:
Like I said, he's not doing anything that is outside the bounds of any other form of film criticism, professional or otherwise, though I'm going to go out and agree that the quality of his reviews is on the decline.
I'd argue the entire site is in something of a slide. (Hell, maybe it's me, but even Yahtzee sounds tired to me these days.) Bob's gotten complacent, and just isn't trying to do professional writing anymore, he's degenerated to shit he'd write on his blog. His movie list looked like a collection of films he liked rather than any kind of cohesive list, and now, two weeks in a row, we have him devoting huge chunks of his reviews to inciting flame wars. That's not journalism, that's just tacky. Before that we've had reviews that boiled down to him masturbating over an actress. Anyway.
SamElliot said:
But, that's not what people are raging about in this thread. They're under the impression that Bob has personally insult them, because for once they're in that massive blob that is the mainstream moviegoing public going to see a shit film.
Here's actually a funny thing. Not a dig at you per-say, but you may want to stop and think about this for a minute.
Yes, there are people who are pissed at being called "the worst kind of person", they called early and often to voice their annoyance in the previous thread, but that was a
week ago. Rather than doing the smart PR thing and letting it drop, Bob specifically weighed back in this week and accused them all of being (something to the effect of) "douchebag jocks". There is a term for this, it is called "flaming".
Now, I remember a lot of very solid constructive criticism in that thread which really runs contrary to his own comments, and at that, a
lot of constructive criticism. I love Skullcap's analysis of Bob's behavior, and I've the sinking suspicion that he's dead on the money.
SkullCap said:
Bob, I appreciate the caricature voices you give to represent the people who, God forbid, disagree with you, ranging from the Paul Walker-like jock voice to describe the general public or the Boston accent you occasionally use as well. However, now it's being used as a defense mechanism similar to that of a child mocking his authority figures. Even though in all your apparent intelligence you mentioned how people said not every film has to be high art, but you opt for showing your signature picture of Ogre from Revenge of the Nerds and repeating that argument in your Paul Walker surfer voice once more belittling people like a child. Grow Up.
So, I asked you to stop for a minute and think. Are you expressing your own opinion here, or are you simply expressing Bob's?
SamElliot said:
If The Expendables had failed at the box office, and we were just left with him saying it was awful, virtually nobody would be as up in arms about it as they are now.
As a general disclamer, I haven't actually watched
The Expendables or
Scott Pilgrim or even
Piranhas 3d. And I really don't give a shit how well they do anywhere, really. The films are made, they'll be on DVD in six months when I've got time to kill, and that'll be the extent of it.
SamElliot said:
And he's before taken shots at movies he thought were shit (and the people who see them) but still did well, but usually they fell into what the people on this site would have found acceptable to hate (i.e. Transformers, Blind Side, etc.), so not only did they not care, but they actively encouraged it.
Yeah, generally speaking going off on the people who watch them is an asinine move on Bob's part. It's
kinda relevant to his argument about the Michael Bey
Transformers films, but, beyond that? So what? People have never been particularly good at filtering out the good films. The ur-example is
Blade Runner which completely died in the box office. So what? That doesn't mean you can't find it on DVD today, in a remastered edition from three years ago, with new edits and loads of special features. Throwing a fit over who does and doesn't watch films is, in general, completely puerile, especially when it comes to who those individuals are.
SamElliot said:
So, yes, it is hypocrical to fly into angry rants about it now.
I can't speak for everyone here. Personally I was more disgusted by his review of
Salt, and as someone who has actually had to write movie reviews, what Bob's doing here is insulting to me, not because he is insulting me personally but because this is such an abomination of a review, it's insulting to the entire profession, especially given he gets paid for this. So, yeah, I'm not flying into an angry rant because he labeled me a "douchebag jock" which as a label fits me about as well as, oh, say, "lesbian queen of the desert". I'm irked because I haven't gotten a review, for three weeks now. Because as a professional, I'm offended that any editor would look at this tripe and sign off on it, and as a writer because when he's receiving actual genuine constructive feedback he'd rather childishly stick his fingers in his ears and call people names.
EDIT: Yay! Typo patrol :|
